Hirotaka Kato - 5D’s Edition A
Good lord, getting this to actually upload was a nightmare. Still trying to figure out the best way to upload these. Ah well. Who needs consistency?
Hirotaka Kato is primarily a key animator who works on Gallop anime from time to time. Rather than Yu-Gi-Oh, he spent a lot of his time working on Eyeshield 21 (also produced by Gallop). As such, he usually works on their in-house episodes. Lately, he’s been involved in a couple of WIT Studio works, like HAL and Hozuki no Reitetsu.
His style is defined by the thick-to-thin, sharp outlines he draws the characters with, with very smooth animations that, from what I can tell, seem to require many inbetweens between the keyframes (as opposed to say, Kenichi Hara, who is very economical with the number of drawings he uses). The result is a lot of smooth, yet subtle motions that can allow for a lot of high action if needed.
About the video proper, yaaay, more 5D’s. There’s a few ZEXAL scenes he worked on, and a couple more from 5D’s not included here. I’ll make more posts in the future highlighting those. I wasn’t able to fit in everything though. I also left the audio in this time around, to really get the feel for how these scenes were like in context (which I believe adds power to the animation itself, at least more so than seeing everything silently)
Action-wise my favorite parts are the Arm’s Aid vs Dark Dive Bomber action sequence in #21, and the Stardust Dragon vs Red Demon’s Dragon sequence in the OVA. Especially in the OVA, the subtle yet smooth fire effect when Red Demon’s in biting into Stardust. Both cuts show plenty of explosion and smoke effects that are simply to die for.
In #26, I really like the cut when Rua points off screen, as you can see the overlapping action on his hair react to his arm pointing. There’s way more drawings in there than there really needed to be, but I love it. And right after that, when the MC looks back and forth. His body is only two drawings looped, but each time his hair takes a few frames to catch up. I love little touches like that.
