What happened

Amateur anime in the 80s


Amateur anime now:


The first film was shot frame by frame with an 8mm camera by three animation students, made for a scifi convention in Osaka. They would go on to found studio Gainax [Evangelion, FLCL, Gunbuster, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, etc ect]. One of them was Hideaki Anno, one of those anime directors where when you see one of his films, you can recognise anything else he's done, because his own style is so heavily imposed on it. Everything is hand drawn and its all pretty crude but its still exciting to watch. In Daicon IV [the film with ELO music] the animation staff increased to 9 or 10, all of them future Gainax animators [including Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, recently did illustrations/concept art for Rebuild of Eva], still as an amateur studio you can see how good the production values are. Some of the effects just put modern animation to shame. Unfortunately, this was the best quality video I could show you. Apparently it could never be commercially released because they never got permission to use the song Twilight or the Playboy bunny outfit, ha. Do you see all the references to Star Trek, Star Wars and American comics? There's also a load of old anime characters in the crowd at the end, I see Kamen Rider and possibly Char from Gundam, as well as Spock in a tux. I've written too much about it, but I love these! Its so interesting to see the first works of this studio.

The second thing I linked to is another piece of fan-made anime which was released yesterday at the 75th Winter Comiket . It's based on a series of shooter games called The Touhou Project created as an amateur work by a guy called ZUN, although he's nothing to do with this animation. The fanbase for this game is so huge [over 1300 artists circles selling fan-made manga at C75] Maikaze got professional voice actors to appear in the anime, so I was a little excited to see it, although I wasn't expecting much. I won't link to the whole unsubtitled 20 minute episode, but the animation shown in the trailer is pretty much the extent of what was on offer. The background art is nice, but actual 2d animation is really scarce, and I won't go into what I was expecting from the story/theme. I know I'm being quite mean to criticise such an amateur production, but Maikaze had unlimited time to make this, along with modern technology which is supposed to speed up the animation process; this looks like it was outsourced to Korea. They also had their love for Touhou to fire their blood! Its just so poorly crafted compared to what was being made all those years ago. I don't think I'm being to harsh to feel disappointed.

I'm sorry, I think I talk about my hobbies too much. But if you're at all interested in anime, anything by studio Gainax is worth watching. Even if you hate anime and are beginning to regret following my blog, I guarantee you there are great things amidst a vast ocean of shit. Even things which aren't about magical little girls.
Weekly tasks coming soon...Really...