I wanted to do my usual sakubuta thing and track down these cuts on the booru, but unfortunately there’s not a lot from Yu-gi-oh GX where the second gif comes from. It might be by Junpei Ogawa, who did most of the cuts from GX that the Booru does have, but that’s a weak basis to guess on really.
That’s a lovely motion though. I wanna break it down frame by frame since it goes by so fast. For some reason this gif is timed at 20fps - I would expect TV animation to go at 24fps? So it might be slowed down, not sure what’s going on there.
To begin with we have the face closeup. Some mouth flaps and a very slight head tilt, I’ll just post the extremes since very likely the rest were left to the inbetweener in a case like this:
Then this smear of a card enters:
This is a really clever bit of staging, because the smear disguises a rather large camera move from the character’s face to his hand. The first couple of frames are on 1s, then it slows down to 2s (still fast by anime timing!)
The character’s fingers are actually spreading out as the hand moves towards us. Kind of impossible to see at this framerate, but I suppose it helps to accentuate the motion towards the camera. Also check out how detailed the shading is on those fingers given this is on the screen for all of two frames!
The first frame went up and two the right, but that motion stops very soon and starts moving down and to the left.
We slow in to a down-left motion as the hand gets ready to flip out and left. This is anticipating a truly massive motion that’s about to come…
PHEW. On 1s again. We’ve rotated the hand almost 180 degrees in the space of two frames here. Honestly the whole thing is kind of a blur at full speed, but the pose it eventually lands in helps us understand what happened.
Here, if you viewed this in a long shot, the hand is also travelling quite a long distance to the left. Here’s how I imagine the poses would go without perspective distortions.
That is, we have a slow in and a slow out.
We should actually be seeing the front face of the card in the second frame there! But that would be distracting, so they don’t draw it here, I guess?
Pressing on, we drop back to twos. We complete our arc and the hand moves away from the camera to give us a clearer picture…
The fingers are in a nice pleasing set of uneven positions, there’s strong overlap here. This is on 1s again.
We flip the card a full 180 in the space of a frame. No inbetweens or nothing either. The card’s been rolled behind the middle finger and tucked into the ring finger. The palm and thumb remain roughly where they are to keep us grounded.
The motion here feels like a continuation of the pull out. And we can get away with it because it’s really fast. There’s also a bit of shape contrast with the previous frame to help us read that the card has rotated, not just changed colour!
Once again the fingers switch with regard to the card in the space of one frame. Now the middle finger has gone behind and the ring finger is out in front, but the little finger is getting ready to catch it. Overall the card is making a downwards motion, and this time we have an inbetween frame in perspective.
We reach the bottom of the arc by completing this motion.
Now it’s time for the card to come back up…
The whole hand twists at this point, which helps anticipate the change of direction. The card is rotating so that it’s flattened out from our perspective, which is a way to apply squash and stretch while staying physical: it’s like a bouncing ball squashing before it comes back up. The middle finger actually makes a pretty huge jump.
^ This frame honestly feels like a colouring error? We should be seeing the brown side if the card has rotated around the middle finger like this. I’m a little confused about this, but whatever, let’s look at everything else that’s going on. The little finger has moved up to overlap the hand, following the motion of the card, and the whole hand has started to angle upwards as well. Both card and hand are part of the down-then-up motion.
We’re still on ones! With motion this fast you can’t afford a hold frame.
The card completes its twist around the ring finger and gets caught by the index finger and middle finger.
The card now slows in to its final position and gets arrested between two fingers.The hand now starts to twist back down, so the whole motion is kind of a snap. (We’ll follow some arcs in a minute!)
Finally another inbetween lets the hand close and the middle finger move on top of the card as well…
We finish the sequence by dropping back onto twos for some much slower motion…
OK, I promised arcs, let’s have a look at what some individual fingers are doing in the frame…
Red is the index finger, cyan is the middle finger, green is the little finger.
Honestly? I can’t make head or tails of that. That’s completely bananas. I think arcs is actually the wrong way to look at it. Instead, let’s look at shapes.
Here I’ve coloured in the silhouette of the card. I’ve made one side brighter - the rapid flickering effectively conveys rotation! - but now I’m going to make them both the same colour and hide the original animation so we can see what the shape as a whole does.
Now we can start to see the fundamental motion. The first part doesn’t really read without the extra information, but during the flip part, we can see the card rapidly goes down then up, and then settles down to the side.
What about the hand? Well, despite all the complex finger wiggles, that actually occupies about the same volume during the whole flip:
And once again, on its own:
You can see that despite all the crazy finger wiggles, the actual overall motion of the hand is incredibly simple: it moves away from the camera, and then clenches to the left. I think that consistency anchors the animation and makes it possible for the other stuff to happen.
This whole sequence is a great illustration of how you don’t actually need to show how stuff happens: once you have anticipation, arcs follow through, and overshoot/settle down right, the rest can be pretty much filled in by your brain. This point was made in a video I watched recently by Alex Grigg…
A truly fantastic example comes in a cut corrected by Hiroyuki Imaishi from Kill La Kill:
When Ryuuko stands up, the chair would have to clip through her leg. Do we notice? No: it’s really fast and the arcs, anticipation, etc. are so strong that these details don’t matter at all. A similar principle is at work in this card flip. Your eyes certainly can’t follow the details, so they just have to be suggestive enough to communicate that the card is being wiggled between the fingers in an elaborate flourish. I want to start practicing tricks like this! Animation tricks I mean, though it’d be great if I could do the card thing too…
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