You know. Those weird, borderline unnecessary in-between movements that add to the visual appeal of the characters and makes anime anime?
Yeah, that.
Anime Movement (or just Ani-movement)is an umbrella term (I just made up) that encapsulates the different categories of movement within anime.
It’s all the little animation poses and quirks you’ve seen in transformation sequences, flashy attack moves, or how a character gestures and expresses their personality. For this post, I’d just like to highlight one particular aspect of ani-movement that begs the question of its purpose within a story.
Especially prevalent in anime openings, ani-movement is great for either enhancing a good character’s personality, or giving a no-personality character some level of visual interest outside of their design. Often, the more movement displayed that says nothing specific about the character, the less likely it is they have a meaningful personality to convey.
I call this aspect, frontloading.
And don’t be fooled. It’ll get ya.
Not me, though.
I’m not falling for it, VIOLET EVERGARDEN!
To explain, you ever see those commercials claiming “This is the #1 movie in America”, aka every movie commercial on tv?! That’s frontloading.
Or those commercials for shows that are obviously limpdick lame, going “See what EPIC adventures are in store for our AWESOME trio of characters, on the next episode of blahblahsomenickelodeondshowblahblah”? (You can just hear the guy’s voice can’t you?)
That’s frontloading.
In many cases, what I call ani-movement is just frontloading. Extraneous, flashy animation of characters to entice you into a show where they really don’t matter.
It’s basically animating a character with all the visual detail and gravitas of a more complex individual, when in context, they’re flatter than cardboard. I don’t care how cool your character moves, or how forlorn your heroine looks with the wind blowing in her hair, or how fast your shounen boy is running towards his goddamn dreams. If I don’t care about the character in the context of the story, no amount of extraneous animation will change that.
The most egregious example I could find was here.
Jesus. Of Nazareth. Why?
That wasn’t the original sound effect for this scene, I’m sure, but it may as well have been.
Oh, what’s that? You mean the creators were trying to play it straight?
Rather than go over the myriad of reasons why that’s just weird, I’ll give you the ONE reason it just doesn’t work:
It’s not effective!
It doesn’t explain anything, enhance the character, the story or the plot. It just takes up 10 seconds of valuable screen time.
And it costs my left nut just to produce 10 seconds of anime!
More importantly, what were we, as the audience, supposed to feel as a result of that action?
Happy? Sad? Mad? These are the questions that the writers didn’t ask themselves, so they left it to the animators to pad out the scene with frontloading. Meaning that they over-animated the scene with ani-movement to compensate for the lack of meaning.
I asked myself, what was the point of animating it like that?!
- Was it to show how delicious the food was?
- To show how much the girl enjoyed it? or…
- Some weird fetish shit.
Based on the actual sounds in the context of the show, my money’s on “weird fetish shit”, but I’m open to the bonus option of
- Animator trolling/showing off
For my own sanity, I’d like to think it’s the last one.
This kind of non-descript animation makes me wonder, if they have the time to do all of that just for an eating scene, would it be too much extra trouble to give the movements a point?
Which brings me to mine:
Imagine how much more powerful anime could be if more of the characters’ movements had a purpose to them!
A story purpose, an action that moves the plot forward, or shows a bit of character in between dialogue.
Think of how much more effective that would be for the overall story?
How much more effectively the animators’ time, talent, and resources could be utilized?
I’m not saying to get rid of the flashiness, but to merge it with actions that IMPACT the story!
Perfect examples would be Luffy’s finishing move at the end of most arcs in ONE PIECE (Skypiea, Arlong Park, Enies Lobby), where each ending has great significance to the characters on multiple levels of emotion, plot, and consequences.
Or any fight scene in Avatar: the Last Airbender. The conceptual creativity on display in that show blows most anime super-powered light shows out of the water!
The “90%” is just an arbitrary number, but I think this is symptomatic of a larger problem which I’ll go over in later posts, but I just wanted to put this idea out there now.
Before Violet Evergarden gets too popular.
HAHA! JUST KIDDING. (It’s too late for that)
Purposeful Animation
The point is, a good story doesn’t need frontloading. A good story speaks for itself and then people speak about good work to others.
It doesn’t need flashy animation to get its point across, that is just the icing on top.
This is why you’ll see almost the reverse effect in anime openings with shows that have an actual story to tell. This is not 100% but look back at openings like Evangelion, FMA Brotherhood, Rurouni Kenshin. In these cases, the animation may either be subdued or overt, but the actions are always catered to the character’s roles and the stories that will play out. Good anime know they’re good, so the opening can lay back and let the content of the show do the heavy-lifting.
Compare with most run of the mill anime that have come out in any era. The less content in the show, the more flashy and exciting the opening animation has to be in order to get your attention. You’ll see the same played-out visual motifs, time and time again, only slightly varied in animation style because the animators are hard-pressed to find anything unique to differentiate this show from many others. (Again, not a 100% rule.)
This is why to me, a show like Fooly Cooly, feels so…ALIVE. Each animation of the character has a POINT; an emotion to convey or a joke to tell. It isn’t simply well-animated (which is par for the course in most shows these days),
FLCL is brimming with life.
(And I can only hope that the new iteration can even come close to its predecessor)
If you watch a Miyazaki movie you’ll notice the same purposeful animation, though much more subdued.
The difference between purposeful animation and non-descript “good” animation, is the focus on conceptual execution over flash.
Flash seems almost easier to do, as it doesn’t require as much conceptual thought put forth. It’s like the difference between an anime with dark, complex themes and one with a lot of gore to induce the sense of darkness.
(Then there’s Berserk which has both)
There are ALWAYS exceptions, don’t get me wrong. This is just my opinion on a general trend I’ve noticed over the years.
JUST DON’T COME CRYING TO ME NEXT TIME A HYPE ANIME PV WITH GREAT ANIMATION, TURNS OUT TO HAVE A LAME STORY.
I know you’ve all seen at least one.
Until next time friends…
-Ken