Anime - 9 days per minute of footage!!

[NexusSheep]

I wonder how long it takes our Japanese friends to actually make an Anime feature. I was watching the Blood documentary yesterday, and I think the director said it took them a year to make it.

One year! And it's only 40 minutes long!

BTW, I know a girl called Emina. (A little too close to enema, if you ask me... :D ) Anyway, I've just realised what her name is backwards. Funny old world, innit?

[charlie angel]

I have a friend who's an animator - he says that if he can get 10 frames done (roughly) in a day then he's motoring along.

[NexusSheep]

So what's the frame rate on Anime then? Someone told me it was 58-60fps but somehow I think that may be slightly wide of the mark. :rolleyes:

[Michael Brooke]

It depends on all sorts of factors: generally the technical complexity of the animation and the number of people working on it. For instance, a new episode of <I>The Simpsons</I> is turned out every fortnight, but that's hardly going to tax most animation studios.

I know of one animator (Yuri Norstein) who's been working on the same hour-long feature for twenty-two years, though going from the quality of the footage I've been lucky enough to see we're talking animated Rembrandt, so the long wait isn't too surprising! Also, Norstein tends to work either on his own or with a tiny crew, so that's at the outer end of the obsessive dedication scale.

[Roberto]

I know of one animator (Yuri Norstein) who's been working on the same hour-long feature for twenty-two years, though going from the quality of the footage I've been lucky enough to see we're talking animated Rembrandt,

Is he nearly finshed?? Are we ever likely ever to see it?

[Michael Brooke]

<B>Is he nearly finshed?? Are we ever likely ever to see it?</B>

Who knows? I saw the footage during a presentation that Norstein gave in London in the late 1990s, and I don't think I've ever heard so many jaws hit the floor simultaneously before (the fact that the footage was totally silent helped, though!). Unfortunately, during the Q&A session people offered loads of suggestions as to where he could find further funding, and the answer was usually "Yes, they gave us some money ten years ago but we've spent it!".

I'm just praying that <I>The Overcoat</I> will get finished according to Norstein's own terms - because I vividly remember what happened the last time an animator spent decades on a groundbreaking personal project, and Richard Williams ended up losing control of <I>The Thief and the Cobbler</I>, which was retitled, finished and dubbed by others and dumped onto video.

Incidentally, all of Norstein's earlier work is available on DVD via the excellent (and region-free) <I>Masters of Russian Animation</I> series - discs two and three contain the five self-directed films (the first four on disc two, <I>Tale of Tales</I> on disc three) while disc one has an early effort directed by someone else on which Norstein did the animation.