FEATURE: Learn About the Building Blocks of Anime
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. We’re publishing this series throughout this entire week, so be sure to check back on our article hub to keep track of each part as it launches!
Last time we tackled Anime Pre-Producrion, and in this article, we will be exploring anime’s building blocks, the preliminary creative bedrock that needs to be set for the narrative and visual elements of a series. Today, we’ll be going over scriptwriting, storyboarding, and reference sheets. Let’s get started!
Note: This series is meant to detail the production process for serialized anime television series. The production process for films (even franchise films for pre-existing anime series) has significant differences.
What Does an Anime Director Do?
Seiichi Kinoshita, an anime director in SHIROBAKO
Before we get into these processes, we need to explore one of the most important roles in anime production: the director (kantoku in Japanese)!
In the West, a lot of film enthusiasts have a very romantic idea of the director as an auteur who prizes their personal creative vision above all else. In the realm of Japanese animation, the director of an anime is far more akin to a manager at a job — someone who manages a team of subordinates (in this case animators and other creatives), collaborates with colleagues (producers, episode directors, sound directors, and so on), and answers to their own bosses (the production committee and studio heads). That isn’t to say that director’s don’t leave their creative mark, just that their personal vision is tempered by the considerable weight of caring for their team and delivering a well made product to stakeholders.
The anime series director has a hand in pretty much every aspect of the production process. They will collaborate with and advise the script writing team, they often storyboard key episodes in the series… they work with quite literally every single department! Despite all of the different directions they are pulled, you can still see a very specific, consistent style shine through in a director’s body of work — just look at the genre pastiche of Shinichiro Watanabe (Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo), the blown out, colorized worlds of Atsuko Ishizuka (A Place Further Than the Universe, HaNaYaMaTa), and the delicate, intimate works of my favorite director, Naoko Yamada (The Heike Story, Sound Euphonium 2, Tamako Market).
Working under the anime series director are episode directors (enshutsu, in charge of the creative production of a single episode), a chief animation director (sou sakuga kantoku, in charge of ensuring consistent animation quality), and an art director (bijutsu kantoku, in charge of background art).
To give a specific example, let’s go through episode 3 of Spy x Family and put names to these roles:
- Series Director: Kazuhiro Furuhashi (who has also directed series like You’re Under Arrest, Zipang, and more)
- Episode Director: Takashi Katagiri (directed episodes of Vivy -Fluorite Eye’s Song- and Kedama no Gonjiro)
- Chief Animation Director: Kyoji Asano (held the same role on Attack on Titan and Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress)
- Art Directors: Hisayo Usui (Horimiya, Your Lie in April) and Kazuo Nagai (Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere, Noragami)
We will reference the anime series director numerous times throughout the rest of this series, so just remember that they have a hand in just about every creative decision made!
Anime Scriptwriting
A depiction of an anime episode script in Paranoia Agent
If you’ve been an anime fan long enough, you’ve probably heard of the term series composition (series kousei). This doesn’t refer to the person who composes the music, but the person who oversees the narrative and script writing aspects of an anime series. You can think of this role as a lead writer — they oversee the narrative arc of the entire series while managing a team of writers underneath them who will handle the episode-by-episode scripts.
At the very beginning of the anime writing process, a meeting is held between the series composition lead, the series director, the team of individual episode writers (kyakuhon), many of the producers, and representatives of the source material if applicable. This is where the general direction of the plot is established.
The writer in charge of series composition will then work on a rough plot outline and assign episodes to episode writers. From this point, each script will be submitted and discussed in group feedback sessions.
In the case of anime that is adapting a manga or any other type of media, the director and the person in charge of series composition play an integral role in deciding where to deviate from the source material and figuring out how to give each season a satisfying narrative arc in the case of ongoing series. The anime script is the backbone of the entire production — voice actors read from it, the storyboards draw from it, everything is built from that basic narrative structure.
Here are some writers who have handled series composition of some of your favorite anime:
- Hiroshi Seko (Chainsaw Man, Attack on Titan, JUJUTSU KAISEN, Mob Psycho 100)
- Reiko Yoshida (A Silent Voice, K-On!, Yowamushi Pedal)
- Mari Okada (anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day, Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans)
Anime Storyboards
A depiction of storyboards in SHIROBAKO (image via Sentai Filmworks)
Storyboards (e-conte) in anime are the bridge between the script and the actual animation. E-conte cut up the script into segments aligned vertically on a page next to thumbnails that indicate a rough intention of what should be on screen at that point in the script. E-conte also indicate the rough intended length of a cut or scene. E-conte are often created by either the series director or the episode director, though that is not always the case.
Here are a few examples of people who have storyboarded iconic episodes of anime:
- Yoshiharu Ashino storyboarded episode 3 of Puella Magi Madoka Magica… you know… that episode.
- Tetsuro Araki storyboarded episode 25 of Death Note which began a hugely controversial shift in the series! Araki is also series director.
- Shinji Ishihira storyboarded episode 49 of My Hero Academia which included the iconic All Might vs. All For One fight.
Anime Character Design and Reference Sheets
Character settei depicted in Golden Boy
Any given episode of an anime has multiple animators working on it, often numbering in the double-digits. With so many hands touching it, a production needs a way to keep drawings consistent across the different cuts handled by different animators. This is where anime character designs and reference sheets (or settei) come into play.
An Anime Character Designer is someone who establishes how a character looks in a number of different poses, angles, and with a number of different facial expressions. In the case of anime that adapt manga, the character designer needs to make a number of creative decisions that simplify or otherwise alter features on a given character to make it more suitable for drawing hundreds of times to create continuous motion. In addition to character designs, anime series will often have artists specifically dedicated to creating settei for objects, outfits, settings, and any other aspect of the series that will need to be drawn numerous times from different perspectives. Settei are distributed to the animators for the series.
Chainsaw Man, with its complicated monsters, props, and dynamic backgrounds needed several different groups of settei artists:
- Character Designer: Kazutaka Sugiyama (also acted as Chief Animation Director for 10 episodes)
- Costume Designers: Aya Yamamoto (also acted as Animation Director/Key Animator for several episodes) & Takuya Wada (
- Devil Design: Kiyotaka Oshiyama
- Prop Designers: Aya Yamamoto & Takuya Wada
Scriptwriting and e-conte help give animators a sense of the overall structure of an anime series, an episode, or a scene, and settei give them a reference point to keep drawings consistent across a number of different animators.
From this point on, the actual animation is ready to be drawn. Join us next time as we explore the magic of bringing drawings to life!
Glossary of terms we’ve learned about the building blocks of making an anime:
- Series Director (kantoku): The creative lead of the anime series. If the producer oversees the business and financial aspects of a production, this person oversees the creative aspects.
- Episode Director (enshutsu): Like the series director, but only in charge of the creative production of a single episode.
- Chief Animation Director (sou sakuga kantoku): A role overseeing the consistency and quality of animation.
- Art Director (bijutsu kantoku): The person in charge of the painted background art.
- Series Composition (series kousei): The head scriptwriter who usually manages a team of individual episode writers.
- Individual Writers (kyakuhon): Writers who work under the supervision of the series kousei to write scripts for individual anime episodes.
- Storyboards (e-conte): Rough visual sketch of each shot aligned with its respective section of the anime script.
Sources:
- Anserman: Who Writes Anime Filler Episodes? — Anime News Network
- The Anime Survival Kit — Tonari Animation
- Behind the Scenes of Dr. STONE | The Making of an Anime — Crunchyroll on YouTube
Currently available articles in this series:
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.
