FEATURE: How Anime Gets Animated
How did your favorite anime get created? It’s a pretty big question that has an equally big answer. Japanese animation has a highly unique and specific workflow from start to finish and there’s very few comprehensive explanations of that workflow available in English. That’s where this article series comes in!
Welcome to How Is Anime Made? a series of articles that will guide you through the entire lifespan of an anime, from the initial seed of an idea to watching it here on Crunchyroll. This series is organized into six articles that break up the creation of anime into broad concepts.
After tackling anime pre-production and the first stages of producing an anime, today we’re detailing the actual animation process! This article owes a great deal to industry professional Blou, who provided a huge amount of information to us. Blou has worked on numerous professional anime productions, and you can check out Blou’s work with Studio Ton Ton here!
In this article we will be taking you through the production of a single episode of anime. We will explore the long journey a single frame of animation goes through, from the most basic sketches on the storyboard to the fully colored finished frame that’s ready for post-production. Let’s begin our journey with…
Assigning Anime Cuts
This is definitely what this process looks like (via Hayate the Combat Butler)
As with everything else, the animation process begins with a planning stage. Beginning with the approvals of a storyboard (or e-conte), in this stage the production staff divides an episode of anime into scenes which themselves are divided into a number of “cuts.” If an episode of anime is a chapter of a book, you can think of a scene as a paragraph and a cut as a sentence — each scene is a sequence of uninterrupted narrative and each cut is a small unit of action within that scene. If the production schedule and the schedules of the individual animators allows, scenes are cut for coherence: it’s ideal for the same animator to handle a complete set of actions so that there is visual continuity.
This assignment process of an anime begins once an episode’s e-conte have been approved. A production assistant will prepare an offer that contains the episode e-conte, the settei (model sheets for characters, objects, etc. that animators use as drawing references), timelines and deadlines, and pay rates and begin reaching out to animators to fill out assignments for every cut. All of these assignments are recorded in a spreadsheet called a warifuri hyou (which roughly translates to “allocation table”).
Depiction of the sorts of spreadsheets used by production assistants in SHIROBAKO (image via Sentai Filmworks)
As an example, let’s take a recent episode of anime: episode 11 of VINLAND SAGA Season 2. Shingo Uchida (previously worked on series like Attack on Titan; Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood) created the e-conte for this episode. Once those were approved, a production assistant at MAPPA will have prepared an offer including those e-conte, all of the necessary settei including the character designs by Takahiko Abiru (TRIGUN STAMPEDE; Hunter x Hunter) and sent it to one of the numerous animators that worked on the episode like Sho Hirano (Mob Psycho 100 III; Dr. STONE).
After an animator accepts an offer, there is usually a meeting between the animator and the episode director where they go over the cuts in question, specific requests for the cuts, and how the cuts fit into the wider episode of an anime.
From there this animation workflow begins:
Let’s explore each of these steps!
Anime Layout: Initial Rough Animation
Layouts give a rough indicator of all elements of a shot (via Hayate the Combat Butler)
The first stage of a finished animation cut is layout — a first draft of the overall composition of the shot. Layouts in anime take the rudimentary visual information of the e-conte and expand it into rough versions of the animation and backgrounds as well as providing camera and compositing instructions and a timesheet (a document that helps the rest of the animation team understand the timing of each frame as well as when and where additional frames of animation are needed).
The goal of a layout in anime is to break down a cut into its most basic components. You can think of any given frame of animation as a set of layers stacked on top of one another: at the bottom is the painted background, and then each animated element (characters, objects… anything that moves or needs to be interacted with) is stacked on top of the background and one another. The layout should provide a very rough version of what exists on each of these layers which will get redrawn and refined later in the process.
Many of the drawings in the upper layers will be rough first versions of key frames, or drawings that indicate the beginning and end of a specific motion. In-between frames will be drawn and added in between the key frames later to make the action smoother, but key frames alone should convey the essential visual information for a complete set of motions.
Once an animator has finished animating their cut, they send it on to be checked by several people, the first of which is the Animation Director (or sakkan) — the person in charge of supervising the overall quality of the animation — who will give a number of revisions to the animation before it moves on to the next steps of animation refinement and background art. The sakkan’s work is checked by the Chief Animation Director (or sousakkan).
The other person who will check the layout cut is the Anime Episode Director (or enshutsu) — the person in charge of the overall creative production of the episode in question. This check is usually focused on the more technical aspects of the cut like camera movement. Enshutsu checks are just as important as the sakkan checks!
Returning to our example of VINLAND SAGA Season 2, Hirano works on the layout for the assigned cut based on Uchida’s e-conte. Hirano’s work is then checked by one of the four sakkan for episode 11 — either Fumihide Sai (Fairy Tail; Blood Blockade Battlefront), Mutsuaki Murata (Vivy -Fluorite Eye’s Song-; Golden Kamuy) Saki Nishihara (A Couple of Cuckoos; MEGALOBOX) , or… wait, Sho Hirano?! That’s right, sakkan can (and often do) contribute their own animation work!
Genga
This is what genga looks like! (via SHIROBAKO the Movie)
The next step in the process is where animators take the sakkan’s layout revisions and instructions and draw the genga. Genga literally translates to “original drawings,” and is often translated as “key frames,” but (as Blou explained to me), it’s a bit more nuanced and complicated than that. A more helpful (if esoteric) translation might be tie-down, a term used in western animation to indicate a cleaned up version of a roughly drawn frame. In the layout phase, the drawn frames are sometimes referred to as rough genga, but genga should bring to mind an image that has linework far more in line with what you would see in the finished animation than the rough sketchiness of the layout.
Ideally, the artist who handled a layout cut will handle that same cut in the genga stage, but that is becoming more and more difficult as the anime industry evolves. When a new animator takes over a layout cut, that is called 2nd key animation or nigen (“ni” coming from the Japanese word for 2 and “gen” coming from “genga”). Like the layout, the genga must be checked, corrected, and revised.
Anime Background Art
One of my personal favorite anime background paintings (via Kyousougiga)
Simultaneous to the genga stage, the layout is distributed to the background artist after the first sakkan check, who then begins painting the scenery that will serve as a backdrop for each cut. Each image is completely static (with some exceptions made with the help of computer graphics), so the background art is able to contain far more detail than the animated frames placed on top of it.
The background art of an anime is overseen by the Art Director (bijutsu kantoku), who oversees a team of background artists. These backgrounds go through their own rounds of revision between the Art Director and their team. In our VINLAND SAGA Season 2 example, the series bijutsu kantoku Yusuke Takeda (Chainsaw Man; Sword Art Online) will have overseen this process along with the work of the individual background artists.
Anime In-Betweens, Coloring, and Further Refinement
An artist digitally paints a frame of animation in the shiage stage (via Paranoia Agent)
Once the genga are finalized, they are sent on to douga. This step of the process is when a set of artists take the genga frames and trace them by hand so that the lines are as crisp and clean as possible. In addition, this step also includes animating in-between frames. After douga, the frames are then ready for shiage—where they are digitally colored. Both of these steps, as with the above steps, involve their own managers and approval processes.
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Once a frame is painted in the shiage step, it is ready to be sent along for post-production processing and editing. Animation is a process that is just as much about effort as it is about artistry. There’s a huge amount of work involved in bringing a single cut within an anime to life. Multiply that by the number of cuts within each scene, scenes within each episode, and episodes within the anime, and you’ll begin to see the absolutely astonishing amount of work that goes into the creation of some of your favorite series.
This is far from the end of the production process, however! Next time we’ll be exploring how anime gets its sound, from voice acting to music. Join us tomorrow to learn about anime audio!
Glossary of terms we’ve learned about animating an anime:
- Anime Scene: A segment of continuous narrative within an episode.
- Anime Cut: A segment of continuous action within a scene.
- Warifuri Hyou: A spreadsheet used by the anime production staff to keep track of animators and their assigned cuts.
- Anime Layout: The first draft of a finished cut; contains rough sketches of each layer of animation, camera and compositing instructions, and a timing sheet.
- Timing Sheet: A document that indicates the timing of each frame and when and where added frames are needed.
- Key Frames: Frames of animation that represent the start and end point of an action. Think of these as the most basic necessary bones of finished animation.
- In-Between Frames: Frames of animation added between key frames to make action appear smooth and continuous.
- Genga: An animation frame that tightens up the rough drawings in the layout. Akin to the Western term “tie-down.”
- 2nd Key Animation (nigen): This usually refers to when a new animator is brought in to handle genga rather than the same animator that handled the layout.
- Animation Director (sakkan): The person in charge of supervising the overall quality of the animation. The Japanese here is an abbreviation of sakuga kantoku. Their work is checked by the Chief Animation Director (sou sakkan).
- Anime Background Art: The painted scenery that serves as a backdrop for each shot.
- Art Director (bijutsu kantoku): The person in charge of the painted background art.
- Douga: The step of the animation process where artists trace each genga by hand to ensure crisp line art. Besides animation refinement, this step also usually involves the creation of in-between frames.
- Shiage: The step of the animation process where each frame is digitally painted and given its final color.
Sources:
- The Anime Survival Kit — Tonari Animation
- Behind the Scenes of Dr. STONE | The Making of an Anime — Crunchyroll on YouTube
- FEATURE: Why Are the Backgrounds of P.A. Works so Beautiful? An Interview with Anime Art Director Kazuki Higashiji — Crunchyroll News
- Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions Limited Edition Blu-Ray Book — Distributed by Sentai Filmworks
- A Silent Voice Limited Edition Blu-Ray Behind the Scenes Featurettes — Distibuted by Eleven Arts and Nozomi Entertainment
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Upcoming articles in this series:
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Cayla Coats is the Editorial Partnerships Manager at Crunchyroll. She tweets @ceicocat and you can watch her YouTube channel here.
