#The Canipa Effect

[canmom]

Hello! I absolutely love your blog, everything from your festival recounts to animation analysis and programming (one of tumblr's recommended posts was the one where you made your own rasteriser, and I liked your attitude in what I've read so much that I'm gonna attempt to conquer my 3-year-long grudge against using opengl during college and do something similar now that I'm a bit older and have no deadlines :D).

But anyway, I have 2 questions (sorry if there's easily accessible answers, tumblr search is not helping): 1. During your animation nights, does the screen stay black while everyone watches their own video while you provide commentary? I haven't caught any yet but maybe someday! And 2. do you have any youtube channels or just one-off video essays that you like that also cover animation/directors? Or, even programming lol.

Sorry for the long ask have a nice day!

hiii! i'm very touched that you like my dorky eclectic blog <3

For the Animation Nights, I just stream the video over Twitch from local sources on my computer, typically by playing the video in mpv and recording it in OBS. This is obviously not ideal from a video quality perspective, but it's the easiest way to watch video in sync without making everyone download files in advance. Then we all chat in the Twitch chat box (in large part to crack stupid jokes, it's not that highbrow lmao). I've gotten away with it so far!

As for youtube channels, I can recommend...

anime production/history (i.e. sakuga fandom)

SteveM is likely the most sakuga-fan affiliated anituber. He makes long, well-researched and in-depth videos on anime history, usually themed around a particular director or studio.

Pyramid Inu might be my fave anituber - very thoughtful analysis of Gundam, obscure mecha anime and oldschool BL and similar topics. tremendously soothing voice too.

The Canipa Effect does excellent deep dives into the production of specific shows, both western and anime. I appreciate the respect he gives to the Korean animators of shows like AtlA in particular!

Sean Bires's 2013 presentation on sakuga is pretty foundational to this whole subcultural niche, and a great place to get an introduction to the major animator names to know and significant points in the history of anime. unfortunately a couple of the segments got slapped down by copyright but the rest holds up!

animation theory (for animators and aspirants)

I'm going to focus here on resources that are relevant to animation in general, and 2D animation. if I was going to list every Blender channel we'd be here all week :p

New Frame Plus is one of the best channels out there for game animation, describing in tightly edited videos how animation principles work in a game context and analysing the animation of various games. highly recommend

Videogame Animation Study is similar, examining the animation of specific games in detail

the 'twelve principles of animation' (defined by Disney's Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas) remain the standard approach to animation pedagogy; there are various videos on them, but Alan Becker (of Animator vs Animation) has quite a popular series. I haven't actually watched these but many people swear by them! Dermot O'Connor expands the list to 21. Note that some of the terminology can be a little inconsistent between different animators - c.f. 'secondary motion'...

Dong Chang is an animator at Studio NUT, who produces a lot of fantastic, succinct videos on standard techniques in the anime industry, timesheet notations, etc. etc. Studio Bulldog, a small anime studio, are a good complement; they focus more on douga than genga and are generally a bit more traditional.

programming

big topic here, I'm going to focus on game dev and tech art since that's my field. but also some general compsci stuff that's neat

SimonDev - graphics programmer with a bunch of AAA experience, fantastic explanations of advanced optimisations and some of the more counterintuitive aspects of rendering

Acerola - graphics programmer who makes very detailed guides to a variety of effects with a very rapid and funny 'guy that has seen monogatari' editing style. When he's good, he's really good. His video on water is probably the best one I've seen (though I can recommend a couple of others).

TodePond - the most charming, musical videos about recursion and cellular automata you've ever seen. less programming tutorial and more art in themselves.

Ben Eater - known for his breadboard computer series, a fantastic demonstration of how to go from logic gates up to the 6502 with actual hardware. worth watching just for how clean he puts the wires on his breadboards like goddamn man

Sebastian Lague, Useless Game Dev - both do 'coding adventure' style videos where they spend a few weeks on some project and then document it on Youtube, resulting in a huge library of videos about all sorts of fascinating techniques. great to dive into

Freya Holmér - creator of the 'shapes' library, makes videos on mathematical programming, with gorgeously animated vector graphics. Her video on splines is a particular treat.

There are definitely many more channels I can recommend on these subjects, but I'll need to dig into my history a bit - unfortunately I need to rush out right now, but hopefully that should be good to be getting going with!

[sleepylion]

What Makes Mari Okada So Special? | The Canipa Effect

[patronhunt]

Featured creator of the day ❤️ The Canipa Effect

[matt0044]

I like to at least credit AniTubers like Mother’s Basement and The Canipa Effect for highlighting these industry issues in various videos. Sadly, their words at best tend to be less about solutions and more a lot of, “Stuff’s messed up, y’all” with few calls for action.

As far as AniTwitter and wider AniTube goes, there is an attitude of shrugging and going, “What’re ya gonna do?” There’s a difference between not falling down the doomerism rabbit hole and just giving up basically.

Really, I could care less about what people like and prefer so long as they can recognize their hypocrisy at least. I’m not immune to overlooking myself but I often want to try and take a step back in the event.

Don’t like RWBY? Fine. Just don’t hold possible foibles of it and its production against it while sleeping on similar issues in other shows you either like or shrug off.

Man, there's an entire fucking industry of neckbeards on YouTube that devote themselves to malding about how every little aspect of RWBY is fundamentally cringe and boring, from the things that make the series' aesthetic what it is to bullshit like trying to to imply that villainous characters are in the moral right for attempted genocide.

Meanwhile, those same shit-slurping bottom-feeders will happily sing the praises of [insert shounen anime here] that does the exact same thing, often to a far greater extreme. They'll harp on and on about Bakugou or Sasuke or literally any other Edgy McFightyMan about how DeEP AnD muLTifacEteD he is... when they'd be called a Mary Sue in an instant if they were female, or even worse, made by a Western creator.

They'll gleefully gobble the mass-produced slop that they fill their trough with and gloat about how the overarching plot of the current popular thing is sooooo unbelievably timeless... when said plot is just the same bog-standard shit as in all shounen. The System is Perfect and Flawless, and anybody who dissents is a faceless mass of generic pure evil and is morally acceptable to murder/hospitalize en masse; any antagonists that abuse the rules of the establishment for their own gain are doubly Impure and Sinful for the crime of tainting the Perfect System. It doesn't take long for the original message to get buried as the authors of these works are put through the grinder to stretch out the story as much as possible to meet the lethally high standards of the manga industry, corporate overhead demanding that everything be smothered beneath marketable trends that the unwashed masses prefer to consume.

This shit isn't subtext, it's just borderline text - but point that out, and you get barraged by hordes of shrieking consoomers incensed that you dared to suggest anything being wrong with the current Popular Thing that they've decided is the next timeless work of art... at least until the next Popular Anime comes along and they toss it aside with the rest, eager to start consooming the next batch of fresh slop.

Wonder why that happens? Wonder what feature makes RWBY's cast so deeply offensive to this sea of interchangeable milquetoast 'reviewers' that makes blindly consooming this ultra-masculine crap their entire personality? Hmmmmmmm, I wonder.

[momtaku]

Do you think the AoT team for MAPPA has had more time to make the 2nd part of the season compared to the last part?

It's just that I see Jujutsu's and Chainsaw's animation and wonder why AoT didn't get the same treatment, so I came to the conclusion that maybe it was the time invested.

Don't get me wrong I am extremely happy that MAPPA was the only one to accept the work, wich I know is long and hard to do, to top it off, we recently knew that their worker's conditions are the best so it's understandable.

I'm going to point you to two videos if you'd like an explanation of why and how Attack on Titan is suffering quality-wise. The first is about the studio in general (which is also a bit of a love letter to my favorite director, Maseo Maruama) :

The Two Sides of Studio MAPPA | Anime Studio Spotlight

MAPPA studio began to change in 2017 when Maruama exited and Manabu Otsuka become president. While Maruama's focus was "make anime we love and are enthusiastic about", Otsuka's was simply to make more anime. This was triggered at least in part by the success of "Yuri on Ice", which suffered in quality yet was still a hit. If you want to jump to that, it's just after the 10 minute mark but at 16:06 the conversation shifts specifically to Attack on Titan and Jujutsu Kaisen. The td:dr is that mediocre anime is often good enough to make money. Rather than fight the evils of the current anime climate, MAPPA is trying to work with it, maybe even embrace it. They are doing too many shows, relying too much on outsourcing, working people too hard, and perpetuating and contributing to a climate that was already exploitative and unfair.

The second video is specific to the situation regarding Attack of Titan, why MAPPA took it, why problems persist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNTtS37Lzqc&t=6s

Both videos are by The Canipa Effect, which I highly recommend.

Thanks for the ask!!

[checkpointsafezone]

Breaking Down FGO Babylonia's Incredible Animation with The Canipa Effect

[spacetraum]

[exoburn]

Ufotable: Unlimited Digital Works | Anime Studio Spotlight

THIS is amazing! I never knew how much work Ufotable put into their works. I love their policy, “in-house till they get fucked!” Words to live by. 

[novadreii]

when a piece of media--particularly one that i was looking forward to--turns out to be ass, the very first thing i do is go on a youtube deep dive, preferably for an hour+ long video essay dissecting the production environment/schedule as well as producers and staff involved so as to squarely point the finger of blame at the right perps. whether it’s unrealistic budget/schedule, really bad hires, bad vision, etc.

this brings me immeasurable satisfaction. i need to know exactly what kind of human incompetence fucked up that badly or else i won’t know peace.

[canmom]

Animation Night 148: Aeni (애니)

Hi everyone! It’s that time of the week.

It’s been a good while since we covered Korean animation - or ‘aeni’, following the ‘anime’/‘donghua’ pattern - on Animation Night!

As you know, Korea has a lot of incredibly talented animators, but despite that the list of Korean animated films is fairly thin on the ground because South Korea is one of the major hotspots for animation outsourcing in the world, along with the Philippines. Nowadays, nearly all ‘American’ 2D animation is storyboarded in the States and then outsourced to South Korea for all the actual animation; occasionally the work gets passed further down the chain and ends up in North Korea as well.

Even so, there certainly are a number of original Korean animated films...

Korean animation was actually one of the first ‘animation from x country’ themes I wrote about on here, back on Animation Night 20. Back then, I talked about the impressive cyberpunk Sky Blue/Wonderful Days and the films of Lee Sung-Gang - the gentle fantasy of My Beautiful Girl Mari and the Miyazakiesque Yobi the Five-Tailed Fox. I also wrote a little about North Korea’s one major animation studio, SEK, and their war drama series Squirrel and Hedgehog. All those films are worth a look!

(A note on Sky Blue - much of the animation team that directed this movie would go on to create the impressive animation of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, American productions which allowed their Korean animators a much larger than usual degree of creative influence. More on them here and here from youtuber ‘The Canipa Effect’.)

Much later, on Animation Night 77 we had a look at one of the films of Yeon Sang-ho’s film Seoul Station, the animated zombie film which preceded his popular live action zombie film Train to Busan. But before he was a zombie guy, Yeon Sang-ho’s preferred mode was dark, violent animated dramas, beginning with The King of Pigs (돼지의 왕 Dwae-ji-ui wang, 2011). Which is one of our subjects for tonight...

Yeon Sang-ho was born at the end of the 70s, and found the ambition to direct animation while at school, collecting a lot of anime with particular inspiration from Miyazaki. He achieved his ambition towards the end of the 90s with short films like The Hell: Two Kinds of Life (지옥 두개 의 삶 Jiok Dugae ui Salm) in which two people are confronted with the afterlife by an angel, and Love Is Protein (사랑은 단백질), in which fast food is unexpectedly delivered by anthropomorphic animals. You can watch ten minutes of The Hell here on Youtube with engsubs, but the quality is kind of terrible! Still, we can see some of the techniques Sang-ho was using at this time - quite a bit of rotoscoping. Love Is Protein is also available on youtube, though sadly sans subtitles.

The King of Pigs sees the adult reunion of an impulsive murderer Kyung-min with his former classmate Jong-suk. In their childhood, the boys were the ‘pigs’ at the bottom of the class hierarchy - but their fortunes changed when a third boy Kim Chul joined the group, who became known as the ‘King of Pigs’. But something happened to him, which Kyung-min now intends to reveal...

Like Yeon Sang-ho’s other animated films, it uses a realist style inspired by Satoshi Kon and the manga of Minoru Furya, mixing traditional animation and cel-shaded CG that pushes against the limit of its tiny budget. Nevertheless, the film was noted for its impactful, uncompromising depictions of pain, cruelty, and class, and brought international attention to Sang-ho, sending him to film festivals and giving him the chance to make more films.

Sang-ho described the film as drawing from real experiences of sitting by and witnessing bullying at his school, and even put himself in the film as a silent background character. He’d continue this approach with his next film, thirty minute The Window, based on his time in mandatory military service; then his next full-length film was The Fake (사이비 Saibi) about a cult leader challenged by a social outcast. We’ll talk more about that one down the line...

Tonight, at about the last minute, I’ve managed to get my hands on a copy of The King of Pigs. This one fits the harsh, violent model of Korean films about class in common with... well, most of what gets internationally popular I suppose, works like those Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho, or Squid Game. So I’m quite looking forward to it.

Then, for a change of pace, we have Ghost Messenger.

This is perhaps aeni at its most anime, stylistically as well as being full of nods to anime from Haruhi to Bakemonogatari - but it’s also about Korean traditions around death and folklore. The project, created by a studio called STUDIO ANIMAL, began as a cancelled phone game, which goes some way to explaining why the narrative centres on a possessed phone! Since then, it evolved through several formats, initially an OVA and then a movie series.

The story concerns psychopomps called Ghost Messengers whose job is to fetch spirits who refuse to go to the world of the dead. One of these guys, Kang Lim ends up imprisoned in a ‘Soul Phone’ used to capture ghosts, and guess what, it ends up in the hands of a hoodie-wearing blue-haired boy with strong psychic powers. But this means Kang Lim and his new companion are well placed to face a new threat manifesting demons and destabilisng the whole thing.

I’m not entirely sure what to expect from Ghost Messenger, but the wiki article is endearingly enthusiastic and it seems like it’s been something of a long-term passion project for its creators. And it’s definitely got some pretty stylish designs coming from that Korean folklore angle.

And for another, very different dimension we have 소중한 날의 꿈, Sojoonghan Nalui Ggoom (2011) which translates literally as Dream of a Precious Day but in English has the slightly odd title Green Days: Dinosaur and I. This coming of age story calls to mind the films of Hosoda, with elaborate traditional animation on paper and a kagenashi look. It sounds like it was a hell of a project, with the production spanning 11 years under the co-direction of Ahn Jae-hoon and Han Hye-jin.

The story follows anxious high school girl Yi-rang, growing up at a gender-segregated school in a small town in the 1970s. She’s struggling with the pressures of life and competition with her peers, socially and in running, intimidated by the pretty and poetic transfer student Soo-min. But then enters a boy called Cheol-soo, an aspiring astronaut, and their awkward first romance begins to change her outlook. It seems to be a largely low-key, slice of life sort of film, with (once again) a realist approach to animation against detailed backgrounds depicting the 70s rural village.

This film seems to have generally flown under the radar, never gaining a large audience nor much international attention. But the Korea Times is full of praise, and it made it to the Annecy shortlist - so let’s give it a look in!

Animation Night 148 will be beginning at twitch.tv/canmom - going live now, films to start in about 20 minutes! The watch order will be Green Days, then King of Pigs and wrapping up with Ghost Messenger - hopefully that will balance the vibes without going out on a huge downer. Hope to see you there!

[animationdesk]

This is an awesome read - @cookiefication and the owner of @studioyotta Jake Ganz, along with other animators, talk about working online as animators, and getting started into the industry of online animation. 

If nothing else, as many have said before - post your animation online (tumblr, twitter), and keep going. It’ll be a beautiful tree before you know it. Enjoy! 

[maggcat]

This shows how little I actually knew about Studio Trigger!

Also this also shows why im losing my shit over Little Witch Academia

[zicygomar]

This isn’t exclusively about the horse girl anime, but it does explain how we got to where we are now. And what a wild ride it is.

[tamras-shieldmaiden]

This a very informative inside look to the series pre and production process. Bonus cameos from Janet Varney and Michaela Murphy.

[enki2]

I saw your response about anime style history and was absolutely fascinated. Do you have any reading/watching recommendations about the histories of different genres?

The WaveMotionCannon blog is a great resource for detailed analyses and primary sources about trends in the anime industry (including genre trends), but they go really deep and get into the weeds so I'd recommend some overviews first. I'm not really sure why, but general-audience books on the subject tend to be both broad and full of errors.

Luckily, Youtube has a lot of channels that specialize in a mix of overviews and deep dives:

Pause and Select comes out of the academic world (specifically, the anime-centric part of cultural studies) and does a lot of broad surveys of trends in genre, situated with cultural, political, and technical context. They used to do periodic book clubs, too, which was a great way to get exposed to academic sources (important because industry, academic, and fan histories of anime kind of sit in their own bubbles and rarely interact, in part because of language barriers; each can illuminate the others in interesting ways).

Mercury Falcon does both genre overviews and deep dives into particular franchises, with a focus on the 70s and 80s. This channel has an absolute wealth of information about early anime industry drama (particularly in the mecha space in the 70s) and early localization efforts. Kenny Lauderdale does some of the same stuff, but with a lighter tone -- he's more interested specifically in rarities and oddities, but when he dives into history, he will sometimes dig up information nobody else has, and he's got some insights into media preservation that are worth hearing.

KaizerBeamz's series "Kyoto Video" shines a spotlight on older, forgotten shows and as a result often provides an insight into the outer edges & branches of current genres (and a reminder of now-dead genres). He sometimes provides a lot of historical context, as well.

The Canipa Effect focuses on the contemporary scene, but dives into the histories of particular studios; where he really shines is explorations of the dynamics of the industry (something that doesn't get talked about very much even in Japan, and where translations of first-person accounts are rare). Canipa was important in spreading awareness of the working conditions of animators among the western anime fandom. Worth checking out alongside Archipel, a Japanese-language channel (with high-quality translations) that documents individuals working in the anime industry with little documentary featurettes about their life and work. Also check out the Japanese public television series Manben, in which manga artists (including veteran revolutionaries like Rumiko Takahashi) are filmed drawing their current projects and then discuss the footage with the host, veteran artist Urusawa Naoki. These deep dives sometimes provide critical insight into whole genres, because anime genres (much like genres in italian film) tend to develop out of imitators of single seminal properties, and so single creators or small groups of creators can wield huge amounts of influence.

STEVIEM's mini-documentaries on Studio 4C and Hideaki Anno are great, though most of his output is general anituber territory. I would also recommend Ygg Studios' Anime Alphabet series, and ErynCerise's Mahou Profile (a series of videos on the evolution of the magical girl genre).

In terms of books, I've found them pretty hit or miss. Some that I can recommend wholeheartedly are:

The Moe Manifesto, a collection of essays about the history of the concept of "moe" -- this is where I got a lot of information about the genesis of the bishojo style

Otaku: Japan's Database Animals, a work of cultural analysis by Azuma that dives into the intersection of anime fandom, the VN space, and online communication technologies and tries to produce a general model of the evolution of how people relate to media (with, IMO, mixed results)

The Notenki Memoirs is a history of the period at Gainax when Evangelion was being developed (and can be combined with Otaku no Video, Gainax's semi-fictionalized OVA retelling a mythic version of their origin; there is also a live action series called Blue Blazes about the early days of Gainax, which I haven't seen, and a documentary about the production of Evangelion 3.0+1.0 that gives interesting insight into Anno himself.)

Some that I recommend with caveats:

Anime Impact, a collection of anime reviews by english speakers (mostly people who were semi-famous online personalities about 10-15 years ago, and only some of whom actually know much about anime), is largely interesting because it's organized chronologically by the date of the show's release, so the early chapters dive into the history of forgotten shows

Robot Ghosts And Wired Dreams, a collection of essays (mostly about science fiction anime) by academics in cultural studies, contains a lot of interesting and compelling material (for instance, the first essay situates Japanese science fiction in the context of the irregular detective genre and connects it with complicated currents in nationalism, and a later essay talks about the semiotics of loan words in the context of Macross Plus and Patlabor) and a couple real duds (for instance, an essay trying to compare Evangelion with Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within wherein the author only watches two episodes of Evangelion and gets their plot confused, then tries and fails to fit it into a framework of second-wave-feminist critiques of transhumanism through a freudian lens)

The History of Hentai Manga is well-researched and detailed, but the author tries to cram in a lot of jokes that don't land, and it seems like there might have been an editorial mandate to put in as many images as possible (because this academic study of hentai manga is being published by a company that mostly publishes actual hentai); the translation is also pretty clunky. In his attempt to come off as breezy, the author uses particular phrases and constructions that are part of japanese fan-culture argot, and the translator does not localize these phrases and constructions (preferring to translate them literally) and also does not provide context for them, so they can be quite confusing to people who haven't come across them before (i.e., people who haven't seen a lot of fansubs of obscure otaku-focused shows from 20 years ago).

If I think of anything else, I'll post it later.

[wisehq]

@lacrow, @eldraftsman, and @coolbluerays catch up on the anime and discuss the latest short mission. Listen in as they talk about their thoughts on the abridged dub, Loid's apparent alcoholism, Yuri's VA, and Andre the Giant!

Also be sure to check out Roski's latest fan animation, featuring Damian Desmond! Links for that and "The Canipa Effect" video down below!

The Scion: https://youtu.be/3SWPzzi0Rqs

Animation Spotlight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib6REWYRbcQ

Spy x Family Abridged Episode 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A09BpNf_xqE