Welcome to the Ballroom – Episode 2
Before enjoying another look at the craft of this series and the fascinating vision of its key creators, there’s something more serious we must talk about. Even if this project by itself wasn’t necessarily at fault, someone died of overwork while producing this episode. That’s not something we should skip over. Let this be a final farewell to Kazunori Mizuno.
Episode 2
StoryboardStoryboard (絵コンテ, ekonte): The blueprints of animation. A series of usually simple drawings serving as anime's visual script, drawn on special sheets with fields for the animation cut number, notes for the staff and the matching lines of dialogue.: Yoshimi Itazu
Episode DirectionEpisode Direction (演出, enshutsu): A creative but also coordinative task, as it entails supervising the many departments and artists involved in the production of an episode – approving animation layouts alongside the Animation Director, overseeing the work of the photography team, the art department, CG staff... The role also exists in movies, refering to the individuals similarly in charge of segments of the film.: Ogura Shirakawa (Kazunori Mizuno), Masahiko Murata, Mamoru Taisuke
Chief Animation DirectorChief Animation Director (総作画監督, Sou Sakuga Kantoku): Often an overall credit that tends to be in the hands of the character designer, though as of late messy projects with multiple Chief ADs have increased in number; moreso than the regular animation directors, their job is to ensure the characters look like they're supposed to. Consistency is their goal, which they will enforce as much as they want (and can).: Takahiro Chiba, Masayuki Honda
Action Animation DirectionAnimation Direction (作画監督, sakuga kantoku): The artists supervising the quality and consistency of the animation itself. They might correct cuts that deviate from the designs too much if they see it fit, but their job is mostly to ensure the motion is up to par while not looking too rough. Plenty of specialized Animation Direction roles exist – mecha, effects, creatures, all focused in one particular recurring element.: Takashi Mukouda
Animation DirectionAnimation Direction (作画監督, sakuga kantoku): The artists supervising the quality and consistency of the animation itself. They might correct cuts that deviate from the designs too much if they see it fit, but their job is mostly to ensure the motion is up to par while not looking too rough. Plenty of specialized Animation Direction roles exist – mecha, effects, creatures, all focused in one particular recurring element.: Megumi Tomita
Assistant Animation Director: Kumiko Horikoshi, Yasuhiko Kanezuka
Key AnimationKey Animation (原画, genga): These artists draw the pivotal moments within the animation, basically defining the motion without actually completing the cut. The anime industry is known for allowing these individual artists lots of room to express their own style.: Daisuke Tsumagari, Retsu Okawara, Anna Yamaguchi, Yuri Ichinose, Hiromi Yoshinuma, Kaori Takahashi, Tamako Horiuchi, Zenjirou Ukulele, Mariko Emori, Nobutaka Masuda, Hisashi Samejima, Kim Je-Hyeong, Mori Tominaga, Miyako Matsumoto, Hiromi Okazaki, Takenori Tsukuma, Kensuke Watanabe, Yasuhiko Kanezuka, Takahiro Fujii
Megumi Tomita
Production Assistance: Pierrot
The regularly-scheduled look at the craft can wait, because there’s something more important to address. Back in March it was reported that 52yo director Kazunori Mizuno had passed away, though the news only seemed to catch on weeks later when it was mentioned that he died at the studio, while taking a short nap he never woke up from. This got widely misreported as “Naruto animator dies”, following the exact same pattern seen when an A-1 production assistantProduction Assistant (制作進行, Seisaku Shinkou): Effectively the lowest ranking 'producer' role, and yet an essential cog in the system. They check and carry around the materials, and contact the dozens upon dozens of artists required to get an episode finished. Usually handling multiple episodes of the shows they're involved with. committed suicide a few years ago; we’re in a fandom that loves to express their worry about industry problems, but where even the news outlets can’t be bothered to check the job of people who lose their lives to those issues. The least we can do is to take a proper look at the events.
Mizuno had made a name for himself as an action storyboarder and director despite not having joined the industry as an animator, which is quite unusual; it’s not that he was unable to draw, but it wasn’t his area of expertise, thus making his solid grasp of action all the more impressive. While he was a freelancer for most of his career, it was at Pierrot in particular where he flourished, and so he kept a very strong link to the studio and related companies like Arcturus. Bleach firmly established him as a creator you shouldn’t miss after having shown promise in the likes of Yu Yu Hakusho, and in recent times his main occupation had been Naruto Shippuden. Its penultimate episode, directed and storyboarded by Mizuno, aired just 3 days before his death. People assumed his exhaustion was due to him preparing work for its successor Boruto, but that doesn’t seem to be the case, and that’s where this episode comes into play.
Welcome to the Ballroom #02 was outsourced to studio Pierrot – more on this later – and produced earlier this year. The harrowing proof is that the first person credited for directing the episode, Ogura Shirakawa, is none other than Kazunori Mizuno under a pen name; hence the unusual presence of three episode directors, since his Naruto comrades had to become his replacement in such dreadful circumstances. Rather than Boruto as assumed, it was juggling between Naruto and Ballroom that proved fatal. This is a tragedy on an individual level, but also highlights systemic problems that we must talk about properly. For starters, it’s yet more proof that framing the anime industry’s issues as “animators struggling” is absolute nonsense, since the conditions of plenty of other workers are also inhumane. Even amongst animators, in-betweeners and clean-up artists are worlds apart from chief animation directors, and the creators suffering actually range from painters to production assistants. While episode directors are as a whole in a much better position, their role involves so much more responsibility that the more sustainable wages don’t necessarily make up for it either. Oversimplifying this only causes harm, and yet the west in particular is somehow stuck on the vague idea that it’s just “animators” who are having a bad time.
The other point worth noting is that this happened to a production that is by itself rather healthy. Unlike most projects that have barely no lead time, we know for a fact that was in active production many months ago…but that’s obviously not enough, as this tragic event shows. That Mizuno was tasked to work on a solid production doesn’t matter when it was subcontracted to a messy studio and he personally had to keep on worrying about other projects, consistently devouring what should have been his sleep time. In an industry that majorly functions through freelancing, everything will be broken until virtually every studio, company, and project is sanitized. This is the reality of systemic issues, which are inescapable in this medium where every creator is linked. If studios manage to become more self-sustainable then we might get to the point where tackling individual cases is truly effective, but unless we get to that point, no project subcontracting work is safe.
Please be very skeptical of claims that international streaming services will “save” the industry by funneling money into it as well, since so far their projects have generally operated the same way when it comes to actually manufacturing the product; Yuasa’s upcoming Netflix series seems to be shaping up to be a healthily scheduled exception, but even then his small and manageable Studio Saru was already chasing different production models before. This is a complex set of issues that we can’t approach with the idea that we’re one press of a magical button away from “saving anime”. Change needs to happen immediately and on industry-wide levels. I don’t mean to say that small-scale initiatives aren’t positive, but beware that those are patchwork. More needs to be done.
There is no way to smoothly segue from such heavy topics to standard analysis, so allow me to pretend this is a different post altogether and start anew. This episode was…perfectly serviceable, I suppose. Poor attempts at levity like the dumb walking-on-the-girl-changing-clothes scene coexisted with potent isolated moments like Tatara spying on Hyodo’s practice, so as far as I’m concerned it all averaged to simply alright. There’s something definitely noteworthy, though: having an outsourced episode, let alone to Pierrot and this early, is quite the surprise. The first season of Haikyuu! had a handful of those, but ever since #15 the entire series – meaning the second half of the original plus two sequels – had all been produced by this team at Production I.G. I don’t know whether they were trying to build a healthy backlog before the broadcast or if they’re making this a regular occurrence in the staff rotation, but their approach has clearly changed.
The irony of the situation is that, in the end, this didn’t seem to save much time for the show’s key creators. The series directorSeries Director: (監督, kantoku): The person in charge of the entire production, both as a creative decision-maker and final supervisor. They outrank the rest of the staff and ultimately have the last word. Series with different levels of directors do exist however – Chief Director, Assistant Director, Series Episode Director, all sorts of non-standard roles. The hierarchy in those instances is a case by case scenario. Yoshimi Itazu had to do extra work, the lesser drawings forced them to deploy both chief animation directors, and their ace animator had to redraw all tricky cuts himself. Chiba and Honda did a good job as supervisors – the detailed closeups of eyes stand out in particular – but it’s Takashi Mukouda who stole the show. His role of main action animation director means that he’s tasked with correcting all the intense dancing, but it seems that in cases like this where the drawings they received weren’t up to par, he’ll essentially make them all his own.
The positive side of this is that we got an episode filled with enchanting Mukouda dancing, ranging from comedic to awe-inspiring. This raw scene in particular, in which series directorSeries Director: (監督, kantoku): The person in charge of the entire production, both as a creative decision-maker and final supervisor. They outrank the rest of the staff and ultimately have the last word. Series with different levels of directors do exist however – Chief Director, Assistant Director, Series Episode Director, all sorts of non-standard roles. The hierarchy in those instances is a case by case scenario. Itazu himself was involved too, is without a doubt my favorite so far. When I said that Ballroom could mark a move towards expressionism for this crew, it’s exactly this kind of work that I was talking about. As much as we can poke fun at the exaggerated necks, Ballroom is generally very mindful of realistic body movement, weight, even how articulations work. And then come scenes like this, where forms flow freely and anatomy isn’t a concern. The series is definitely aware of dancing’s duality of sport and art, which they’ve chosen to portray in this manner. Tatara was taken aback by what he felt was inhuman skill, which took the form of Mukouda’s almost Ohira-esque pencil lines. Itazu’s storyboardStoryboard (絵コンテ, ekonte): The blueprints of animation. A series of usually simple drawings serving as anime's visual script, drawn on special sheets with fields for the animation cut number, notes for the staff and the matching lines of dialogue. was a perfect complement as well, highlighting the impact Hyodo’s performance has on Tatara but also the clear barrier separating them at the moment. A very powerful scene making use of the tools only available to animation. Here’s hoping for more of this!
Support us on Patreon to help us reach our new goal to sustain the animation archive at Sakugabooru, SakugaSakuga (作画): Technically drawing pictures but more specifically animation. Western fans have long since appropriated the word to refer to instances of particularly good animation, in the same way that a subset of Japanese fans do. Pretty integral to our sites' brand. Video on Youtube, as well as this SakugaSakuga (作画): Technically drawing pictures but more specifically animation. Western fans have long since appropriated the word to refer to instances of particularly good animation, in the same way that a subset of Japanese fans do. Pretty integral to our sites' brand. Blog. Thanks to everyone who’s helped out so far!
“Change needs to happen immediately and on industry-wide levels.” I don’t disagree, but… what can actually be done? As much as we as anime fans understandably focus on the Japanese animation industry, which likely does have rougher than many other industries due to the tight schedules they operate under, it’s worth noting that death by overwork is an issue that plagues Japanese working culture in general, not just their animation studios. So it’s difficult to see how the animation industry can fix itself if there isn’t concurrently a shift in approach and mindset throughout Japanese society as a whole, such… Read more »
“Pay people not to work overtime” ok realistically which company and what percentage this payment actually paid out? Pay more for creative worker and hire more people (lets say you pay double for each case, resulting in 4x increase in cost). This isn’t sustainable if we’re using current model of payment to studios. We can see billions of yen spent in otaku business, but only a paltry percentage to animation studios. Another way to lessen overworking is, sorry to say this on blog catering for anmation, is to create less anime per season. One project can take more time to… Read more »
Don’t feel bad about it, I’ve been advocating to halve the output for quite a while. It’s not as if that would magically solve everything and have no downsides (good luck asking companies that need to constantly produce a lot of work to survive to reduce their workload), but we definitely need to move towards that.
I do understand that feeling of impotence you have, but I think this type of articles are very important first steps to raising awareness about these cases. Look, overwork is common in all of the sector with shortage of employees, I won’t deny that. However, animation is from the few jobs with these circumstances where foreingers are interested in working in. This is where raising awareness seems important to me. I’m sure as hell this blog was for some people, like me, a huge help in understanding this craft, and I’m gonna tell you something, if this topic could reach… Read more »
Abysmal working conditions are literally everywhere around the world, and affect billions of people. The only way they could elevate their conditions is for them to be empowered to realize and speak out their concerns – decent wage, humane treatment. Apart from a culture that celebrates overwork, ridiculously low wage also compels workers to take in more work that they can reasonably handle. Huge demand can go long ways. But frankly this isn’t something that can happen overnight.
For the record (and I don’t mean this as a rebuttal to you), JP anime industry members have been loudly and very concretely speaking out against the situation for years, and it’s only been in crescendo. The only reason many western fans think they’re alright with it because it’s part of their culture is because as a fandom we’re extremely good at ignoring what the creators say.
The JP anime industry members might have been loud about things, but at the end of the day, not much has changed, someone dying recently only highlights this issue more. It seems to be getting worse actually, with insane amounts of anime being produced each season, more and more anime are being made and now I’m seeing a ton of companies that used to do nothing but shorts take on full length anime because the demand is so crazy in the market.
The idea that this is just “JP culture” becomes very silly the moment you’ve seen enough Japanese people, whether they’re part of the industry or not, saying that this is unsustainable bullshit. You’re right about it perhaps being beyond fixing itself, though. Most studios aren’t actually in control of their own fate, and the big companies ruling the market keep looking the other way because technically it’s not their employees that are actually dying. The idea about government intervention isn’t new, but it’s been gaining force over the last few years as the situation has kept on spiralling out of… Read more »
I’m not saying this is an unavoidable thing, or that there aren’t people in Japan actively working to combat this – thankfully there are – just pointing out that the problem of “karoshi”, as death by overwork has come to be called, is something that Japanese society at large has been grappling with for years. (E.g., http://www.nippon.com/en/currents/d00310/) I think change is possible, for both the anime industry and Japan in general, but I don’t think it’s likely to happen immediately. If the Japanese government hasn’t been able to enforce labor laws to help solve the problem of death by overwork… Read more »
I know the anime industry is horrible and that the conditions and pay are also horrible, but honestly, what can we do about it? Literally nothing. We can’t even support our favorite anime studios with money by importing Japanese blurays from shows they worked on, because the production committees will take all the money. The only exception to this are shows were the studios have a majority on the production committee, like The Ancient Magus’ Bride and those cases are very few. There’s also the whole, but I watch my anime on CR, I’m totally supporting the anime industry, when… Read more »
You can choose to support the positive exceptions (and actively avoid the worst ones), but I don’t think we should approach this feeling that we must do something individually to make a difference, because that’s not feasible. But as a community, exerting pressure /is/ possible. You’d think that at this point we’d be over the raising awareness stage, but we’re stuck in there due to how poorly the situation has been communicated. And since you brought that up, I actually think Trigger’s Patreon is the worst idea possible to tackle a real problem. Direct funding for the creators may be… Read more »
Honestly, I doubt community pressure is going to do anything, maybe if Japanese studios and all the workers including the freelancers go on strike, but that’s not going to happen. So what if Trigger are a big company? It still does not fix the problem where supporting them directly is impossible, like how it is with any studio. Trigger have resorted to Kickstarter before and things were very successful, so I don’t see why it would be gross for them to use something like Patreon. I’m the type of person that wants to support the creators as directly as possible… Read more »
Asking for help to fund a project and begging fans to pay their animators rather than doing it themselves is very different in my opinion. If this https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2017/06/01/p-a-works-animator-training-course-and-salaried-animators-program/ can be done then they ought to try too. I understand your point but we cant conflate the company and “the creators” especially if theyre big.
Who said anything about begging though? Also, yeah it’s nice P.A. works have that initiative, but the animators will still get paid poorly and that’s only 1 studio, plus it’s going to take 2 years to reach that point.
I really don’t see why I can’t directly pay a company like Trigger, what’s so wrong about it? I’d rather pay them than a middleman.
There are some ways to support Trigger directly, since they’ve got their own online store and merch, like those animation sheets they keep bringing to western cons. That wasn’t so much the point as the idea of offloading the responsibility of paying your worked to the fans, which makes me deeply uncomfortable. This isn’t like Nishii asking for assistance for her new tiny crew, it’s a respectable branch of one of the biggest entities in the industry. There’s absolutely no reason to believe they couldn’t instead move towards a modus operandi that involves actually employing their crew and paying them… Read more »
I had no idea that Trigger even had a Patreon, much less the size of the company. Could you be able to do a post detailing major/famous studios and their sizes and current situations, as well as the level of healthiness for each company? It could be a good reference point for us Western fans, so that we don’t wind up throwing money at the wrong solution to a problem.
They’ve not launched it yet, it’s just something they’ve been saying they plan to do for a while. A studio sizes post could be interesting…though it would have to heavily focus on how companies can have/lack entire departments, which can make similar number of employees form entirely different studios. The rest would be a logistical nightmare that would also lead to fans getting very nasty, so I’d rather not (which doesn’t mean I intend to stop talking about this stuff when relevant).
Now, about the episode itself, I really enjoyed it. It makes me incredibly happy as a long time manga fan to see this adaptation and how good it is, it brings a tear to my eye ;-;. I also really loved Hyoudou’s scene at the end of the episode and I really appreciated the use of the sweat hitting the window to separate him and Tatara. Thanks for the great read!