The Art of Akira

maybe it’s early and i haven’t had my coffee, but it kinda makes me want to cry, if only because akira and the like were back when people did one thing, but they did it soooooo well. i’m a such a sucker for anything old school like this.

akira is lord

i’m a big evangelion fan too

can’t beat good animation, hopefully it will make a comeback, cg sucks, but as i learned in my animation class last semester, i can understand why people shy away from the labor intensive hand drawing method. (i drew like a million frames)

easier is never better though.

Akira had spectacular animation for its time, and the fact that it still looks great today is a testament to that, but I dispute the idea that it was “the last completely hand-created animated feature.” I’m fairly sure that Hayao Miyazaki continued to make all of his movies completely hand-drawn until a decade after Akira, when a very small amount (on the order of 10%-20%) of the animation in Princess Mononoke used some computer aid. As to the claim that “No other animation in history… focused so much attention to detail in every single aspect, on every single frame and background,” again I would point you to Miyazaki’s films of the ’80′s and ’90′s: during the production of each film he checked every single key frame himself (I think Princess Mononoke had on the order of 40,000 key animation cells) and personally redrew them if they weren’t up to his standards.