Joe Sparrow / Illustrator - Animator - Designer / 07758224292 / joe@joe-sparrow.com

Thursday 1 July 2010

"my pain is greater than yours" - "BLOOOPITY BLOOP BLOP I AM A FORMLESS OCTOPUS MAN"

So, I watched the naruto episode 166 on a whim because I'd heard it was the one hinata "died" in and I just wanted to see how they treated it. It sort of made me sad, which was pretty good. So I just watched 167 to see if the fight with Pain and Naruto was going to progress in a cool way.


I'm not going to pretend I know anything about anime right now - I don't even know that much about animation - but I don't really expect anything when i watch naruto nowadays. the drawings of faces and bodies are usually pretty terrible and the fights don't always seem to have much zing to them.


And then I fucking saw this.



I know there are arguments for and against this sort of thing, and if I'm honest they're abusing the whole Gurren Lagann things-morphing-at-high-speed-for-not-much-of-a-reason thing to the extent that it started to get a little tiring, but jesus -


I thought it looked both cool and hilariously funny. It dipped in places but the variations on generic-naruto-anime face were really entertaining and refreshing.

5 comments:

Jonathan Harris said...

WHAT THE FUCK, I was vaguely contemplating posting this with a silly caption and then you fucking beat me to it!

I honestly don't know if I think those more extreme bits are good or bad. I literally laughed out loud when Pain got punched in the face and his whole head pretty much literally went ABLURBLBLURBLLRULBULURB. And again when Naruto's giant chakra hands hammered him into the ground with a rock. And AGAIN when he got shot into the cliff and then the rocks fell on him. Alot of the frames do just look downright ugly and weird even in motion, but I can admire Norio Matsumoto for experimenting (I think he usually does stuff that looks rather distorted, but took it to a new extreme in this instance), and alot of the episode was legitimately well animated.

I don't actually watch or have any interest in Naruto (it just looks incredibly bland to me) but I saw /a/ alternately raging over and exalting this episode, so I had to give it a look. Apparently Pain was all out of character since he's meant to be emotionless but whatever, it's not like I care, but it was more interesting than anything I've ever seen out of the Naruto anime.

I must take serious issue with the comparison to Gurren Lagann, though. It really never had that much distortion in the animation, unnecessary or otherwise, and it was hardly the first anime to do that sort of thing. I'd say modern anime does it less, since general blandness seems to be the dominant approach these days, so it's nice to see something stand out, even if not always for the right reasons.

Jonathan Harris said...

OKAY I'M A FAGGOT SO I WENT AND POSTED GIFS OVER ON MY BLOG.

Joe Sparrow said...

maybe the comparison to GL was a little erroneous - I guess I was just thinking of that wacky gainax-y stuff you usually post stuff about.

also, apologies for stealing your subject matter! I was considering posting gifs too but I couldn't find many I liked. the roadrunner one in particular made me laugh so much.

Ben Tobitt said...

I think john k would be proud.

the Tex Avery style of animation felt a little at ods with the emotion of the episode. but it was fun to see as a casual fan. pain getting hammerd into the ground wile coyote style made me laugh though. just need some acme sound effects.

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