Raikoh wrote:I can't see much room to complain when it comes to the animation. It might not be as fluid as other anime, but the attention to detail is staggeringly amazing. Every background is vibrant and full of personality, and even in shots where characters are all over the place they still have room to be expressive. Just look at any scene where Raraiya or Noredo is in the background and you can see that they react to the conversation. Yeah, having a few more in-betweeners wouldn't hurt, but given how consistently great the composition is, I'm willing to cut the animation some slack.
Besides, I'm the type who doesn't like things to just be blase and forgettable, and the industry's ideal of good animation is a bit oversaturated with the style that... I don't even know how to describe it, but it's the kind of stuff seen in the dozens of schoolgirl series. It's fluid, yeah, but you get people moving too fluidly and it doesn't look natural (
case and point). G-Reco looks nice to me, so I'm willing to overlook some of the shortcomings of its animation (the only thing that really bugs me is that there seems to be something that looks like Flash in the shots of aerial Mobile Suits).
I'm probably more forgiving on
all animation these days, since I remember seeing a big budget series released not even a year ago that looked like it was animated in ten minutes of someone's lunch break and I'm willing to go easy on it as long as it isn't
that bad..
I would call it over-exaggerated. I strongly believe one of the keys to good animation is dynamic range, which doesn't mean that everything looks like it's always moving, but that you make choices about when something moves and how something moves, so that not everything always looks the same. Those choices should be dictated on what you want to communicate to the audience and what both the dramatic
and thematic situation calls for, and generally the more dynamic range and different choices you have for different frames, the more likely the director and animator put deeper thought and meaning into the character's motions. My criticism of the animation standards these days is that there are certain kinds of motions that are meant to convey very shallow sentiments such as "cool" and "sexy" that have become very common. Even the dramatic expressions in animation these days tend to convey the stereotype of the expression or emotion, and not a real unique set of motions that reflects the specific context of the scene and the individual nature of a character (Then again most characters in Anime these days don't deviate too far from shallow tropes and archetypes. It's rare now to have characters that have more depth to them than what you can identify with a type). The other criticism I have for most animations these days is that the colour palette is too clean and flat and lacks character. Flat isn't bad for all things, but it's one that's being overused. There's a richness of different ideas and emotions that can be expressed using different colour palettes, but most animes these days seem to relegate colours to help set up what things look like, instead of what things
feel like.
To tie this back to G-Reco, this is one of the reasons I'm so glad to have another Tomino series, and why I don't have a problem with the animation. Tomino puts a lot of thought and effort into how animation is an art, not just a business, and I think it shows. Sure, there aren't as many cool poses and exaggerated choreography in mech action as you would see in a lot of other series from today, but he forgoes that to focus on more expressive and human elements of the storyboarding and art. I could maybe agree that they could use some more frames when the mobile suits are moving, but at the same time, I don't mind so much because I feel the human drama in G-Reco's actions far more than I would in many other series that focus purely on mech to mech action. I'm not simply engaged because it looks cool. The use of diverse and dynamic character expressions and the rich and deep colour palette is superb in G-Reco (they even bother to use focus points and bokeh!), and I largely approve of storyboarding choices this team has chosen to make. The cuts back and forth between the action sequences and the reactions of the characters, and the cut to close ups of what is happening at specific points of action (like Dellesen's Cathsith cutting through the Montero's hands) are all meant to convey the experiences of the characters in the story, not just the movements and actions of machines or hackneyed character interactions.
To kind of summarize my thoughts on all this a little, I think contemporary Anime has focused too much on how the animation looks, at the detriment of how the animation
feels. A lot of animation choices have become detached from being a vehicle to convey a deeper sense of expression and meaning for the sake of commercial expedience. Sure the standard animation quality is sharper and more fluid now, and may look prettier, but it tells us less and it has less significance to the story (though my other criticism of anime these days is that most have hack and superficial story telling). These are problems G-Reco largely (if not completely) avoids, and for that I am grateful.
