Digital Infiltration

I've been attempting another foray into new anime lately, the above image is from the first episode of Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai. It's not bad, it has some funny moments, and I like the butterfly wings in the girl's hair. I guess you could call it a Haruhi Suzumiya-type anime--it begins similarly with a misfit girl who spontaneously starts a strange club after she meets the male protagonist. There's no apparent Science Fiction aspect to the show, though--the club is formed by the female lead in order to help her make friends. Like many shonen anime, this one presents the unlikely circumstance of several beautiful girls desperately requiring the company of the otherwise social outcast male lead.

Something a bit more interesting to me I just now noticed clicking through Wikipedia links is that the company producing Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai, AIC Build, is also funding the development of a computer programme called CACAni which does in-between animations. That is, the animations between key frames in 2D animation, key frames being the beginning and ending frames of movement. An essay I'm working on for my English class is actually about how hand drawn animation remains unrivalled and inimitable and one of the things I used to support my argument was a quote from Mike Judge on The Howard Stern Show talking about how he depends on an animation studio in Korea for in-betweens on his recently re-launched Beavis and Butthead (which is really good, by the way). I pointed out in my essay that even though the Korean animators are still nominally divorced from the creative aspect of the show, the human element they provide still can't be replicated by computers. So much for that argument. Well, then again, CACAni doesn't appear to be in regular use and the few demonstrations I've seen on YouTube aren't very demonstrative. Mind you, the animation at the start of this video doesn't appear to be attributed to CACAni;



On the one hand, I can see this leading to a rash of dull, soulless animation. On the other, I can see this putting a lot of creative power into people who couldn't afford it before. Certainly it's ominous for Korean animation studios. Anyway, I guess my main point still stands, since this thing isn't even attempting to do key frames.

Twitter Sonnet #325

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