Recently, an IBO Guidebook came out. There was a bunch of interviews in it, but I decided to translate a short one with Hiroshi Arisawa, the chief mecha animator for IBO.
Cool poses are off-limits?! How to draw Barbatos
>Firstly, can you tell us about what direction you decided to take in drawing the mecha when you originally became involved in the project?
Arisawa - I came on board after being asked by the producer, Mr. Masakazu Ogawa. When I first saw the design of the Gundam Barbatos, I was surprised to see that so much of its frame is exposed; something that hadn't been in (Gundam) anime yet. The previous series I worked on "Gundam Build Fighters", was a show with mobile suits that could strike cool poses. Early on, I had a talk with the director, Mr. Tatsuyuki Nagai, about how the mobile suits in Iron-Blooded Orphans are gritty and rustic so they don't really pose.
>Was this your first time working with Mr. Nagai?
Arisawa - It was. When I first met him, he was really nervous and scared (laughs). He's a really nice person though. If I ever needed to ask him something, he'd politely answer. Whenever I'd show him early Barbatos pose references, he'd say "it can't make cool poses like this" or "if you make it streeetch like this it looks low-quality" (laughs).
>Low-quality? (laughs)
Arisawa - Yeah. He said the mace was low-quality, too. Originally it was more like a metal bat that would be dragged around.
>It's unusual to have a mecha anime without cool poses, isn't it?
Arisawa - My biggest regret is that I couldn't give Barbatos a signature pose. An pose inseparable from the mobile suit. Like "This is THE Barbatos pose!"
>>14922129
so that's the origin of barbatos' YEAAAAAAAAAAAAART pose
what a shitty design
>But I think that the viewers were drawn in by the image of the Barbatos holding the mace in the first episode.
Arisawa - I'm the one who drew the key animation for that scene, but I struggled with it. I wondered how to deal with the problem of the lead mecha striking a cool pose at the end of the first episode. I think that this has been a tradition since "Mobile Suit Gundam SEED". That, and I have a desire to really let the Gundam strike a cool pose (laughs).
>As a design, the Barbatos was really made for cool poses, though.
Arisawa - It has a silhouette that's easy to portray from a variety of angles.
>Have you ever had other mecha animation directors accidentally draw it in cool poses?
Arisawa - Yeah, we have. Each animation director for "Iron-Blooded Orphans" has a different way of portraying Barbatos. If I become too aware of that, I run the risk of being bound by that fact. That's why I think it’s appealing to let each animation director's individual personalities shine through in an anime. We all have a common impression of Barbatos in that it's not something that lightly flies about in the air, but wields a mace with these heavy movements.
How do you draw appealing fight scenes while keeping them in line with the setting?
>IBO doesn't have beam weaponry, but in my opinion, the animation of the mecha scenes had an element that left an impression on me.
Arisawa - I can agree with that. But there’s a lot of melee combat, so there are parts where there are two or more mobile suits on screen at one time. From an animation standpoint it makes things more difficult, so that was definitely one of my concerns. Though it’d be difficult in its own way with beam weaponry (laughs). I first thought that fight scenes without beam weapons would look plain, so I made sparks fly out whenever the mobile suits clash into each other. In this series, in addition or red or orange sparks, we also make use of blue sparks. Those blue sparks are the top layer of the Nanolaminate Armor getting shaved off, so I wanted to express that in a way that looks flashy.
During the compositing phase, we use a dry brush technique to add in these blue effects. In addition, there aren’t any explosions (of the Mobile Suits?) in IBO. Because the pilots would die if there were (laughs).
>You can really feel how much things hurt during collisions.
Arisawa - By doing things like the suits shake and swing by the force of impact, we can make the (the fight scenes) satisfying to watch.
>Was that something that was decided by meeting with the director?
Arisawa - I remember asking him “well, what if we did it like this?”. In this series, I wanted to let the light of the thrusters be translucent but doing so turns it into a different kind of animation (Note: meaning that it’s the composite team as opposed to the key animators who have to take care of it) so it adds just another little burden. But after talking about it with the director, we ended up making use of it.
>Mecha anime have some sort of promise of traditionally “cool” elements like poses and beams, so it must have been a great challenge to draw mobile suits like that.
Well, this show wasn't exactly hot trash, but I couldn't help but feel like it was an inferior knockoff of Frontier. And say what you will about Frontier, at least it had a reasonably paced plot, Delta felt like it alternated between rushing the plot and spending a bunch of episodes on character building.
The final episode didn't exactly ruin the whole thing for me, but it felt like Kawamori just threw all the leftover plot threads together and rehashed Frontier's ending. The whole shit with the last-minute change of heart, last-minute betrayal and all that other stuff made it feel rushed as hell. I also see now what everybody was complaining about Mirage, she didn't exactly present herself as a credible love interest until the very last minute, where it didn't matter dick all anyways. She was more like the supporting matchmaker character for Hayate and Freyja, there was almost no contest in the whole thing. At no point did my expectations ever point to Mirage winning, making this the most lopsided love "triangle" since probably Seven.
Still, the show wasn't really a train wreck like I'd been led to believe. Just a bunch of pacing and plot problems (the whole thing with Hayate's dad turned out to be a pretty big dud for all the lead-up it had), with a big animation and VA budget that still made the show reasonably enjoyable. I'd probably still put it above Plus and Zero, and maybe a bit below the Frontier movies.
Yeah, it does have it problems but it wasn't as bad as people led me to believe.
I alsoliked the music
>>14922045
The problem with Delta is that, despite everything starting strong, the plot slowly turns into poorly written fanfiction tier trash.
I don't use that word lightly, by the way. The Windemeren race seriously feels likr someones OC donutsteel insert race.
They are super badass at everything but have tragic 'flaws' that never impact them except for forced drama where everyone else has to immediately drop what they are doing and fawn over how tragic this is (lets all get super sad about how Herman, a guy I have met all of twice and how is constantly trying to kill me and my friends, is dying of old age after nearly killing me less than a minute before. How TRAGIC.).
Lets not forget, after all, that the Windemerens are the official "chosen by the Protoculture to inherit the galaxy" species. Which we originally thought was just nationalist propaganda, but NOPE! Its legit. The massive galactic mind control array, built by the protoculture, requires Runes to operate. And they found it that way, no modification needed. Unless we are lead to believe that the Protoculture had runes too (which seems unlikely, since absolutely none of their other creations have an equivalent organ) literally no one who is not a male windemeren could operation the mind control weapon. It was expressly built for them and them alone.
But hey, thats all ancient history, right? Only the macguffain is windemere focused, right?
Nope! Literally the entire plot can be summed up by only describing the actions of windemeren characters. Windemere launches a war of expansion using an ancient mind control weapons, succeeds greatly, suffers an internal division about how to use that mind control weapon, breaks free of its effects temporarily due to the actions of a windemeren girl, and then the windemeren military kills the traitor and they all go home for the day.
>>14922617
This means that, in 26 episodes, the protagonists never did jack fucking shit. They never successfully slow the windemeren advance, force Roid to change his plans, launch successful counter offensives... nada. Hayate's only contribution tot he plot that mattered was giving Freya FEELS, so that SHE (a windemeren character) could enable the rest of the windemeren characters to go off and solve the plot by killing Roid while the rest of delta sat around and watched them do it.
No one has any agency in this. Every moment that Walkure and Delta and the various Xaos staff members were onscreen was a waste of our time, because NONE OF THEM AND NOTHING THEY EVER DID mattered.
And, of course, the war itself cannot be resolved onscreen because the only option left is for Windemere to eat shit in the face of a NUNS offensive, now that they have been deprived of their mind control weapon and the NUNS has jammers against the Song of the Wind and they lost their best pilot Keith. But that would require us to see Windemere lose fights, so lets just skip that shall we?
Are the Gundam movies good enough? 50 episodes is a lot of time investment comparatively.
Same question for Zeta, Turn A, etc.
I never saw 0079 but I heard they were good. Zeta movies... IMO I thought movie 1 and 3 were alright but movie 2 skips Dakar/kilimanjaro/Dijeh so it sucks.
Saw Turn A but I didn't think it was very good. don't bother with Seed/Destiny. AGE MOE was alright but it was more a retelling than anything else.
>>14921688
0079's movies version is the only one that lives up to it's respective series. Most of the others have horrible pacing in comparison to their series. Or with the Zeta movies, the plot is different and includes new animation, so is best viewed later after seeing the series. And even though 0079's movie version is great, the series is still better. Even if it has more of pic related
>>14921688
The Zeta movies are okay if you fucking hate Zeta.
the obscured part of this pic contains the main cast of the new anime series, though as you can see from the bottom it doesn't seem to be the OZ cast
>>14921336
OZ was a flop so it makes sense thst they wouldn't touch it.
>>14921336
HYPE?
>>14921336
Why do they have to make more of this crap?
>new God Mazinger chapter released
>no thread
Let's fix that.
>>14920977
Do you have a link?
>a giant stone god fighting an army of guys who ride dinosaurs and are led by a man in a gold demon mask.
I fucking love this description. This is a great sales pitch.
>>14921195
Fuck off.
>>14921180
Do you honestly need somebody to post a link when it's on most read online sites already? Google it, motherfucker.
How would you rate it?
>>14920728
Inoffensive yet completely bland and unappealing/10
>>14920741
Action scenes were pretty nice though. Better choreography than most mecha series 3D or not desu.
>>14920728
Garbage fire.
Is a tomboy robot called a tombot? And why is she so perfect?
>>14919981
her getting reduced to background cameo in Plus was a crime.
>Is a tomboy robot called a tombot?
No. A tomboy is a girl who acts like a boy. Therefore, a tombot should be a girl who acts like a robot. Or maybe just a person who acts like a robot.
It seems like Titanfall 2 is starting to become a little critical darling.
Does that mean its allowed on /m/ now?
>inb4 that meme image from IGN interviewing a retard artist saying Titanfall isn't mecha
I'd be wary of it becoming a meme game but hey second time's the charm I guess.
How hardware intensive is it? It and the first TF still surprise me that they're Source games.
>>14919038
Which retard artist was this?
Sure it's allowed, we just had a thread about it a little while ago.
Also just picked up the game, really good first impression. I didn't expect there to be so much robot-pilot interaction. That's awesome.
>>14919041
Holy shit I forgot they ran on Source.
What's your favorite Knightmare Frame /m/?
>>14917153
Glasgow through Gloucester were pure sex, then the series dropped the ball making them all gaudy and shit
Panzer-Hummel is cool too
>>14917153
You posted it, I love the Gawain.
What the fuck is this bitch's problem?
Hair too sexy
Her rule 63 didn't want to fuck her
>>14917131
>What the fuck is this bitch's problem?
She's frigid.
New FSS chapter
Full image of gtm kog yet?
>>14916917
THERE IS NO FSS THERE IS ONLY ZUUL
>>14916917
That's the new Schpeltor for anyone curious.
>Imma give this Mobile Suit to Amuro and then beat him
>Oops I forgot I fucking suck and Amuro kicks my ass all the time
Is he retarded?
I'm going to say this in advance. I'm drunk, but I hope this helps you understand char.
>0087
>fuck everything, beating the titans was supposed to advance humanity
>0088
>fuck everything, world still sucks humans aren't advancing
>0090ish
>fuck everything, I'm going to deal with this shit
>0093
>Fuck everything, throwing more shit at the earth is stupid & I know my plan sucks and won't work
>I give up
>I'm going to go out in style fighting Amuro, he's the closest thing I have to a friend anyway.
>Fed suits don't have proper psycho frames
>I'll send one to amuro just to make sure my going out party is done in style
>0096
>fuck everything, I'm beyond the time
>>14916778
CCA was two obnoxious teenagers and a elaborate suicide plan.
>>14916778
To be fair they tied at A Baoa Qu and Texas Colony. The only real win Amuro had on Char at that point was the Lalah incident, and that was a messy situation with both Sayla and Lalah involved, and was exactly the score he wanted to settle.
Post some deluxe mecha toys. I'll start with the 1/55 origin of Valkyrie VF-1J.
(Extra points for anything that's not S.O.C)
This fucking thing.
1/48 V Gundam. Sounds big and cool, but it was made in the early 90s when V Gundam aired, and Bandai could not figure out how to get proportions right on their toys
>>14916746
Making the V instead of the V2 was retarded.
I had this as a kid. I was so excited to get this, because I had no idea what Gundam was, this was before Wing got huge in the USA, I had no idea what the story of Zeta Gundam was, but the Zeta was the coolest looking mecha I had ever seen
Ok so I'm 3 episodes in and I got to say, what ever subs they're using are kinda killing it for me, so I have to ask do they get better?
>>14916040
They do when it goes back to m-subs in the 20s iirc.
You talking about the shin getter subs or the Semi Hk subs?
I HURT MYSELF TODAY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJKyqALHC2w
That CG looks early 2000s Japan tier bad.
Considering the current Hollywood and its audience "If I have to think, it's bad", will this movie have transhumanism or just a simple plot with a lot of action scenes?
>>14915412
I was pretty happy when they announced that the writers have some decent science fiction chops, but it looks like the bulk of the story will be the Kuze arc of the second SAC.
I guess they don't know how to contextualize transhumanism without a boy for ScarJo to kiss.
http://io9.gizmodo.com/we-finally-know-what-part-of-ghost-in-the-shell-the-mov-1788549513
I guess it was too much to hope that Ex Machina influenced the production.