#mini animals

[what-even-is-sleep]

Better pictures (and perhaps a re-make) coming sometime!! So happy this duck ring worked out

[markscherz]

You might know this tiny frog.

This is Mini mum (photo by Andolalao Rakotoarison), a species I had the pleasure to name—together with a team of amazing colleagues—back in 2019.

That was the start of a fascination with the process and consequences of miniaturisation for vertebrates. How the hell does this tiny frog manage to fit all of its vital organs—more or less all the same senses and organs that we have—into a package the size of a tic-tac‽ Why and how has it evolved to be so small? And why don't we get frogs that are much smaller?

Well, I just secured 1.5 MILLION Euros (!!!) in the form of a European Research Commission Starting Grant, to answer these and other related questions in the genomes of Mini frogs and other miniaturised vertebrates.

Because it turns out, there are *lots* of miniaturised vertebrates, and they push the boundaries of how small we think it is possible for a vertebrate to be! Here is a little graphic of some of them, scaled to a BIC ballpoint pen.

The project is called GEMINI: The Genomics of Miniaturisation in Vertebrates! You can read more about it on my website here, and in the press release, here!

[swampjawn]

Time to talk an unnecessary amount about floors!

Episode 6 of Dungeon Meshi was produced in collaboration with a smaller studio, Enishiya - and it went way harder than I expected, for being made up of two relatively simple and self contained stories focusing on one character each.

And you can really see how those extra resources meant the animators could give full focus to both halves of the episode. Let's take a look at one piece that stole the show.

The first half was handled primarily by episode director/storyboard artist Keita Nagahara and co-animation director Hirotoshi (or Hiroaki? [1]) Arai. It's actually kinda insane how much of this section can be attributed to these two.

But the real star of the show is the second half, Chilchuck vs the mimic, led by co-animation director Toya Ooshima in his first animation director role for TV anime!

And the biggest aspect that knocked my dang boots off was something that's very consistent with Ooshima's style: background animation!

By animating the backgrounds rather than using painted still images, Ooshima and the team of other similarly skilled animators are able to create these beautiful dynamic camera movements that wouldn't be possible otherwise. Like these cuts by Takeshi Maenami where the camera becomes an expressive part of the scene, zipping forward and backward, and tilting to emphasize the speed of this murderous hermit crab. (Maenami's style is also very recognizable here - snappy timing and quick camera movements)

Or this cut by the incredible Kaito Tomioka which cleverly combines a traditional background for the walls with a fully animated floor. The level of detail in these tiles is just completely insane, and used to great effect with this wide, diagonal angle, and the way the camera tentatively drifts forward before reversing direction, and the tiles blur out as it speeds up.

I don't think I'm the only one caught off guard by how much they full-assed this little side story, but it was a pleasant surprise!

I broke down the entire episode in this video here. A lot of research went into this one, and I think it's the best one of these videos I've made so far, so if you're at all interested in more of this type of analysis in video form, I would really appreciate it if you checked it out, or re-blogged this post! Thanks

[1] It's listed as Hirotoshi on Anime News Network, but Hiroaki on a key frame that Studio Trigger shared on Twitter, so I'm not sure which one is wrong.

[brainbesplit]

every time i see a namari and kiki interaction from daydream hour namari’s like “those leg harness things for daggers that some tall-men wear make me a little horny i won’t lie” and then kiki’s like “i’m wearing six of those right now, namari, how about that” and lifts up her pants to reveal six dagger harness leg things and shes like “does this work for you namari.” Like what the fuck man what the FUCK

[stickerskingdom]

47 cartoon ghost mini hamster panda stickers

https://stickerskingdom.etsy.com/listing/1319840095

[lackadaisycats]

Premiering tomorrow, May 24th, 11am PT / 2pm ET -

Lackadaisy Season 1 kicks off with one of the three promised Mini Episodes - a look back at Lackadaisy's early days.

Lackadaisy Ingenue

[apparently-artless]

⚛》 NATSUME YUUJINCHOU S07E01 ◆ MINI SENSEI 《⚛

[georgiedoodles]

Shit post for shiggles.

[gigi-chococat]

after unearthing the mc life fans here I wonder if there's deltarune fans out here in 2024 LMAO - but here's a little animation I did to practice my compositing although I keep accidentally seeing kris' mouth as their nose oops

[rinibayphoto]

[asiriyep]

Kakashi Week 2024.

Day 7: Stillness.

@kakashiweek

[swampjawn]

Look Back VS AI Art

This is a real frame from Look Back (2024).

You might assume this made it into the final movie because of its director Kiyotaka Oshiyama (押山清高) doing HALF the key animation for the film and only fully finishing it A WEEK before it's festival debut.

And well, you might be partially right about that. But more importantly, this is the movie embodying its themes through its unconventional production process and the very lines on the screen!

In an age of digital tools, CGI, AI, and other combinations of letters ending in I, Look Back is an ode to art and the labor that goes into it, no matter how tedious or imperfect.

Every thought, every little decision, every stroke made by a person puts a little piece of that person onto the screen, and the imperfections that come from that process can be beautiful in the sense that they're evidence of the thoughts and process that went into creating an image. So in keeping with the plot of the movie itself, Oshiyama made a point of leaving those remnants - lines that are scratchy, overlapping, or half-erased, and normally would have been cleaned up in 2nd key animation (第二原画).

Ayumu Fujino has a tight grip on how she expresses herself, having this image to uphold as the perfect prodigy girl. She's afraid to let people see too much of her, lest that perfect image be shattered.

But at times the mask does slip, like this moment of sheer panic after she accidentally drops what is really an extremely rude manga strip under her rival's door by accident.

And it's these moments when that rough imperfection shines through the most! So this breakdown of polish in the art functions simultaneously as both a connection to the human labor that went into creating it, AND an impressionistic representation of Fujino's mental state within the world of the movie.

Not only are the edges of her backpack visible through her arm, her face even disappears completely, replaced by just the roughly sketched dividing lines that indicate the position of her eyes. At least personally, I never would have noticed this fully unfinished frame at full speed because the shot is just so well-executed! The framing is dramatic with Fujino surrounded by these mountains of sketchbooks in the foreground, and the motion is so believable, her posture - hunched over to the side to support the weight of the bag while maneuvering around the books, and the way her legs twirl around each other frantically, rotating this way and that.

But more importantly, this is a frame that an AI program would never draw, because it has no REASON to. There's no thought process, no decisions being made about how to express a feeling. Even if you did train an AI specifically to mimic these human imperfections, in Oshiyama's words, "It would just be a design. It would be a fake. The lines have meaning because they were drawn by humans. […] There's value in that." (MANTANWEB)

This is an adapted excerpt from this video! Go watch it or I'll dox you.

[bonus-links]

a collection of birthday requests from the $5 tier on patreon! realized I never posted these here

[doublxpresso]

Toward new memories

(link click audiodrama fan animation)

[akimbod]

Maowmaow

[lackadaisycats]

A reenactment. During the Lackadaisy crew cocktail mixer earlier this summer, Zib's VA tried grits for the first time while Wick's VA looked on. The facial expressions said it all. Couldn't resist trying to recapture it.

-------------------------

ALSO,

The Lackadaisy Season 1 BackerKit ends shortly!

If you're interested in supporting more Lackadaisy animation, and getting some books, plushes, pins, and a card game in return, this is the way to do it!