What the hell?
So, in this 3D CGI Anime about people fighting demons by using power suits that may also be demons, we have this episode, fully 2D Animated and stuffed to the gills with otaku gags and references, focused 100% on the bond between our main character, Kakeru, and his foster brother Kippei.
The meat of the episode is that Kippei has figured out that something is going on with Kakeru (building on him seeing the “indirect kiss” last episode, mostly suspecting that Kakeru has a new girlfriend) and is both curious and upset that Kakeru hasn’t told him anything. Kakeru, of course, needs to keep his hero work separate, in part because we’re told that Oni could intentionally target someone who becomes ‘in the know’. Most of the episode is dedicated to a mix of micro-vignettes of Kakeru with the team, random weird fantasies about their interactions, building a genuine bond between Kakeru and his brother from another mother, and slightly on the side building a sense of Kakeru’s bonds with the other members of the team, particularly Oka.
The weird thing is that after you get over the phase of repeatedly whispering “what the hell?” under your breath as you watch, it’s actually… kind of effective? At least more effective than I would have ever anticipated from “Shikizakura does a 2d-animated energetic comedy character building episode out of nowhere.” So, let’s break down the elements of this episode for a clue as to why.
First of all, the animation. The 2d animation is at the level where it’s probably not technically good, but it could have been at least decent with some extra polish, in a way that makes me sad that the show decided to go with CG for most of its material. I see why they chose to step out for this episode, though, and am just glad that they decided to do the whole episode one way (well, mostly) rather than blending like the random 2d characters in previous episodes.
In a sense, this shows the different strengths and weaknesses of 2d and 3d animation in an anime context. 3D, as Shikizakura normally goes with, is good at getting flowing, intricate movements. Barring cases of utterly incompetent CG like Ex-Arm, it should be radically easier to produce technically good action with 3d techniques. On the other hand, CG is significantly worse at both nuance, particularly showing subtle facial expressions of human characters in slower scenes, and at what I’ll broadly term as innovation. By that, I mean that because CG animation is dependent on animation-rigged models that are far more effort-intensive to produce than basic character designs, it becomes limited by what the models can really do. We’ve probably only had two fairly similar breeds of Oni and no real recognizable “boss monsters” that weren’t just larger palette swaps because it would be a lot of work to create an Oni rig for just a single scene. Now, once the rigged character model is created, a CG show can earn back a lot of that effort in how much easier it is to animate scenes, but there’s sort of a minimum practical use threshold for the overhead of a CG model to be “worth it”, which is why you get things like bit characters being randomly done in 2D: it was likely just cheaper to animate them the old fashioned way than to create a proper rig that then isn’t used much.
It’s not just that, though. This episode slides through a number of styles, including shots imitative of several other anime and even a SNES-ish visual novel segment while Kippei is fantasizing about what Kakeru attending the Bon Festival with Oka would have been like. Even in the more default bits, the characters this week make some really wild or even Super-Deformed expressions in addition to the subtle ones that do a lot of work. None of that is stuff you could really do with CG rigging, at least not easily, so if that’s the visual you want then you can’t be constrained by your tools.
From this, you can kind of see why the common use-cases for 3DCG animation are what they are. It makes a ton of sense for Knights of Sidonia, which is full of sterile environments and identical mechas, to use CG in order to get its space action across, since we’re spending more time with that than with subtle characters in natural environments. And, let’s face it, right behind Mecha action would be power suit action like Shikizakura where again we aren’t usually seeing the faces of the characters, their designs can be heavily recycled, and they need to move in a fast and effective way to do action. But, since this episode is so weird, despite being in a show where CGI was a good call, it does pretty much nothing CGI would be good for and lots of stuff that CGI would be weak at.
I’m not going to say, necessarily, that swapping to 2d animation for just one episode was the right call. It’s a little bit jarring (if not as much as the “This character doesn’t matter” Fudd Flag of having a traditionally animated individual in the middle of a 3D scene) and makes you question, with some of the speed and flow they’re able to get, if the whole thing might not have been better off in 2d. There’s quite a lot to be said for consistency. You can use 2d or you can use 3d or you can even blend them if you’re smart about how you handle the blending so that it doesn’t stand out as jarring, but in general you should have your take and stick with it. At the same time, though, it’s a good match for the contents of the episode, so I can see why it was done, and the creators do at least take full advantage of it to show us some cool ideas and good stuff.
So, how about the vignettes? Well, the scenes are all so short that it does kind of feel like Shikizakura is throwing everything it has at the wall just to see what sticks. On the other hand, most of these scenes don’t need to be longer to express what they want to express, and some of them are pretty decent. We’ve gone from no character to loud character, for instance, as Kaede takes a big sis/personal trainer role to Kakeru that’s misinterpreted (often by a jealous Haruko) as romantic. Kippei, who I commented before was kind of a mild homeopathic otaku has now come out swinging as a full nerd with interests and history. And on the more subtle side, Oka and Kakeru are given a couple (brief) quiet moments that do convey the essence of romantic tension at least as Kakeru is feeling for Oka (no real hint of the reverse, she’s a little weird and generally nice so you can’t really call what she does signals). All in all, this episode did a lot to make the Shikizakura cast, with the exception of Ryo not really appearing in this episode, feel a lot more like people. Even Ibara gets a couple good moments.
And now, how about Kippei. Kippei was a character I actually complained about before, and even aside from that he seemed like a kind of useless addition to the show. In general, it is a good idea to have characters have interests and even friends that don’t relate directly to the plot, at least not 100% of the time. This is more true in novels than in anime where the 30-minute run-time of episodes can force some degree of economy of detail, and it’s worth understanding that sometimes the setup of the world doesn’t make that terribly easy. To draw on another show I’m doing Seasonal Selection write-ups for, in 86 it makes sense that most of the characters don’t really know anybody or have well-defined hobbies outside what they are in relation to the battle with the Legion. And yet, despite this, because 86 is a great show, it does work some of that in. It’s surprisingly humanizing to know even basic things, like that Theo does art, or to see things like Lena enjoying pudding with her scientist friend.
All the same, depending on the nature of the work and the nature of the outside element, there’s a limit to how much effort you want to spend on things that simply aren’t germane. Just because it’s good for a major character to have friends and a life doesn’t mean we want to spend 45 minutes of a Kaiju movie on the buildup and logistics of a leading human attending a friend’s kid’s school play if ultimately nothing is going to come of it other than humanizing the lead. Humanizing the lead is important, but it is not so important that you can forget other important things like pacing and engagement. Some extra leeway can be given if the human bond expressed is particularly relevant and strong (Say, the overworked scientist having to make time for his own kid’s event despite unfolding situations) or if the diversion itself is interesting in its own right one way or another, but in general it’s important that the non-plot friends and hobbies of a lead don’t take over the story just because you feel like you need them. So when I looked at Kippei in the first few episodes, I was worried that his presence in the show was going to far outstrip how useful or interesting he was, especially as he just came off as a roommate who had some nerdy interests maybe.
It still might, but after this episode I’m a little more confident, since it both did work to give Kippei a voice and make him interesting to watch, and did a much better job of establishing what his bond with Kakeru is and is going to be like. Kippei is not just a school friend (in a school we never see) and roommate who can give an unknowing inspirational speech in episode 2, he’s Kakeru’s family, related by blood or no, and what they go through working out their problem in this episode and in the flashbacks to when they were kids helps enforce that. Especially when Kakeru lost his biological family in plot-related mayhem and is kind of being integrated into a new ‘family’ in terms of his team, I can now see Kippei providing an extremely valuable link to normalcy, as well as potentially serving as a wellspring of genre savvy since his interests have been better established.
At the very least, I’m willing to give this episode the benefit of the doubt, and the show the same courtesy going forward. At least as a reviewer, I try not to give an absolute judgment on anything until the fat lady sings; just because a show starts bad doesn’t mean it fails to pick itself up (I would have given up on Scarlet Nexus as a casual watcher well before it started to straighten out and fly right) and just because a show starts with promise doesn’t mean it doesn’t squander that over its run. At some point, particularly if a show approaches the poles, you can reach the stage where you either trust or fundamentally distrust the creators, but until the end it’s hard to say that something is absolutely a good thing or a bad one.
It’s that matter of trust that has me wavering on Shikizakura. It has some deep, basic mistakes that it’s made, but on the other hand it does seem to work to mend those initial faults. I don’t really get the sense that the creators are particularly skilled at their craft, but neither do I feel like they’re uncaring or confidently off base. Rather, what I’ve seen so far from Shikizakura feels, in a word, amateurish. Oddly (given that they’re all industry newcomers) not the voice acting, but most of the other constructive elements feel like they’re coming from a source that technically knows what to do but just hasn’t developed the unconscious instincts on how to do it well. Because of this, I don’t know if I should believe in an improving or declining future for Shikizakura.
And you know what? That’s alright, and I do feel like it’s not wrong to favor hope in this circumstance. To be new or amateurish at something is possibly the most forgivable fault, because it shows that there’s room and potential to grow. This is a common idea in gaming, where it’s said that there’s a difference between a ‘newb’ and a ‘noob’. Both have poor skills, but a newb (short for newbie, or newcomer) is willing and able to learn, hampered only by a lack of experience they can gain while a noob (same etymology, but after n00b, to use the old 1337) is someone without the will or inclination to improve, who will be making newb mistakes forever. In the same way, I mentioned that the creators of Shikizakura don’t seem to be uncaring or confidently wrong, and those are much deeper faults. If the creators just don’t care, nothing good will come of it, because the poor results are perfectly acceptable to the individual getting them. If they’re confident in their wrongness, nothing good will come of it because the source of the mistakes is resolved to continue making said mistakes in the belief that they’re right. Not every total failure stems from those attitudes, but far more do than come purely from a lack of experience.
A little research says that in addition to the voice actors all having no prior anime credits, the resumes of the rest of the staff are also quite sparse. The Directors, Art Director, Sound Director, and Director of Photography all have between zero and two other credits, while the man credited with Series Composition has a little more work but only one other credit in that particular exercise. And you know what? All things considered, they’ve done a very fair job. Even though I guessed that the creative team for Shikizakrua didn’t have a lot of experience, all things considered they’re not handling the effort that poorly, and I was actually quite surprised on looking it up that there wasn’t really a more veteran member or two of the team to be found; I thought at most that maybe the director or the writer was somewhat new, not that they’d basically all be relatively green.
Viewing Shikizakrua in that light, as an early or experimental outing, even a first outing for a lot of the creative team? It’s actually holding up fairly well. Time will tell if that continues as effectively.