Kaguya-sama: Love is War Season 3 Production Notes: A Resourceful, Passionate Team’s Triumph Over Adversity

Kaguya-sama: Love is War Season 3 Production Notes: A Resourceful, Passionate Team’s Triumph Over Adversity

Kaguya-sama Season 3 was a massively fun & heartfelt romcom gem, but unbeknownst to many, it also was a constant fight against adversity that had its team prove they’re among the most resourceful and creative people in anime. Let’s recap its whole production!


After multiple successful iterations, Kaguya-sama approached its third season without the need to reinvent the wheel. Its anime adaptation is fueled not just by an understanding of the source material’s appeal, but also by the contagious inventiveness of the series director that encourages everyone around him to continue coming up with fresh ideas as well. The show’s identity is sustained by the pillars set by Mamoru Hatakeyama himself: striking kagenashi snapshots to capture shifting emotions, staged theatricality, the most unpredictable references to other pieces of media, and perhaps the funniest audio riffs in the entire business. It’s around those inflexible ideas, which always keep Kaguya-sama feeling like itself, that they’ve built their formula that allows endless iteration without a faint trace of staleness. Most notably, the show excels at taking expository panels of the manga and reimagining them as self-contained visual gags with a theme tangentially related to the information that is being dumped. Even more so than the finesse in the execution of its highlights, this adaptation’s greatest success is elevating the moment-to-moment experience so that the downtime is just as enjoyable.

Given how well this approach has worked and the very tight team Kaguya-sama had built thus far, it should have been easy for the third season to simply gather the same crew and stick to their winning formula. For those who come to simply enjoy the series without listening to the surrounding noise, their assumption after finishing the series will be that this is exactly what happened—if anything, they’re likely to think that this is their biggest success yet. In reality, though, Kaguya-sama Season 3 is a precariously balanced masterwork, a magic trick that has convinced the audience that everything was perfectly under control while the staff were in deep water. Like Shirogane standing atop the clock tower, this team’s victory condition relied on countless moving pieces, ingenious planning, and resourcefulness that borders on ridiculous. Much like him, it came to the wire, with some people doubting the outcome until the last second. And, again like him, it was a big win in the end.

People have been asking exactly what was wrong with the production of this season since before its broadcast even started, in part because we’ve alluded to its issues for that long. While they barely finished it before the ultimate deadline of the broadcast, the issue isn’t as simple as Kaguya-sama S3 having had your classic rushed TV anime schedule; after all, in the same event where they admitted that they were tweaking the finale mere hours before its release, they also explained that a completely arbitrary additional gag had been planned for over a year. The truth is that this season has been in the works for a perfectly reasonable timespan for a sequel in a series that doesn’t have a built-in demand for extensive design work—although the directors’ wildly inventive execution keeps on challenging that claim. In a vacuum, Kaguya-sama S3 would have been as comfortable of a production as you can have in an always messy studio; which is to say, by no means a relaxing job, but one that they’d have been able to wrap up much earlier, with fewer compromises, and an order of magnitude fewer headaches for their management staff.

So, what was it that threw Kaguya-sama S3 off track? Fans are right to blame the overlap with Visual Prison—a visual kei musical anime released in Fall 2021—but that demands more nuance than the discourse is sparing it. If multiple productions sharing staff was such a definitive mark of death, I’m afraid that nearly all anime would be buried already. And if Kaguya-sama S3 had been screwed since the very beginning, many of their most spectacular, time-consuming stunts this season would have never been possible.

In truth, Kaguya-sama S3 was off to a reasonable start. The team did know that they’d have to split resources with the production of Visual Prison, but that is unfortunately nothing new in this industry, and thus they were more or less prepared for it. If anything, it was Visual Prison that proved not to be ready, hence why many resources originally planned for Kaguya-sama had to be funneled into it in a rush, to the point of bringing season 3’s production almost to a standstill while they solved the mess that had the more quickly approaching deadlines. As a consequence, Visual Prison’s directorial rotation ended up being even more full of Kaguya-sama regulars than intended, its main animators doing the heavy lifting in every episode became the same aces as its sibling project’s, and the situation was similar for the supervisors. Although it was always the idea that Kaguya-sama S3 would have to reach out to new creators to make up for the resources that it’d have to share this time around, the help those newcomers were bound to get arrived late, exhausted, or not at all. And yet, for as grim as this sounds, the show still managed to be excellent. Let’s recap how they reversed those circumstances.

On the surface, the first episode feels like not a single comma from Kaguya-sama’s winning formula was changed. Hatakeyama’s storyboard and the execution by returning directors like Takayuki Kikuchi excel in the same they always have; small gags and expository sequences from the manga are reformulated to have visual and audio gags of their own, which are then given understated continuity to make those quick goofs even funnier. Those eventually lead to the original punchlines from the source material, which are taken to the next level to avoid getting overshadowed by the original gags that this team peppers throughout each episode. This approach, led by a director who has the artistic chops to give a scene a sense of gravitas at the drop of a hat, really won’t get old for as long as his imagination doesn’t run dry—and this episode proved that we shouldn’t worry about that happening anytime soon.

At the same time, this introduction is also indicative of the more complicated circumstances behind the scenes. The first episode was fully key animated by Shinnosuke Ota, a snappy character animator whom this team is well acquainted with as he was one of their aces in titles like Sigrdrifa. Having skipped Visual Prison’s production in its entirety unlike most of this team, Ota was entrusted with this episode with essentially no help; not a single correction by any animation director, not one cut cleanup up by external 2nd KA. This team had adjusted their schedule in prior seasons so that one specific artist could handle a larger concentrated workload than rigid planning would allow, but while those were motivated by artistic reasons, this decision came down to the possibility of greatly reducing the workload for a thinner team. Production desk Shunsuke Sugimoto did pitch him the idea on the grounds that animation producer Yuichiro Kikuchi and him thought that an episode fully animated by Ota would be visually hilarious, but neither hid how thankful they were for what this meant management-wise and praised Ota’s mental fortitude—working alone for many months—even more than his technical skill.

The second episode puts Masakazu Obara, another of the few series veterans who were free from Visual Prison responsibilities, at the helm of a reasonably entertaining episode with Hayasaka-shaped highlights; Akihito “Kasen” Sudou is a very talented animator who happens to be big into romcom series, so you can bet that he had a good time animating her sly acting. Rather than the episode itself, though, the most significant part of Kaguya-sama S3 #02 is this season’s new ending sequence, shamelessly modeled after Starship Troopers. As ridiculous as it is, that ending encapsulates the team’s ambition, their thoughtfulness, and how much they care about the show’s fans better than arguably anything else.

Back in season one, Nichika Ono had beautifully directed, storyboarded, and solo key animated the show’s first ending sequence. Ono had found a way to tie the show’s themes with his own passion for planes, riffing on Hayao Miyazaki’s On Your Mark with a cute, implicit star-crossed lovers narrative. Fans loved it and demanded a follow-up, which Ono and the rest of the team were very much aware of. Once he was entrusted with this new sequence, they began pondering how to pull that off, never once considering simply doing more of the same—recycling the specifics of execution simply isn’t in this crew’s DNA. Ono found that The Tale of Princess Kaguya, the obvious folkloric inspiration for a series starring someone by that name and belonging to a different world that she’s bound to return to, had an undeniable sci-fi ring to it; after all, she’s quite literally a princess from the moon. After considering various sci-fi properties they could have built around, Ono settled on another completely out of left field yet weirdly fitting choice in Starship Troopers. He also settled on making Fujiwara bald as a punishment for having grown too popular with her dancing sequence back in the first season, because this is how much power this team wields.

While this already proves how inventive, considerate of the fans, and amusingly referential this team tends to be, the ending also embodies another quality of the production: their ability to punch above their weight. Even before they found themselves in this season’s complicated situation, Kaguya-sama was never a high-profile production. Aniplex may be willing to spend on big-time names for the music, but the animation side of things sees no such generosity, and they definitely haven’t gotten prioritized internally in the way that the studio’s flagship titles in the past have been. Despite that lack of proper support, this team will always have a way to reach out to unexpected extraordinary creators and tactically deploy that military-grade weaponry as they see fit. Rather than an impressive solo effort, Ono got Norifumi Kugai by his side to put together a remarkable animation feat; a beautiful mix of realism and looser form characteristic of the latter, which becomes more down-to-earth stylistically once Keisuke Kobayashi wakes us up from that dream. All in all, this ending is as densely packed as it comes, taking up 2,000 drawings by itself—which is to say, half of your average episode of anime’s worth of drawings, spanning just a minute and a half.

Now, this doesn’t mean that this team can conjure magical animation power out of nowhere, especially not in an environment like this third season’s. Much of Kaguya-sama S3 has been marked by corner-cutting due to the thinner core team and effectively shortened schedule, but the compromises they’ve had to make like the less thorough animation supervision and sometimes less ambitious boards barely registered in the eyes of viewers who are too busy having a good time with a still enjoyable, still imaginative adaptation. Episodes like Kaguya-sama S3 #03 are uncharacteristically tame for a director like Hatakeyama, but it’s important to understand that by his standards, it still means that he’ll storyboard a sequence where the protagonist is nearly beheaded for no good reason. His low-priority episodes across this season are less adventurous than usual, instead focusing his power on the major beats—and silliest gags—to make sure those land as strongly as ever. That said, economical Hatakeyama is more outrageous of a director than most of this industry firing on all cylinders, and episodes like this also make a point of that.

Another aspect that becomes patently clear by this stage in the show is the team’s need to reach out to different corners of the industry. Given the halved team that only got thinner once it was clear that Visual Prison had derailed, Kaguya-sama S3 had to welcome many newcomers and then give them more significant roles than perhaps intended. To give you an idea, you should know that the second season of Kaguya-sama had a nearly identical team to the first one, only introducing 4 new directors to a theoretical 24 slots—an episode director and a storyboarder each week, as this team generally separates them. In contrast, season 3 added 10 new directors to the already expanded pool of the first two seasons, with them having bigger roles at that. The director and producer had to call old friends who had never worked on the series before, promote new faces, rely on freelancers that other production lines at the studio work with, and make completely unexpected calls to attract new talent. While they’ve always been a resourceful bunch, this was quite the challenge.

The fourth episode embodies that concern, with new Aniplex-adjacent storyboarders and chief animation directors in Kanta Kamei and Tetsuya Kawakami; the latter, somewhat of an acquaintance of Kaguya-sama’s animation producer thanks to projects like The Asterisk War, the former, happy to find a new place to do his thing. The team’s usual aces have limited screentime and dedicated their energy to completely preposterous demands like channeling the energy of 1976’s Muhammad Ali vs. Antonio Inoki and other unexpected references, leaving perhaps more responsibility than you’d like in the hands of people not acclimated to Kaguya-sama’s unique vibe. Fortunately, that didn’t turn out to bite them in the butt, in part thanks to Hatakeyama’s corrections across other directors’ episodes.

If there’s an episode that embodies the true potential of adding unexpected, fresh new talent to the usual crew, that would undoubtedly be Kaguya-sama S3 #05. But first, we have to contextualize the production’s issues some more. We’ve talked a bunch of how different projects by this team interacted with each other and nearly spiraled out of control, but it’s important to keep in mind that studios don’t exist in a vacuum, hence why Kaguya-sama S3 is also a victim of completely external circumstances. Out of all artists who were tragically booked by the time of animating this season, no one hurt more than Hidekazu Ebina. It was his animation that had introduced the very premise of the series, and over the first couple of seasons he became synonymous with Fujiwara’s iconic parenting of Shirogane; Ebina came to singlehandedly animate those skits, shifting the entire production schedule of one season to enable this very specific type of comedic animation that people had come to expect. Unfortunately for Kaguya-sama, it was clear since the start that he would be off the table this time around as he’s the character designer for an upcoming Kamen Rider anime.

Being as obstinate as they are, the team refused to drop the ball in an episode from a plotline that fans love so dearly; Fujiwara’s parenting may not be all that important in the grand scheme of things, but it’s many people’s favorite recurring gag, especially if they’ve experienced it through the anime’s outrageous execution. With Ebina out of the picture, the team bent standard production practices yet again and then prepared a tremendous finishing blow. After some location scouting trips, Hatakeyama lent his own voice for a placeholder rap to have the visuals and audio created concurrently and perfectly in sync. Given that despite Fujiwara’s best efforts they’re still a bunch of amateurs, their ridiculous rap battles are modeled after all sorts of music videos rather than specifically after cool hip hop performances. That coolness is instead reserved for My Nonfiction, the special ending that young prodigy Vercreek directed and solo 1st key animated. While the episode by itself already honored the theme more than well enough, they insisted on going all out with this hyperrealistic take on the designs, constantly shifting animation that accentuates the FX-like shading, and snazzy Hyperbole compositing to complement the coolness. With work like this, how are viewers supposed to realize that this season was produced under strict limitations?

The next couple of episodes come back down to earth after that extraordinary production flex, but maintain that threshold of inventive execution thanks to Hatakeyama, who remains an inescapable presence even when he’s present not in the credits. While he was neither the storyboarder nor the episode director, the linked breathing that makes the appearance of Shirogane’s father in Kaguya-sama S3 #06 creepier than ever was of course devised by Hatakeyama himself. This time properly helming the storyboards, #07 combines very eye-catching stylistic shifts with more understated visual humor, with its highlight being a very deliberate Osamu Dezaki parody that turns a very goofy school conflict into classic anime melodrama. Dezaki’s influence is palpable across directors of SHAFT origins like Hatakeyama, and his postcard memories have become as regular of a technique as there is in anime, but this show once again ups its competition by putting more thought into the compositing of an arbitrary visual gag than you’d ever expect. While its VHS mimicry isn’t the prettiest post-processing you’ll see, their attempt to mimic practical cel effects for the lighting is so clearly executed that it was easy to catch onto it before the staff confirmed their intent on social media.

For the prologue to this season’s much-awaited final arc, Hatakeyama relied on one of his greatest pals, as well as one of the most tragically overlooked episode directors of this era. Nobukage Kimura matured under Toei Animation superstars like Mamoru Hosoda and Takuya Igarashi, growing particularly close to Kenji Nakamura and Shigeyasu Yamauchi. His eclectic approach embraces artificiality like his many influences, having grabbed bits and pieces of the styles of all the brilliant directors he has regularly worked with—and that includes Hatakeyama himself.

Episode #08’s greatest sequence is an illustration of Kaguya’s headspace as she’s pondering whether she should become more proactive in her romantic conquest, which is as poignant as it is funny. The expert usage of typography and isolation through paneling keeps every scene visually fresh while very purposely underlining the key narrative beats. As many people noticed, Kimura used that paneling as a way to gracefully integrate recreations of specific manga panels, a risky yet very cost-effective move with the same goal of making the importance of those moments crystal clear. Incidentally, those manga panels were redrawn by Daiki Egashira, a member of Gainax’s management staff who eventually quit anime production to become a freelance illustrator, mangaka, and storyboarder on projects as diverse as Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Sanrio’s theme park events. If you were still wondering how resourceful this team is, the answer is this much.

And so begins Shuchiin’s culture festival, one of the most beloved arcs in this entire series. Despite the accumulated production fatigue, the immediate execution of these episodes is as charming as it’s ever been, showing a variety of strengths even before the climactic finale. Shinobu Nishioka, this team’s Officially Designated Crazy Animator who had a much-reduced output this season after appearing in every episode of Visual Prison, resumes their Elite 4 animation duties by once again drawing their unfittingly cool faces all over episode #09; one that is sustained not just by Hatakeyama’s sheer creativity but also by the technical soundness of his storyboarding. Episode #10 features the strongest core animation directors in the aforementioned Ota, the multitalented Honoka Yokoyama, and a very reliable character artist in Kota Sera. As a consequence of that plus some star guests dragged in by the episode director, the episode’s appeal comes from the explosive animation, as opposed to its usual appeal built on quirky storyboarding—a refreshing change befitting the festivity of the arc. In contrast to that, Ryota Aikei’s episode #11 is a showcase of the show’s usual style, both in the delicate and loud scenes.

Rather than the always enjoyable moment-to-moment, though, this arc deserves a step back to admire its fundamental construction. And that means giving props to Aka Akasaka as the original author, of course. This entire arc’s plotting is phenomenal, with its constantly escalating narrative threads involving many moving pieces that all feel like they have agency; yes, that does include Fujiwara, whose thoughts range from thinking that cotton candy is tasty to actually not thinking at all.

Once again, the anime manages to refine the material even further, thanks to one of its most underappreciated aspects: the series composition. Fans were quick to notice that Kaguya-sama episodes have since the start jumped around different volumes, attributing to quirkiness what’s actually a very deliberate process to thread together skits that flow nicely. Since this final arc follows a much more continuous narrative, there has been a lot less jumping around, but they still made great adjustments like the small delay of Shirogane’s past for more impactful and orderly delivery. It’s worth noting that a loud part of the fandom bothered people in the team on social media thinking that important material was being skipped—an embarrassing reaction even if that had happened—so it’s fair to say that this series is genuinely better than some people deserve, and that the obsession with religious faithfulness to the source material has gone way too far.

This finally leads to the grand finale in the form of a double episode, storyboarded by Hatakeyama as he completed his most involved directorial effort for Kaguya-sama so far; by his side, he had regular Tsuyoshi Tobita as the episode director for the first half, and yet again Kikuchi to direct the very end of the show. As usual, and perhaps more than ever, it’s easy to be mesmerized by the immediate execution of so many moments. The very involved camerawork in the tower scene—one of the elements they tweaked until the last second—to give extra oomph to the climax, Nishioka’s greatest burst of energy, some of the best incidental visual gags during the exposition, the genius decision to give a robotic voice to the yukkuri narration to emulate the second life that meme is enjoying, the list of highlights goes on and on.

Out of all those hilarious little moments, I feel like the one that deserves a special mention is the member of the news club accidentally peeking at the climactic kiss. Both Hatakeyama’s ridiculous idea to make it a convoluted Gundam reference and Hirotaka Tokuda’s perfectly laid out recreation in animation would be enough to make it an amusing highlight, but this team once again took it a step further. Assistant director of photography Hiroya Nobukawa personally composited the scene after going back and studying the original scene and Gundam’s photography process in general; the convincing cel filters, the pink tint on the explosion that despite not being part of the original scene is what people have come to expect from that franchise, it’s all way more careful than you’d expect from such an arbitrary quick gag. Nobukawa has earned the admiration of his peers by putting this type of effort across the whole show, starting as early as the first episode’s reference to the Kinnikuman opening—he might be a name to keep an eye on moving forward.

Again, though, the episode deserves to be appreciated on a more fundamental level. Hatakeyama arrived at this project right after Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu, a sometimes deliberately impersonal, tremendously refined piece about the stage which is essentially the TV anime equivalent of high cuisine. His ability to switch gears to direct a show in an entirely different genre space yet maintain the same stylistic quirks deserves all the praise in the world, and it still doesn’t compare to the admiration I feel for his genuine approach to both projects. Some of the more painful bits in Rakugo felt like they came straight from the heart, which can also be said about his enthusiastic references to everything in anything that he likes throughout Kaguya-sama. This grand finale has the same gravitas as his more serious works, seamlessly attached to the most ridiculous comedy and a heartfelt romantic plot. Never has it felt like the director put himself above any of those aspects that make up Kaguya-sama, so I can wholeheartedly believe his peers when they say that he loves working on it.

This hasn’t been an easy project, but rather than bumming out all the fans who have been raving about season 3 after this fantastic ending, I felt like this production recap deserved a positive spin to it. The negative circumstances surrounding the show should be understood and condemned, but this team’s efforts don’t deserve to be overshadowed by a corporation’s awful management. You might be surprised to hear that my initial reaction to the announcement of a sequel—should have told that to the team before they obscurely hinted it—was somewhat bittersweet. Aniplex studios are very likely to keep running into situations like this given how their most popular animation producers have been pushed into always having multiple active projects, which leaves no room for error and creates multiple casualties out of every singular accident. And on a creative level, the idea of Hatakeyama moving onto something entirely new simply felt more attractive than him returning for yet another iteration of Kaguya-sama.

Don’t get me wrong: those circumstances haven’t changed. This would have been an ideal stopping point for the anime, if not narratively so, simply because no other arc will end as emphatically as this one. The ideal outcome would have also been Hatakeyama proving his unbelievable adaptability by tackling yet another genre. But you know what? None of the circumstances surrounding this project have been ideal, and it still has been an excellent show. If this team loves the series as much as they’ve shown to, continuing to get something that’s this good can only be positive news. All we can do is pray that the production isn’t once again derailed by external factors, and maybe yell at Sony a bit for good measure—that might not help, but it can’t hurt either.

Become a Patron!


Episode 01

Storyboard: Mamoru Hatakeyama
Episode Direction: Mamoru Hatakeyama, Takayuki Kikuchi
Chief Animation Director, Animation Direction: No one, pure Shinnosuke Ota


Episode 02

Storyboard, Episode Direction: Masakazu Obara
Chief Animation Director: Kibidango Number 14 (Azuma Tozawa)
Animation Direction: Kotaro Okubo, Yoichi Ishikawa


Episode 03

Storyboard: Mamoru Hatakeyama
Episode Direction: Aya Ikeda
Chief Animation Director: Hiroshi Yako
Animation Direction: Hiroshi Yako, Yuichiro Mizutani, Honoka Yokoyama


Episode 04

Storyboard: Kanta Kamei
Episode Direction: Tsuyoshi Tobita
Chief Animation Director: Tetsuya Kawakami
Animation Direction: Satoshi Noma, Hayato Hashiguchi
Action Animation Director: Shinobu Nishioka


Episode 05

Storyboard: Toshinori Watanabe
Rap Battle Storyboard: Mamoru Hatakeyama
Episode Direction: Takayuki Kikuchi
Chief Animation Director: Yuko Hariba, Kii Tanaka
Animation Direction: Junichi Saito, Kota Sera, Honoka Yokoyama
Prop Animation Director: Takayuki Kikuchi


Episode 06

Storyboard: Takashi Kawabata
Episode Direction: Motoki Nakanishi
Chief Animation Director: Hiroshi Yako
Animation Direction: Shuntaro Yamada, Maya Kisanuki, Kotaro Okubo, Miharu Nagano, Akihito Kato, Kazuaki Imoto


Episode 07

Storyboard: Mamoru Hatakeyama
Episode Direction: Ryouta Aikei
Chief Animation Director: Nishichi Yamaguchi, Hiroshi Yako
Animation Direction: Kohei Yamazaki, Satoshi Noma


Episode 08

Storyboard, Episode Direction: Nobukage Kimura
Chief Animation Director: Kibidango Number 14 (Azuma Tozawa)
Animation Direction: Yuichiro Mizutani, Takayuki Kido, Yoichi Ishikawa, Miharu Nagano


Episode 09

Storyboard: Mamoru Hatakeyama
Episode Direction: Motoki Nakanishi
Chief Animation Director: Tetsuya Kawakami
Animation Direction: Rena Kawasaki, Kohei Yamazaki
Supervision Of The Four Devas Of Ramen (And Also A Few Shots Of Shirogane’s Dad): Shinobu Nishioka


Episode 10

Storyboard: Shinichiro Ushijima
Episode Direction: Shotaro Kimura
Chief Animation Director: Koji Shiyoki
Animation Direction: Shinnosuke Ota, Kota Sera, Honoka Yokoyama
Assistant Animation Director: Maya Kisanuki


Episode 11

Storyboard, Episode Direction: Ryota Aikei
Chief Animation Director: Hiroshi Yako
Animation Direction: Miharu Nagano, Kohei Yamazaki, Junichi Saito
Assistant Animation Director: Takayuki Kido, Saori Suruki, Kibidango Number 14 (Azuma Tozawa)
Action Supervisor: Shinobu Nishioka


Episode 12-13

Storyboard: Mamoru Hatakeyama
Episode DirectionTsuyoshi Tobita, Takayuki Kikuchi
Chief Animation Director: Tetsuya Kawakami, Koji Shiyoki, Yuko Yahiro
Animation Direction: Shinnosuke Ota, Kota Sera, Rena Kawasaki, Kotaro Okubo, Satoshi Noma, Yoichi Ishikawa, Honoka Yokoyama, Yuichiro Mizutani, Takayuki Kido
Assistant Animation Director: Hiroshi Yako, Saori Suruki, Wakako Yoshida, Takumitsu Miura, Shuntaro Yamada, Kibidango Number 14 (Azuma Tozawa)
Action Supervisor: Shinobu Nishioka


Support us on Patreon to help us reach our new goal to sustain the animation archive at Sakugabooru, Sakuga Video on Youtube, as well as this Sakuga Blog. Thanks to everyone who’s helped out so far!

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

7 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Kumiko's Cactus
Kumiko's Cactus
1 year ago

How does Aniplex choose which shows to prioritize animation wise? Something like Fate/GO is obvious from a commercial perspective, but I would not expect something like Akebi or an original like Wonder Egg to be prioritized over very popular source materials like Kaguya or Neverland.

Regarding the resource issue, I was under the impression that Aniplex was infamous for hoarding and sitting on top tier talent for long times without having them work on much. Can’t they deploy some of these resources in times of crisis?

Abraham
1 year ago

Is there ever going to be a piece on the history of compositing in anime and how it’s done presently (like the recent co-production one). It’s something that isn’t really talked about like other animation processes despite how important it is.

AniHunter
AniHunter
1 year ago
Reply to  Abraham

I actually kind of want to see that too. I know it’s been brought up several times in either positive (this, any time Asahi Pro is brought up) and negative (Megalobox), but never a full comprehensive look into it. Because as much as the animation itself is important, it’s often just as much the compositing that can make or break an anime’s visual appeal.

tinderbox
tinderbox
1 year ago

This was a really great read. Kudos.

Zhou
Zhou
1 year ago

Excellent article, but wasn’t Record of Grancrest War the last show Hatakeyama directed before Kaguya-sama? Either way, it was a big switch for him, and I’m glad Kaguya-sama wasn’t plagued by rushed pacing and inconsistent animation like Grancrest was.

darkfireblade25
darkfireblade25
1 year ago

What was the Gundam reference? Not seeing the links to the screens or videos.