Orange started the season with some incredible direction and animation, it went above and beyond the necessary to try and create the atmosphere needed to tell it's story. Recently that has gone to be replaced with derp faces and bland storyboarding.So what happened?And is it down to time or budget?Now honestly we can't truly answer that question, as no company is going to release the budget they had available and how they spent it during a production, and we can't truly establish whether they didn't properly schedule time and whether that led to rushed key animation, but what we can do is take a gander at the use of staff and outsourcing for the animation over the season and note any changes that may affect the overall product.Luckily through my expert skills of spotting the difference and drawing out obscure kanji within the closest approximation that google translate fixes it I have done just that, if not as accurately as possible but with enough information to get a view on things.My findings are as so; RoleEp 01Ep 02Ep 03Ep 04Ep 05Ep 06Ep 07Ep 08Ep 09Chief Animation Directors111222222Key Animation Directors292123274Key Animation Co-Directors071111221Key Animators32332827182730239Key Animation Outsourced Studios434430683Korean Key Animators001000038Inbetween Animation Inspectors313122161Inbetween Animators24417045000Inbetween Animation Studios632833662*Accidently threw Key animation and 2nd key animation folks together, but I don't think it changes the outlook enough to amend. What this showsWell the information gathered from this shows a few spikes in places with different staff and ways of outsourcing. People noticed a dip in quality from episode 8 with 7 also showing signs here and there, while episode 9 was lambasted by r/anime for it's shoddy animation.Spikes of interest.Episode 02Episode 2 needed 16 key animation directors to manage all the frames, this tells a sign that a lot of frames had to be checked and ready in a very short space of time, this could be the start of a chain of events to put the team off schedule.Episode 4From episode 4 the team begins to use 2 chief animation directors rather than 1, this would go against the budget being the issue idea as that role is a cost and could be a sign that 1 person wouldn't be enough to manage to many different avenues of key frames that would be needed to get the work done of time.Episode 5There is a sudden drop in key animators and one less studio being outsourced to, this would likely mean they have selected animators in house to do more animation for this episode or the outsourced studio is doing more. This episode was directed by Nobuke Kimura who directed episodes of Showa Rakugo Shinju and Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 among others. The key animation direction was handled by Saburo Takada and Ho Ryeol Park who are both known more for Key animation with Takada having a few mentions of doing Animation Directing.Episode 5 was of good quality with background animation in keeping with earlier episodes so I lean towards it being in house key animators been given more workload.Episode 6This is the only episode to not use a single studio for outsourcing so it seems a lot of the work for this episode was done in house. In fact episode 6 is currently the only episode to feature returning staff in Scenario, Episode Director and Animation Director at once. With Taku Yamada taking up [his] first episode directing role on Orange with episode 3 & 6, being in production advancement prior to that with TMS Studios.With that in mind it would appear that Episode 6 being a big moment in the show was done mainly in house.Episode 7This is where the cracks begin to emerge, as 6 studios are drafted in to help with key animation it would seem that the previous two episodes meant that there wasn't enough time to work on the next set of episodes so a lot more outsourcing was needed. Now the key point here is time but making up for that time costs money and it may have negatively impacted the budget.Episode 9To establish that point we have episode 9, at this point key animation has been heavily outsourced since episode 7 and more and more is starting to be moved over to Korea, with episode 9 using 8 freelancers from Korea plus 2 Korean Studios. This is important to note because a big part of outsourcing to Korea is that it is cheaper. So it does begin to point to a budgetary issue as they need to use cheaper studios, resulting in cheaper work.Where did this all stem from?Well I'm going to throw out a guess at this one, but I think it may fall on director Hiroshi Hamasaki known for his direction of Steins;Gate and Technolyze. He generally seems to look to create a new style in each of his shows and I think he may have bit off more than he can chew on this project.The key aspect of the direction in Orange is that when Hamasaki wants the scene to feel alive everything is moving, background character interact with the scene and have individual animations that aren't just a repeated cycle. This takes key animation time, and if we look at the staff brought on for episode 2, it could be that the effect Hamasaki was going for was too time consuming and really halted production early on. It also seems to have been removed from the latest batch of episode that were more heavily outsourced.Will the animation continue to slip?Well hopefully not, the fact that more outsourcing has gone on with the latest batch of episodes could be indicative of the in house team working hard on the final few of episodes, with 3 more episodes to go hopefully we will see that touch of Hamasaki flair return in the next one, if not the one after.It will be interesting to see how it plays out, and I really appreciate the effort put in to the direction to this show in the early episodes but I think this production has shown it is not time viable for a weekly tv series and would be more apt to films.I hope you enjoyed reading this, I know I used a lot of conjecture and my accuracy isn't to be fully trusted but I think it makes for an interesting insight into the production of a show that noticeably slips. http://ift.tt/2bxhYZr
