How’s Christmas and New Year for everyone? I hope it has been a good season of giving and of coming together for celebrations. It’s also a time where we clear our backlog of anime, but how does anime come onto screen? We take a look in-depth at the animation studios and the various people that make it happen.

Animations don’t just happen and it takes people of different roles such as the Director, Producer, Animator, Sound Engineers etc. But how are these people linked together in the whole process? Putting everything into text would just make me sound long-winded, so why not take the time to digest everything in this graphic instead?

We focus on the graphic and animations of the anime where each frame is hand-drawn. Key animators convert the drawings done during the storyboard stage into a full image that you see on screen. You can view some of the storyboards from the popular anime No Game No Life (ノーゲーム・ノーライフ) here !

For smoothness, one second consists of 24 frames (24 fps) and each paper drawing constitutes 3 frames. Doing the math, each second will require 8 pages of illustration so an average 24-minute anime will incorporate 8*60*24 = 11520 illustrations! That’s an impressive number considering what you see on your screens. Contrary to popular belief, animators are not paid much for each drawing and they have a tight schedule to meet.

So now we have a stack of illustrations. What do you think is the next step? Adding colour of course! Each frame is carefully scanned into a digital image and colour is added on the computer. Imagine adding colour to all 10000+ illustrations with the same consistency and not missing out a single spot, that’s a lot of work!

Animators then take these static images and with background art (Produced by another department), combine them using animation, compositing and a whole lot of other graphic effects and you get an anime that looks fluid from start to finish. Looking at this process, it’s no small feat at every stage! Takes a lot of endurance and patience (+ the skills too) to produce a good anime!

There seems to be something missing. Hmmm… Key Animators, Colour Designers, Animation Producers… Ah yes, who could forget the seiyuus’ (声優), the people with the heavenly voices that breathe life into characters’ voices. They too don’t have it easy since voice recording is done after the animation has been completed, so there are a few pointers to take note.
Firstly, recording for each episode (or at least each part in an episode) is done in a single session with no breaks and no errors.
Secondly, since animation is done before voice recording, seiyuus’ have to watch the episode via a monitor in the recording studio while reading off the script. Definitely not a stroll in the park if you ask me, then if they did it the opposite way where the voices are recorded before the drawing of the animation.

This video on YouTube would probably give you a sense of how tough voice recording is for the seiyuus’!

(Recording of One Piece)

With all that information overload, probably it’ll be nice to take a breather and appreciate the effort that these people put in to create the different animes’ that we enjoy and can relate to. With that, if you would like to know more about how anime is produced, have a look at 2 of Danny Choo’s Culture Japan videos, with one of them taken in the studios of Production I.G and the other in J.C.Staff.

Production I.G (株式会社プロダクション・アイジー):

J.C.Staff (株式会社ジェー・シー・スタッフ):

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
メリークリスマス、そして、あけましておめでとう!

Post by Brandon Goh
Edited by Kai Yeat

How is Anime made?

JAC Christmas Party 2015

Humanoid Robots showcased at International Robot Exhibition