miscellaneous
An unexpected budget increase just to shoot that dance scene in a media that isn't about dance (the last example is the opposite)
In episode four, Rentarou's harem stepped in for an idol group after the members conveniently suffered injuries that prevented them from dancing; the episode effectively depicts the training required for the performance as well as the girls' shortcomings The whole show (The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You)
Even though it was rotoscoped, they conducted extensive research on the town of Kasamatsu just for that dance sequence—which was essentially just a gag about her not knowing a victory dance after the race—though the version where she actually learns to dance does look well animated dance 1, dance 2 (Uma Musume Cinderella Gray)
It’s a dance anime, but they made all the dancing look like total crap, like those inflatable tube men (Wandance)
In the first season as a surprise outro ending one episode had this Chika dance number. It's super cute and crazy animated, especially her dress. They used it one time and never again.
there’s a tiktok user who started to do daily videos of him doing this dance (the “chika dance”) and said he would keep doing it until he got a girlfriend. he has now been doing the dance for like 2500 straight days with no girlfriend acquired. people will often comment on his videos that they have graduated high school or college and found themselves a long term partner in the time he’s been doing this video series.
I unironically listen to that rapping song / video more often than I really should ever admit. And the shot of Ishigami spinning perfectly at the end gets me every time
https://youtu.be/yWp6SXivHBQ
I still believe this was supposed to be released later in the season, but the director back then saw the small traction the anime was getting and decided to add this to ep 3 (without context from later episodes a lot of the song doesn't make sense, it should've been released by ep 8 or so which is the Chika detective episode)
Anyway, it worked, Chika dance brought a lot of attention to the anime and nowadays it's one of the most recognizeable romcoms around.
Well, it was perhaps the most anticipated scene of the anime. Like, from the whole series. People have been trying to interpret it for very long, and from the moment Vento Aureo was (finally) announced fans were super excited to see it animated. It's one of the most iconic moments in the mangs.
Animators understood the assignment. But frankly, it they weren't, the reaction would've been very bad. Part 7 ED bad.
was the dance really a big thing before the anime? I wasn't in the fandom when p5 was coming out, but I'm pretty sure that the 4 panel dance was a relatively small thing, smaller than something like Pizza Mozarella
Musical moments in manga are always better when motion and music are added to the scene.
For example: Hunting Soul from DanDaDan. It’s a couple of spread pages in the manga, but the anime makes it an actual power metal music number, even getting Marc Hudson of Dragonforce on lead vocals in the dub.
It’s the song that got me back into metal. I’m pretty picky about the metal genre as a whole, and im just not into a lot of metal, but now I want to discover more options similar to this.
I was watching this in bed on my laptop beside my girlfriend, I was laughing and she looked over and for the thousandth time I just had to be like " I don't know man thats just how this show is"
That season is about the teenage son of a frost vampire teaming up with some hitmen to use their magic avatars to defeat a mob boss with multiple personality disorder so they can end the drug trade in Italy forever.
Many generations of a character with Jo Jo in their name deal with the supernatural, but mostly with weird puzzle shit. Characters tend to have reality-bending abilities attached to ethereal projections of their inner ego, called Stands. Thus, fighting someone often tends to be more about "how the heck do you even hurt him?" or "something bizarre is happening, but what are the rules behind it?" rather than raw power differences. A character with a stand that is very powerful in a situation that favors them might be helpless in one that does not.
It is also, as you can see from the gif, only a little campy and over the top. Just a touch. It's well known for its 'Jo-Jo poses', where characters will strike fabulous poses just because they can. It tends to be male oriented in character, with the first female JoJo only showing up in the sixth storyline. Storylines are mostly independent, in the same way a Final Fantasy game shares traits but is not a direct sequel.
If you're interested, the third storyline(Stardust Crusaders) is generally where the series is considered to hit its stride, and the anime is extremely well done. It's been around since the 80s and is still going.
As an italian i confirm that we have complex dance routines to pass the time while torturing people, doubles as psychological warfare and physical exercise
It’s actually nuts how hard they went on this. The anime isn’t bad and the actual fight scenes are animated well, but this choreography comes out of nowhere
Alan Wake II. The graphics in the game are good, but they look so real in the musical number! /s
*Edit: The /s wasn't enough it is live action. But that's also not fair on my part, cause the full Herald of Darkness section in Alan Wake II is about 15 to 20 minutes, and swaps between live action, gameplay, and trippy transitions between them. This relatively small section of game would have actually taken a lot of effort, so I was being a little snarky, but it does also fit. Watch someone go through it if you don't mind spoilers.
https://giphy.com/gifs/yBSRSbB2ms8ksvuIpj
Peacemaker’s opening feels similar. A very out of place and nonsense dance performed with complete sincerity and maximum effort.
Funny enough, there’s interviews of Sam Lake (director of Alan Wake 2) saying that Peacemaker’s first intro was partially an inspiration for the dances they do in Herald of Darkness
Fun fact, the choreographer of the opening to Peacemaker is Charissa Barton (who's done a ton of cool stuff both for film, tv, and stage). She is married to Alan Tudyk. I bet they are fun to hang out with.
Yeah I've started reading it and even though Kotani has a 90s yaoi ass build a lot of the time, my god do the dance scenes have unfathomable levels of sauce
The funniest thing is that the original Wandance mangaka literally learned how to animate and made this in two weeks to a month (not sure of the exact date) out of spite
The Bob’s Burgers movie already has a larger budget than the main series, with much more of a focus on dynamic shading, animating at a higher fps, better character motion. Yet the musical/dancing scenes take you off guard by being even smoother than the already increased quality, for a series that is typically just a family slice of life comedy with no real musical focus
Whilst I love this anime, this instance doesn’t fit the criteria. It’s effectively the culmination of a multi episode arc leading to this performance.
FYI they have announced an Iruma movie.
It's so funny they introduced the concept with Idol shenanigans shoehorned in to presumably catch a larger crowd and then the franchise took off soaring and NOBODY gives a crud about the idol sequences.
That's because it's been wildly successful with its primary goal: the waifu-ification of real-life horse racing.
I'd be way more critical of the fact that real-life race horses have been licensed for this show except for the fact that the game itself seems to be 18+ nowadays... and not because it's a gacha but because it's strongly tied to horse racing.
btw for the taiwan/cn release of the game they completely removed the tail from the girl’s models so they can’t be classified as horses and market it as girls who run really fast because horse racing and gambling is illegal lmao
along with all carrot motifs and the starting gate
but i don’t play on those servers so i really wonder what they did to nakayama’s character
I mean the original idea was pretty much idols but given a new spin, and the idol element is part of their continued success in Japan.
Around 2010, there was the massive boom in idol popularity, called the "Warring Idols Era." It was a frankly oversaturated market where anyone and everyone marketed something or another to include idols.
In entertainment, some stuff had an easier pivot than others. Manga, anime? Make it idol. The clear glowing opportunity was to get all these voice actors and voice actresses to try out singing, some big agencies even breaking into VAs by seeking out those who can not only sing and act, but also perform live - the 100 Girlfriends example is a perfect example of something that has idol-ish stuff shoehorned in just for the fanservice. Non-zero chance they'll sing it live for something or another. Dunno where to slip this in otherwise, but while lots of VAs came into the industry to try and double as singers (it expands their repertoire), and while the VA industry did try treating their VAs as idols, everyone learned the hard way that this loses promising long-term talent. So unless a unit or specific talent says, specifically, that they're idols, the VAs don't see themselves as idols, just as actors/actresses who voice idols.
The 2011 IDOLM@STER anime (now back on Crunchyroll btw) was the darkhorse of its season unexpectedly popular thanks to beautifully animated performances drawn frame by frame.
On the topic of dance, I'd say that the animation industry is great at animating idols possibly because of IDOLM@STER, but also years and years of more idol anime being animated. I think that Wandance going so terribly was because they haven't given the same thought to how to animate modern dancing (the roots of which are similarly within the last 20+ years) - like yeah, that scene was supposedly intentionally amateur, but they don't show the footwork when the dude was doing footwork. They figured, slap a mocap suit on em and turn the camera on - it's lazy.
Anyway. IDOLM@STER expands its ventures and they start several branches - one of which is IDOLM@STER Cinderella Girls. As it goes for many franchises, they have a mobile card game, music, an anime, and yearly live concerts with the VAs. They get big enough to try a rhythm game, those are all the rage - so they make Starlight Stage with Cygames.
That should sound familiar.
The idea of horsegirl idols gets kicked around, a guy retiring from IDOLM@STER hops over to Uma Musume. Some Cinderella Girls VAs get roles, along with a bunch of other IDOLM@STER VAs, heck, some Live Live VAs too. Project gets announced. One of the first things shown at the panels that weekend were the VAs performing live.
Early drafts of the Uma Musume game were cheap reskins of Starlight Stage, from the 3D model quality to the UI, to the rhythm game elements. So they rework it. Yearly live concerts with the VAs - if people wonder why the anime was so good, how the game ended up so great, I'd say it was the music and live concerts that paved the way.
That roguelike training sim it is today? Still bears a great resemblance to the idol training sims that IDOLM@STER's known for. Why do we care for these girls so much? Why do so many people feel parental, or at least familial urges for these girls? The structure of the game draws upon the experience of idol training sim games.
If we took the Uma out of the game, look no further than Gakuen Idolm@ster for what that looks like - idol training very similar to Uma Musume, but remixed with Slay the Spire elements.
I'd also say this has also led to kaigai idol activities increasing - kaigai idols being those outside of Japan performing as Japanese idols do.
So it's not exactly that nobody gives a crud, just that you don't know those who do.
But yeah, I'm just personally glad to see people enjoying Uma Musume however they want.
Yep, it’s actually insane that they managed to do that. Shows just how much that studio loves the series… meanwhile some of the fans bitch and complain when their favourite chapters aren’t understandably adapted into the anime
The showrunners get to adapt one of the most insatiably unhinged romcoms to ever grace modern television. It’s probably the most fun they’ve had in years.
Iirc the royal dude in the video was bribed into a plot to marry off his niece to the primary antagonist of the film by staging a kidnapping and proclaiming her savior would get her hand in marriage. Obviously the plan was to have the antagonist make it seem like he was the one to save her and bring her back.
Anyway, royal guy is walking through his garden afterwards only to overhear these 3 girls gossiping about how the messenger boy went to go save the princess instead before breaking into a dance number.
Oguri Cap is very well beloved in Kasamatsu. He's the hometown hero there and is greatly cherished by the town, even having a statue. The animators doing research on the culture of Kasamatsu, and Oguri doing said dance is an amazing show of respect to not only the town but also Oguri.
And also, Uma Musume is an Idol Game/Anime as well. Oguri is considered an Idol Horse too in real life. Dancing and singing are part of their culture, it's even explained in the anime that every Uma winner has to perform afterwards. It happens in the game too after every race. To call it unnecessary is kinda false.
The season 2 opening of "Rosario X Vampire" was this seriously well animated disco dancing segment that was really out of left field and had nothing to do with the actual anime whatsoever.
Frieren already looks pretty, and then there’s the waltz between Fern and Stark. Fairly certain some of that is cg instead of hand drawn, but it’s done so wonderfully that it doesn’t matter
It's actually not CG at all. The entire thing is hand drawn. In fact, it's not even rotoscoped, which a lot of fans were speculating at first. They had references from dancers and then drew it by hand.
I'm surprised people haven't mentioned apothecary diaries yet. The first and second seasons end with gorgeous dance sequences from the MC and a side character that are genuinely stunning.
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u/Rubysage3 1d ago edited 1d ago
Kaguya-sama: Love is War - Chika's dance
In the first season as a surprise outro ending one episode had this Chika dance number. It's super cute and crazy animated, especially her dress. They used it one time and never again.