Don't let the beginning fool you.
This is a quick 1-minute compilation of Ryo-Chimo's sakuga in the anime Yozakura Quartet. He's so great at creating exciting but realistic motions. There's so much movement and energy! You can really feel the intensity, speed, and power of the character's actions. Also note how he sticks entirely to 2D effects. All the explosions, lights, beams, etc., are drawn and colored by hand. Anime these days almost always use 3D and CGI for the lights and effects, so it's great to see a new anime doing it the old fashioned way. (Example: At 1:01, when the man morphs his face, the morphing effect is done mostly by actually drawing the blurs and smearing.)
I will be drawing the cut at 0:47 seconds as part of my animation studies. The reason I chose that cut is because it is a very fast movement, with exaggerated and stylish poses and facial expressions. It's really sharp, and I love this kind of animation, even if it's choppy. Also, I had a theory that picking a dynamic movement to draw would be several times easier than picking a slow movement where a character only moves a little from frame to frame. The reason? When you're animating a fast, dynamic movement, you only have to worry about the relative position of one frame to the next. You have a lot of leeway. You do have to make sure the poses are done well (add anticipation), so as to make the images flow from one to the next and feel connected, since the motions are fast and there aren't many transitional frames.
Animating a slow or subtle movement is very difficult because the small differences between frames have to be very precise to get what you want, and the position of everything has to be spot on or else the final motion won't look the way you want it, with the character moving too fast or awkwardly at times. Drawing inbetweens would require you to look very carefully and draw just the character just in between those two frames (given the inbetween motion is desired to be right in between), and to have the distance from the parts of the character in the inbetween to the previous frame be equal to the next frame. This means you may have to redraw a lot of parts to try to get it right.
I'm about half way done so far, and so far what I suspected is very true. In the future, I will concentrate on learning more dynamic, if "choppy" styles of animation, because it is appealing to me and is easier and faster to draw. There is a specific style that is taken to the extreme, and you can call it "pose to pose", as it focuses on the characters doing appealing or cool poses in the frames and doesn't care about how the character actually changes or moves from one pose to the next (no transitional drawings to connect poses to each other). A lot of animators specialize in this kind of style, like Hiroyuki Imaishi who directed Gurren Lagann and Kill la Kill, another of my favorite animators. More on that later X)
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