What can you learn from looking at someone's hands?
The answer is a lot. Especially in Witch Hat Atelier, where a person's hands are a representation of their entire identity.
Hands are especially instrumental to a magic system built around drawing sigils, so it makes sense for them to get extra attention through storyboarding and animation, but the crew at the impeccably named studio Bug Films took it to a new level, giving hands a leading role in their visual storytelling, even beyond what's in the original manga.
The theme is practically stated outright when the magic cops come to erase Coco's memory and Easthies examines her hand to see if she's a terrorist, but finds only the calouses and ink stains of a novice apprentice, literally learning her identity by looking at her hand.
But it goes so far beyond that too. A few minutes earlier when he first appeared, his own hand dominates the frame across these three cuts by key animator Taichi Hattori (服部 汰一) and storyboard artist and episode director Hiroshi Seko (瀬古浩司) uses it to frame Coco and Agott's faces, encroching further and filling more of the frame with each cut and leaving the girls less and less space.
But nowhere are hands more central than Qifrey's secret confrontation with the Brimmed Hat, and this 15-second-long close-up on where the camera tracks his hand as it stretches close to Dr. Eyeball, even intermingling with the almost finger-like tassles at the bottom of the robe and hangs there in anticipation for a tantalizing ten frames,
Only for the tassles to dematerialize just as he tries to grab them, and having exhausted its last bit of energy, Quifrey's hand collapses to the ground, now animated on 1's, and the camera stays locked on to this close-up.
After a brief pause in defeat, Qifrey starts to drag his hand back towards himself and it gradually forms back into a fist and rotates toward the camera for the first time as he swears not to give up. Only then do we return to a wide shot.
That's the main chunk of it, but there's an entire mini-narrative here that plays out almost exclusively through hands. There's some dialogue, but this scene would honestly work just as well without it, maybe better!
This is an adapted excerpt from this video, so check it out if you want:
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