Development Heaven / Anime & Manga

• The dubs of Ace Attorney (2016) and Sakura Wars the Animation had their ADR directors and scriptwriters do optional research playing the games.

• Blade of the Immortal mangaka Hiroaki Samura personally redrew many pages so that the English-language release could be presented in the left-to-right English reading order without "flipping" the pages (i.e. mirroring them horizontally, a then-common practice which tends to cause Bad Export for You, especially with text). The series ultimately ran for 30 volumes this way.

• Katsuhiro Otomo. AKIRA is obsessively, painstakingly detailed like you wouldn't believe, and is known as the epic manga for a reason. The film is this way too.

• ARIA. The detail that goes into the buildings, geography, and events is truly staggering. Also, the anime production team traveled to Venice every time they started a new season—even for the one episode OVA! And if that weren't enough, there's also a large amount of high-quality music by names like Eri Kawai, Senoo and Choro Club.

• Birdy the Mighty. Especially the Decode series, which produced two series of stylish, fluid animation and engaging, sympathetic characters despite poor sales.

• Bocchi the Rock! could have been a typical 'cute girls doing cute things' series, but the animators went the extra mile. It makes frequent use of Medium Blending, utilizing CGI, stop-motion, and even live-action for gags. The music-playing scenes also look very well-animated and realistic, almost as if they were rotoscoped. As for Bocchi's scream in episode 4? That wasn't edited - it was entirely natural, courtesy of Yoshino Aoyama.

• The manga version of Genshiken features very intricate and detailed backgrounds, and references to real media to go with the otaku theme of the series. Example: "The Champ of Fighters" = The King of Fighters.

• Composer and songwriter Yuki Kajiura spent ten days in Peru as she prepared to write the music for El Cazador de la Bruja.

• The music of Cowboy Bebop, rather than going for the J-Pop music that's the norm for such anime, elected to go for classic Jazz performed by composer Yoko Kanno and her band the Seatbelts. If you really want to be impressed, consider the fact that Jazz is not a popular art form in Japan (though Tokyo does currently have a fast-growing jazz scene, well worth checking out).
  • The anime film Metropolis (2001), based off an Osamu Tezuka manga (which was itself based loosely off a film by Fritz Lang), uses the same music with a very similar impact.
  • Yoko Kanno already had some OST fame for a very different sound that was and continued to be in demand for sci-fi works, or 20 Minutes into the Future settings like Cowboy Bebop. The Seatbelts was a passion project of hers, and Cowboy Bebop distinguished itself by choosing that style.

• The Digimon Anime is already well-known for how deep its story went in terms of the complexity. However, the series was a game-changer in terms of how it was presented in the United States. It was changed only in superficial ways. The characters may have gotten names that were slightly Americanized, but the culture, location, story, and character dynamics were kept. Even each story's darker elements were kept, allowing for more mature ideas. As if it a sign to go out in a blaze of glory, with Fox Kids collapsing, it came to a head in Digimon Tamers, where only superficial violence (i.e. blood, and more explicit suggestions of violence) was cut. The rest was completely ignored and let through; meaning that we actually had Digimon being Killed Off for Real, Cosmic Horror Story concepts, philosophy, mature drama, personal openness, more-than-friendship concepts, politics, religion, and real computer and physical science being included in what others would consider just a silly monster-fight show that was made for children!

• This video demonstrates the amount of detail the animators of Durarara!! went through in order to ensure that every detail of their fictional Ikebukuro would mimic almost every aspect of its Real Life counterpart.

• Gunsmith Cats actually sent its entire animation studio to Chicago to make sure they got the setting right, and instead of using stock gun noises they used recordings of each gun being used that they made themselves.

• In the infamous Endless Eight episodes of the second season of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, each episode is animated from scratch, despite the plot and dialogue of each being nearly identical. The voice actors even claim that they did eight recordings.
  • The first season was packed with pain-staking effort, including valid C++ code, SQL commands used in a way that no one can understand anyway, photo accurate recreations of the setting, and tiny details hinting toward coming (that is to say previous) episodes.
  • Also, the novels. There's no other reason (well, except Author Appeal) to put explanations and diagrams of college-level math.
  • The start-up of the old Windows 95 computer in alternate-world Nagato's classroom during the Disappearance movie as well. They could have simply made it a generic affair, but it was done accurately from start to finish, correct opening sound, GUI and all included.

• For the anime adaptation of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, Science SARU didn't have legal permission to use footage from Future Boy Conan in the first episode. They got around this by painstakingly recreating scenes from Conan from scratch; not only did they trace the scenes frame by frame and recolor them, but they even recreated the music and sound effects.

• Negima! Magister Negi Magi: The Omake from the compiled volumes show just how much work Ken Akamatsu put into the backgrounds alone, even enormous hand-drawn crowd scenes. This includes creating a fully-rendered CG tower for the Kyoto arc, even though it only appears a few times in the extreme background. And the surprisingly good Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit for the spells, complete with accurate mythological references. The bonus material includes many a Wall of Text explaining the languages and mythological beings that are mentioned. There's also a metric buttload of Shout Outs, including cameos by various anime and Video Game characters in the aforementioned background scenes. He's very thorough, way more so than was necessary.

• The love and effort Eiichiro Oda pours into each One Piece chapter is astounding. With all the little details in both the art and storytelling, it's easy to see that he loves writing manga.

• For the Pokémon movies, the director Kunihiko Yuyama travels the world in order to capture the feel of the Fantasy Counterpart Cultures Ash and co. will visit. For Pokémon Heroes' Altomare, the director visited Venice. In Pokémon: Lucario and the Mystery of Mew, he toured castles in Germany. For Pokémon: The Rise of Darkrai, he visited Barcelona, Spain. For Pokémon: Giratina and the Sky Warrior, he visited the fjords of Norway. For Pokémon: Arceus and the Jewel of Life, he visited temples in Greece. For Pokémon: Zoroark: Master of Illusions, he visited the Netherlands.

• Red Line: It took seven years of hand-drawn animation to make this movie.

• It may be a huge victim of Once Original, Now Common, but the effort that went into making Science Ninja Team Gatchaman has to be seen to be to be believed.

• When Mamoru Oshii set out to do The Sky Crawlers, he and his crew traveled to Ireland and Poland where the movie is set to photograph not only the scenery or buildings but also radiators, electric sockets and window frames to get everything to look authentic.

• Sound of the Sky takes place in the fictional town of Seize, which is shot by shot the real Spanish town of Cuenca. Also, to voice a German-speaking character in the show, they used a voice actress who was raised in Austria and spoke fluent German.

• SSSS.GRIDMAN: Despite being rendered in CGI, all the kaiju move and act like tokusatsu giant monsters, that is, people in rubber suits. The fights themselves are rendered and shot like they're being filmed in a sound stage. This carries over to DYNAZENON.

• Vinland Saga. Not only did the author make it because it was always his dream to create a kickass Shonen series, but he also had a deep fascination with the Vikings and wanted to make something that portrayed them as they were, more than just killers and thugs. He even went on a trip to Iceland to research Viking Culture in greater detail, to give his artwork that authentic tinge, and it shows.

• The half-hour film Voices of a Distant Star was created almost entirely by Makoto Shinkai. The only thing he didn't do by himself was the voice acting on the commercial release.

• Animation-wise, the entire anime genre is keeping traditional animation alive. In a world where it is a dying breed and CGI animation is becoming more and more common, Japanese animators are notorious for sticking to their guns and still using traditional animation. There's a few Japanese CGI films and series, but most of the time they're experimental works and never intended for being used for replacing traditional animation as a whole.
  • In Japan, CGI animation is normally restricted for animating non-living stuff, like vehicles, ships, robots, etc. And sometimes, some animation studios like Sunrise are notorious for never using CGI in some series, like Gundam, when the titular machines are always being traditionally animated and never being rendered in CGI, with some few exceptions.
  • On the other hand, Studio Nue (the owners of the Macross franchise) are notorious for using CGI for many of their later series, like Macross Frontier, Genesis of Aquarion and Aquarion Evol, but only for the robots.
  • Yet other studios Take a Third Option, by going full CGI but making it look hand-drawn. It's easy and cheap to entirely use CGI that clearly looks computer-rendered, and often not of good quality, but when Japanese studios do it, there is a strong tendency to mimic the hand-drawn look that makes anime so unique (which is not easy). An example would be the Animated Adaptation of Arpeggio of Blue Steel, which is entirely done with CGI, but apart from the unusual fluidity of movements looks as hand-drawn as other works, just a little cleaner.
  • That's not to say studios don't embrace what 3DCG has to offer. Take for example Sanzigen Animation; right down to the studio name,^note Sanzigen = San Jigen (Third Dimension) they're committed to making series in fully rendered 3D, with video game cutscene quality.
  • Making a CG show look hand-drawn is sort of standard for anime, but bringing characters into fully 3D space takes arguably a lot more effort. Stand by Me Doraemon, the first Doraemon film to use a 3D style, goes above and beyond to look almost Pixar-like in quality and attention to detail, in addition to having a plot that tugs at any Doraemon fan's heartstrings. It all paid off, becoming the highest-grossing film of the franchise to date (and for a franchise as popular as Doraemon in its home country, that says a lot). It’s no wonder that the director would later move on to do Lupin III: The First.
  • The season 2 opener for Osomatsu-san has the brothers try out different animation genres and techniques to figure out the best way to become a "proper" series. Jyushimatsu is the only one to come back rendered in CG— but rather than make a cheap model and barely animate it, the team uses film quality, high framerate, expertly rendered, smooth CG to make his gag work. And they didn't even cel shade him to match style! Did they have to put that much in for a 1-minute gag? No, but if he had to exhibit the technique as "proper", they needed to make it live up to the title.

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