Okay so I had missed out on Zutomayo’s song Hunch Gray because the MV it was region locked and upon discovering it and watching it I was kind of disappointed? I know that Zutomayo and even Eve don’t use Waboku ALL the time for their animation, but I was so surprised when watching Hunch Gray because it looked just like Waboku’s art, but something felt off and it took me a minute to figure out that the reason it looked wrong was because it wasn’t. I then realized it was closer to the art style in Hakumei Zenya by NEE- which was because both of them were animated by Komugiko2000.
Komugiko2000 DOES have a very similar style to Waboku to begin with, but their lines are thinner and the contours are more broken up, while Waboku tends to have cleaner, continuous lines that are a bit thicker (over the course of Waboku’s career as a PV/MV artist their lines have gotten thinner and cleaner, earlier works sometimes had a thick more textured appearance to their lines). While in Hunch Gray, the more muted, warmer coloring that Komugiko2000 did in Hakumei Zenya is shown, which is a clue that this is their work in this case, I can’t help but notice the lines are a bit thicker than normal, and the biggest give away is the eyes. Unlike the eyes is Hakumei Zenya, they are much closer to Waboku’s style. Hakumei Zenya had a more circular “dish” shape to them, or in the case of the girl in the MV, looked much more like an “egg”, showing all of the iris’s circle- the closest comparison I can make is to the eye style of the Hanako-kun series. Komugiko2000 CAN and HAS drawn eyes differently, as seen in their work on GIANT KILLING’s MV by Loin and on their Twitter, they may have simply been going for a new style, but just with everything else, it feels almost like Zutomayo told them to replicate Waboku’s art? I’m guessing they couldn’t get Waboku for this MV (maybe because they were working on the Porter Robinson MV at the time?) and so they hired a similar artist/animator to do a similar look. The smoother lines and animation could just be a product of higher production, staff, or money. I wouldn’t really be comparing this if it wasn’t for my other problem with the MV which is that I feel like I had seen this plot before.
Now, I know that a plot line of a character turning into a monster that is a manifestation of their internal turmoil or emotions exploding and being rescued by another character isn’t an original concept to begin with, but in recent years we’ve seen this theme pop up a lot more mainly because Eve has been building a narrative surrounding this throughout his music videos and work with Waboku and Mah. I’m not saying that other creators can’t do this same idea, but my issue is that Hunch Gray’s MV feels like Zutomayo took Hakumei Zenya’s characters and gave them an ending of Baumkuchen End by Eve. There are some new details, the car scene is very well animated for one, as well as the characters being linked by the compasses on their wrist that point to one another. But the ending of the MV where the girl goes into the sky to rescue the boy who seemingly had been locked inside a tall building is very similar to Baumkuchen End which ends with the boy being thrown through the sky to reach the girl nested in the center of the giant monster that she unleashed when crying. It just feels reused, is what I’m saying, and less original and abstract than Zutomayo’s previous MVs.
This may just be a decision to finally deviate from their usual story. They did essentially finish their story about the girl who kept dying in Milabo, and showing a girl with two toned hair is just their brand since Study Me isn’t necessarily linked in the story but showed that too (and neither was Ham and Fastening really). My real issue is that if they wanted to do a new story, whether it was a one shot or the beginning of a new series, they had really gone with it. I wish they had let Komugiko2000 do more with their art, because although the buildings don’t look like Waboku’s at all, the way the people are drawn really look reminiscent of the art from Waboku directed MVs for Zutomayo, and they’ve done other styles before for MVs LIKE in Study Me and Fastening. I just don’t know why they decided to go for something that ended up feeling like a copy.
