Yamashita Anime

[Nikita Desjardins]

Lendingsupport to this theory is the fact that by this point, Yamashita had worked with Tsuru on NARUTO twice already: the Distance and the soon-to-air Blue Bird openings, in which he handled main action parts on both. The latter would even include encountering his idol and soon to be mentor, Norio Matsumoto, for the first time.

If the aforementioned openings were where Hiroyuki Yamashita caught the eye of his seniors, it was on #85 that he cemented his place. An episode directed by Toshiyuki Tsuru, and with animation intimately supervised by Hirofumi Suzuki, Yamashita was charged with an approximate seventy cuts, most of which contained highly involved action. For context, healthy TV anime episodes feature 300 cuts on average, though considering the director and amount of action, #85 sits leagues above at around 450 cuts instead.

Interviewer: Studio Trigger recently opened a Patreon account to accept donations and connect with their community. Do you see this as the start of something that could resolve the issues that you brought up? Or is it an anomaly?

I feel more positive about those kinds of attempts. Japan as a culture has a little bit of opposition to receiving money from someone. Of course that attempt may get criticisms from people, but I think in the long term it might become something. But right now I think it might be better to have people become patrons of individual creators instead.

Evan is the Editor-in-chief of Ani-Gamers, a freelance reviewer for Otaku USA Magazine, and a frequent anime convention panelist. You can read his ravings about anime, manga, games, politics, music, and more on Twitter @VamptVo.

I read this article a year ago and today I finally got around to watch it. The three shorts were fine enough, but this one is the best of the bunch by far. After watching it I felt the need to reread this article again, as to enhance the experience. Thank you.

Whenever someone shares it, Invisible has a tendency to mesmerize people \u2014 and terrify more than a few. The film is mind-bending, adventurous and a little dark. It\u2019s a technical tour de force. And it\u2019s a statement on Japanese animation itself, by one of Ghibli\u2019s ace animators from Spirited Away, Howl\u2019s Moving Castle and Arrietty.

Invisible began with a question: how do you move, and bring life to, a character you can\u2019t see? At Studio Ponoc, director Akihiko Yamashita gave us his answer. When Ponoc released this short in the Modest Heroes anthology back in 2018, it wasn\u2019t like anything else \u2014 not even a Ghibli film.

This clip encapsulates what\u2019s so great about Invisible. It portrays incredibly complex movement in a way that looks effortless. It brings real weight and emotion to an impossible scenario \u2014 creating moments never before depicted in animation. There\u2019s little dialogue in the film, and basically none in this sequence. Instead, Invisible is something that you feel before anything else.

This is not a simple, clear-cut entertainment piece; it\u2019s a piece that is packed full of things and does not explain them at all. It is difficult to understand it with the mind, and I am not trying to tell a story. I want to make it a work that you can feel. [\u2026] I\u2019m drawing the inside [of a person].

The idea of revealing someone\u2019s interior life, and letting the viewer feel it, extended to every part of the film. The main character of Invisible isn\u2019t experiencing the usual, H. G. Wells type of invisibility. No one can see him because he\u2019s an invisible person \u2014 like many in modern-day Japan.1 His existence is so tenuous that even gravity forgets him.

Invisible was the product of conversations between Yamashita and the founder of Studio Ponoc, Yoshiaki Nishimura. Modest Heroes was revving up, and Nishimura felt that Yamashita should handle the most difficult film in the anthology \u2014 one that capitalized on his strengths as an animator.

\u201CIf there were nothing to move, if there were no faces to convey emotion, how would an animation genius approach it?\u201D Nishimura wondered. \u201CI know this is a little mean, but \u2018how about an invisible man?\u2019 \u201D

He wanted the character\u2019s emotional state to play out across the entire screen. Yamashita asked for dark, distressed backgrounds, which let up only a few times to match the changing feelings of the protagonist. He found himself dramatically pushing the character\u2019s animation, too, since there was so little to work with. (Yamashita served as Invisible\u2019s animation director, overseeing four key animators.)

As reference, Yamashita drew from Alfonso Cuar\u00F3n\u2019s Children of Men and Gravity, the films of Alejandro Gonz\u00E1lez I\u00F1\u00E1rritu and the manga of Junji Ito, among others. They contributed to the dark, unusual vibe and look of Invisible.

The final film makes all of this seem casual. The protagonist\u2019s emotions, like his motions, come across seamlessly \u2014 as proven by the anxiety that so many people feel while watching the sequence above.

Studio Ponoc appeared in 2015 as a home for animators displaced after Studio Ghibli, in late 2014, temporarily stopped making films. Ghibli left behind a gaping vacuum inside the industry. The point of Ponoc\u2019s first film, Mary and the Witch\u2019s Flower (2017), was just to keep the spirit alive.

The anime industry was, and still is, in dire straits. There\u2019s a crisis-level loss of artists. \u201CPerhaps the biggest problem in the Japanese animation industry is that there are no more young animators,\u201D said one director in 2019. Anime has always been brutal, but things have gotten bad enough that its future is vanishing. The conditions that allowed artists like Hayao Miyazaki to rise to greatness no longer exist.

Before his time at Ponoc, Akihiko Yamashita had discovered this for himself. He was one of those displaced Ghibli workers. Rather than join Ponoc, though, he decided to try his luck in the wider industry for a year or more. Nishimura frequently met with him during this time, as Yamashita\u2019s \u201Ccomplexion got worse and worse.\u201D

Animation production sites are harsh, especially for TV animation, which is even harsher than film. The number of productions is large and there is not enough manpower, so the workload per person is very heavy. Director Yamashita, far from making the most of his abilities, witnessed the miserable situation at the production sites and thought, \u201CMaybe this is the end of animation\u2026\u201D

What restored Yamashita\u2019s faith was a chance, in the mid-2010s, to work with Ghibli again. Miyazaki ended his retirement to make the short film Boro the Caterpillar, and Yamashita contributed to its early stages. He found his way. Then he joined Ponoc.

Looking around, Ponoc came to believe that Japanese animation was missing the spirit of invention that had once led to risky films like Grave of the Fireflies. (Nishimura correctly noted that Ghibli has never had just one style \u2014 it\u2019s always tried new things.) Entering a kind of survival mode, though, a lot of anime grew \u201Cconservative.\u201D

The threat here is existential in nature. The masters who rose in past decades are getting older, and many are dying. Isao Takahata originally agreed to direct a short for Modest Heroes based on The Tale of the Heike, but he passed away, at the age of 82, before the film\u2019s release.

Modest Heroes and Invisible were meant to bring renewed creativity, to generate animation that\u2019s unexpected in both form and content. Not to copy the masters, but to find their spirit again and discover new things as they once did. \u201CMaking short films isn\u2019t economically rational,\u201D Nishimura admitted, but that wasn\u2019t the point.

Which isn\u2019t to say that Invisible casts Miyazaki\u2019s influence aside. As Yamashita has made clear, Miyazaki is his great inspiration. Even the idea of portraying the internal life of Invisible\u2019s protagonist through the appearance of the world came from Howl\u2019s Moving Castle, where the design of the castle represents Howl himself.

Plus, Boro the Caterpillar wasn\u2019t the only time that Miyazaki changed the course of Yamashita\u2019s career. Yamashita has explained many times that, in his early 30s, he hit a wall and became unable to work. He got back on track by getting hired to the game series Suikoden, and then receiving an offer to animate for Spirited Away. His time at Ghibli, he said, helped him to \u201Crediscover the fun\u201D of animation.

But Invisible doesn\u2019t end by looking back. After this ghostly version of Miyazaki encourages him, the protagonist goes on to discover his own purpose \u2014 one tied directly to new life. Likewise, Yamashita hasn\u2019t copied Miyazaki\u2019s past work, despite how much it informs him. Invisible is something new.

Although it came out a few years ago, and Yamashita hasn\u2019t directed another film since, there\u2019s something invigorating about watching this piece. It\u2019s thrilling and human. By Yamashita\u2019s own admission, it speaks to the misery and invisibility of many Japanese animators right now \u2014 and it points toward a path out of the darkness.

Today marks one year (!) since we opened up paid subscriptions to Animation Obsessive. It\u2019s an exciting milestone for us. To celebrate, this issue has been unlocked for all readers \u2014 just like our last two on Satoshi Kon\u2019s final film and lost projects.

The Japanese stop-motion film Hidari, co-produced by Dwarf, is about to wrap its successful crowdfunding campaign. It\u2019s a pilot for a feature \u2014 the early work looks fantastic.

The Warner/Discovery debacle continues in America: Driftwood canceled, major projects shopped to other streamers and DC features pushed back to cut costs. As one producer reportedly said, \u201CThey have no money and no clues.\u201D

We first learned about the \u201Cfather of Slovak animation,\u201D Viktor Kubal, in early 2021. A reader introduced us to Kubal\u2019s retro series Puff and Muff \u2014 which turned out to be great fun. The historian Toadette showed us even more of Kubal\u2019s films this year. So, we featured them in our newsletter this past June.

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