BT: For P.A. Works, the recent love letter to Kyoto, The Eccentric Family, achieves this with strong, flat colors and creative visual design that complement the folklore nature of the story. And I look to a studio like A-1 Pictures, with titles like tsuritama or The IDOLM@STER where the color palette is uncommonly bold and over-saturated; or the colors instead washed out, softened and overlit, on OreShura. The short-form Aiura, from Liden Films (its backgrounds produced by Atelier Buuka), demonstrates another method, of rich but pointedly watercolor exteriors, deeply lit so that everything glows. The animation styles of all of those I do consider beautiful in their individual ways.
GBS: Even if it was just a short-form show, Aiura was quite memorable for its scenery at times, though the frenetic opening probably distracted many viewers from looking at the other visual aspects of the shows. Following up on PA Works, I brought them up largely because of one of my favorite shows of the past few years: Hanasaku Iroha. Just focusing on the visual side, it is a work that captivates the viewer. It’s not just the lovingly rendered settings, it’s the attention to the visual space that the characters inhabit, formed and framed at a level similar to the work of a live action cinematographer. All of the elements work together to achieve an almost lyric quality, something I think the staff were deliberately aiming at with the nostalgic nature of the show.
BT: Hanasaku Iroha was a game-changer in some ways, for the combination of storytelling and detailed, world-building animation, so good in fact that I think they’ve been unable to follow up to it. But both P.A. Works and KyoAni have become the fan-favorite names for precisely constructed settings (many that reproduce real-world locations). And for me individuals are what tie these studios’ various titles together: pay attention to names like Joji Unoguchi and Matsuo Shinohara at KyoAni, or Kazuki Higashui at P.A. Works, all art directors. Animation directors like Kazumi Ikeda (KyoAni) and Kanami Sekiguchi (P.A.) build off of what they help design. Or even Katsue Inoue at P.A., who handled the color design on many of their best known shows.
GBS: Yeah, PA Works haven’t been able to match HanaIro, but it’s largely because of an inability to present as involving as story. Their current show, Nagi no Asukara, is visually breathtaking at times, but the character crafting and story development has fallen far short of the eye candy. KyoAni has had a couple of missteps as well in recent seasons.
Another individual worth mentioning is Junichi Satou, the maestro often associated with the former studio HAL Film Maker (which has since been merged into TYO Animations). While his most famous work is probably his involvement with Sailor Moon, there are two works of his that span the range from magical fantasy to fantastic realism, if we could call it that: Princess Tutu and ARIA. These two in particular I would hold up as examples of the high level of beauty that can be reached in regularly broadcast anime, with incredibly intricate backgrounds matched by fluid animation in the foreground. Anime music video fodder galore.
BT: Princess Tutu has that storybook quality, saturated with loving detail, I much admire along with some earlier examples, something I think unique with Satou’s involvement with Tutu’s creator, Ikuko Ito, who also provided animation direction and character design for his much earlier Magic Users Club (from Triangle Staff), where a number of dream-like sequences impressed me just as much. And for ARIA I think color and lighting again play very important roles, where closely researched settings are manipulated into something often dreamlike—a hazy, halcyon Venice, swapping the gritty and ancient beauty of the original with the idealized and timeless beauty of its approximation.
G.B. Smith
Greg Smith has been writing anime reviews and a review column on anime dubbed into English for several years, first at AnimeOnDVD and now for The Fandom Post. His occasional column on English anime dubs, Press Audio, appears whenever he comes across a dub worthy of a closer look. He is also the deputy editor for our seasonal and year end retrospectives.