Roving Thoughts archives

Myriad Colors Phantom World illustrates bad fight staging for us

Let's start with my tweet:

I re-watched the big initial fight in Phantom World and no, KyoAni either (still) doesn't understand fight staging or doesn't care.

I feel sufficiently grump about Kyoto Animation failing once again on fight animation that I'm going to say more about this than fits on Twitter. What I mean by 'fight staging' here is blocking out the fight, ie establishing where all of the characters are in physical space and in relationship to each other, and thus how they move around over the course of the action. Good fight staging means that the fight actually makes physical sense and that you can follow who is where (and often that interesting things are happening).

We're going to look at a specific piece from the initial fight. Start by watching this clip from Phantom World (which was conveniently already on sakugabooru for me). Don't focus on the animation quality, ask yourself how you feel about it as just a piece in a fight (in fact, basically the climactic piece). Does it really work? Does something perhaps feel off? Because for me, even on first watching it felt somehow a little bit wrong or nonsensical.

Well, that would be because it is. Specifically, it has staging that doesn't actually work. Let's break down the flow of action and call out the staging inconsistencies, or at least the obvious ones:

1. Mai and the monster are fighting on the school sports field.
2. Mai sprints away from the monster and straight towards a clock tower (at the edge of the sports field) that has students watching from behind it, with the monster following her. How the shot is framed and how the people behind the clock tower immediately scatter implies that the monster is close behind her. We are certainly supposed to feel that, just from how it's presented.

3. Mai performs a gratuitous jump, dive, and complex pivot to come up standing right in front of the low front wall of the clock tower area. All of the cues in the shot say this, and say that she's stopped here because she can't move any further back (away from the monster).

   We don't see the monster during this bit of the clip, and there is clearly a bunch of empty space in front of Mai (between her and the monster). What happened to it following close behind her in #2?

4. The monster charges at her. However, the shot suddenly shows a vast distance between her and the monster and it takes the monster a significant time to charge up to her. This is again inconsistent with #2's close-behind monster.

   What's really happened is that the show has teleported the monster backwards so that it can do a big dramatic monster charge and have a 'Mai braces and readies herself' brief cut (and also have #3).

5. We switch to a view behind Mai. As the monster strikes at her, the camera pulls back. Say what? In #3, right behind Mai was the retaining wall; we have nowhere to pull back to.
6. Mai jumps up and significantly back to evade the monster's strike; after a flip in midair she lands right in front of our new, pulled back camera position. Say what again?

   Of course, what's really happened is that the show has teleported Mai (and the monster) forward from the clock tower area, because otherwise it would not be able to have the dramatic backwards jump evasion it wants here.

7. Mai jumps back again from the monster's strike, jumps back a third time from another strike, and finally we pull back through the pillars of the clock tower as the monster charges into it and gets tangled.

There are other staging inconsistencies in shot sequences just before and after this clip. For instance, immediately before the clip begins we had a shot sequence that established that the clock tower was more or less straight to Mai's right, yet in #2 she sprints straight back from the monster rather than having to cut to the side.

The individual actions of this fight are more or less okay and it has a certain amount of dramatic beats. What it does not have is consistent staging. As a result this is not actually a real fight; instead it's a clip show of dramatic moments. The whole fight has not been storyboarded by working out what happened and how it flows; instead the clear priority has been to have a sequence of dramatic shots happen, with some vague attempt to glue them together in a reasonably consistent manner. If two dramatic sequences are inconsistent with each other, either the show doesn't notice or it doesn't care.

In other words, the show prioritizes moment to moment dramatic cuts over a fight that is dramatic when taken as a whole. The result is subtly unsatisfying and weightless, as the inconsistency and the resulting unreality rob the overall scene of some of its impact. You may not consciously think of this as you watch the clip, but it's quite likely that a part of your mind is trying to keep track of stuff like where everyone is and as a result is raising warning flags that something feels off.

(Bad fight staging can happen in live action if you do not plan out your shot to shot continuity, but you at least have a higher chance of noticing it when you have actual people standing in places and moving around. Given how anime seems to be put together, I sometimes marvel that it ever has good fight staging. I assume that there are directors who are amazingly good at keeping track of the overall scene in their heads as they storyboard out each individual angle, sequence, and cut.)

Looking back at the Fall 2015 anime season

Once again it's time for my usual look back at the shows I watched this season in order to see how my early impressions and my midway views have held up. While I do these writeups partly to be honest about how things came out, I've also found them useful for looking back at what my past views were, to see what I thought about shows more or less at the time.

Fully enjoyable:

• Concrete Revolutio: In some ways this was not subtle and in others it was hard to follow (to get the most of it you had to keep track of what had happened when in the timeline, which GuyShalev's Concrete Revolutio episodes posts help with). But as the show went on, I became more and more taken with all of the various things it was doing and the story it was telling and, yes, the characters involved. The whole thing has wound up as a quite enjoyable show and I'm looking forward to the continuation in the spring.

  Concrete Revolutio has a relatively distinctive animation style and aesthetic, which I enjoyed but other people may not. I think that it fit the story it was telling and it was probably chosen for that reason.

• One-Punch Man: This is here not because it's a great show but because I consistently found it funny and enjoyable. I'm aware that finding OPM funny is a minority position (at least in the Twitter anime circles I follow), but then anime humour rarely works for me in the first place. In addition to being funny, OPM also had some decent storytelling in spots; it pulled off one reasonably dramatic storyline involving Mumen Rider and a few other nice dramatic moments. I did some OPM takes on Twitter.

  A lot of people love OPM for its fight animation, but I'm more ambivalent. A fair number of its fights were visually spectacular without being what I consider good fights, including the climactic fight in the last episode.

• Gakusen Toshi Asterisk: This remained a well constructed and well made show all the way through to the resolution of the first cour's plotline (it continues in the spring season). It's not exactly deep, since this is a LN action show, but it's well done with surprisingly good writing and a good couple. I'm really looking forward to the next season.

  (Apparently some people think that Asterisk is a harem show. I disagree with that; Ayato and Julis are a clear couple and almost no one else is particularly trying to horn in on that.)

Okay:

• Subete ga F ni Naru - The Perfect Insider: The great thing about the show was Moe and her interactions with everyone, especially Saikawa. The mystery was okay and the process of revealing it was interesting and often very tense, atmospheric, and quietly horrific. Where the show falls down badly is that it fails to challenge the absurd character positions and philosophy that get espoused throughout and especially at the ending. Since all of them are basically garbage, this lack of challenge makes much of the ending into an eye-rolling experience where I had no investment in any of the events and characters.

  (See also, which has some spoilers.)

  In short, when the show was good it was great, with Moe sparking off people, things about her history and Saikawa being revealed, and so on. But when it was not good it was pretty much a disappointing more or less stinker, and the ending was a serious letdown; the last episode was basically worthless apart from a few bits with Moe.

• K - Return of Kings: I have a great deal of affection for K as a result of the first season but this season tried my patience by being kind of slow. In the end it came through with some great final episodes, character bits, and a definite resolution (even if it was a bit hokey). I enjoyed the whole thing but mostly not anywhere near as much as the first season. In my view, Fushimi really stole the season from everyone else by being clearly the best and most interesting character.

  The conclusion to this season basically rules out any further K, and I find that I'm perfectly okay with that. K has had its run and told its stories, and I'm content to stop there (although I might be a bit sad if this season had been stronger; this season and the movie make it look like the first season was pretty much a fluke where everything clicked just right).

I finished it:

• Owarimonogatari: As I put it on Twitter, people who are into Monogatari probably loved the resolution to the Shinobu Mail storyline. I liked some aspects of it and some moments in it, but on the whole I wasn't really set on fire by anything in this season the way I loved, say, Hanamonogatari.

• Utawarerumono - Itsuwari no Kamen: The show has spent almost all of this season derping around. Its only saving grace is that it manages to be very, very charming during this derping around, charming enough that I've kept watching when I would have dropped any other show that pulled this stuff off.

  (Every so often the show made legitimate dramatic points, but they were undercut by the derping.)

Dropped:

• Mobile Suit Gundam - Iron-Blooded Orphans: For various reasons I wound up dropping this shortly after I wrote up my midway views. Ultimately I just didn't really care about the characters and their struggles and I felt the show was going in directions I generally dislike.

I fully enjoyed three shows this season and was reasonably fond of everything else I watched, even if Perfect Insider wound up letting me down after a very strong start (and really, it was pretty strong for most of its run; only the ending was a real nose dive).