Well.. I'll start this article by saying that I was betting on the EX-ARM anime According to some reports that I will be bringing from the ANN .
During Anime Expo Lite in July, Crunchyroll announced three new titles under the company's “Originals” label. Among them the work EX-ARM. At the time, all we knew about the EX-ARM anime was that it was an adaptation of a cyberpunk , a genre that always delights me whether in films or TV series.
But things got stranger with this work.
At the end of August, the names of the director, writer, music composer and animation studio were revealed. They are:
- Director: Yoshikatsu Kimura
- Writer: Tommy Morton
- Music: Sō Kimura
- Animation Studio: Visual Flight
According to the article published on the ANN related to the team, none of them have ever worked on anime before.
Yoshikatsu Kimura made a name for himself by writing and directing live television programs. Tommy Morton is probably a pseudonym. Sō Kimura is a guitar teacher who works as a DJ at night. They later announced the name of the action director, Takahiro Ouchi. And like the others, he has no experience in animation, with his closest ties to anime being his stunt work on the first two live-action Rurouni Kenshin films.
Well done! This brings us to the Visual Flight . The only anime-type project they were a part of was creating a bizarre dance demo in Unity. And her credits appear to only include modeling work for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.
Returning at the Crunchyroll Expo event, director Kimura and voice actor Sōma Saitō appeared on a panel to give fans a chance to learn more about the upcoming series, including why no one on the team had worked on the anime before.
According to Kimura, he was asked to direct the series because the team felt that a live-action director would be able to better understand 3D space. And rather than working with an anime studio, he chose to create EX-ARM as if it were one of his own live-action works. The focus would be to play out the scenes with actors in motion capture suits and then apply that to the character models. In this way, Kimura stated that the work would be “extremely realistic” and that fans could look forward to action scenes never seen before in anime.
Check out the 'trailer' with your own eyes:
BAD EX-ARM ANIMATION:
EX-ARM is bad. In other words, shamefully criticized for its animation quality, serving as a case study in what should not be done in a 3D animation process.
Despite being well aware of the fact that live action directors rarely direct anime, director Yoshikatsu Kimura stated, "I have experience as a director, so I decided to give it a try."
OPINIONS FROM OTHER EXPERIENCED DIRECTORS:
The article in this text cites an example of a live-action director in charge of an anime. 2011's Psycho-Pass, led by Katsuyuki Motohiro . However, in this case he was assisted by co-director Naoyoshi Shiotani, a veteran lead animator. This is because to be an anime director you need to have an understanding of animation, but Kimura had little interest in the artistic capabilities of the medium, instead opting to focus on camera and motion capture work.
BEASTARS director Shinichi Matsumi, “Motion capture is the first step. And we adjusted the movement to look more like anime. ” This is a way to capture realistic timing and basic movement, but it needs additional keyframe animation work to make these elements work and look attractive in anime. At Square Enix Visual Works, they warn against using motion capture as a crutch, and the EX-ARM's weird movement is proof. Although the show's creative team is perfectly capable of directing actors in a motion capture studio, they clearly had no idea what to do once those movements were mapped onto 3D models.
EX-ARM SEVERITY:
The gravity-defying action he refers to as a merit of the medium is perhaps the worst part of this 'trailer'; everything seems silly and weightless. In EX-ARM, Alma is an emotionless android, but this appears to have resulted from the team not bothering to move her face. The same seems to be true for the maid she fights. Her hair rarely seems to move properly: it changes when she runs, but when she turns upside down, it looks static – certainly not the “extremely realistic” animation we were promised.
And unlike most 3D anime, the entire trailer is full of motion blur, despite Kimura stating that “every frame is important.”
Ultimately, it's hard to criticize the animation team at Visual Flight, because they were asked to deal with something outside their strong suit. But somehow, neither the producers at Crunchyroll nor the director himself seemed to notice their mistake until now.
The lessons from EX-ARM are clear and obvious: Anime is best produced by those who understand and respect animation. And if you, reader, have already understood this, then congratulations. You would have been a better EX-ARM director.
Text translated and taken from the ANN .
