80sanime:
Interesting trivia: The third opening of Kimagure Orange Road shocked many animation otaku at the time of its release. In addition to being one long continuous take, it features several rotating shots, something very difficult and time-consuming to render via hand-drawn animation. This level of effort was unheard of for a weekly television series in 1988, and even today, it’s considered one of the more technically laborious anime openings ever made.
per twitter (it came up recently!), the people behind this:
Directed by none other than Tomomi Mochizuki, animation supervision by his wife Masaki Goto, animated by Takayuki Goto.
There is no credit in the anime itself, this is based on this Animage article (via @_animarchive). https://t.co/WEkShcLbQ1
and yes! full 3D background animation is REALLY hard without cg assistance, your perspective drawing skills need to be absolutely perfect. there’s a reason even in Miyazaki films there’s generally only one flying scene with full background animation. even animators like James Baxter who specialise in complex camera movements do it over cgi usually! you occasionally see it in some Kanada school animations from this time, but typically only a couple of scenes…
you can see in this animation they were really pushing against some limits, the most complex camera rotations are sort of strictly delineated and on a low framerate, always in very strictly rectilinear scenes… but it’s still bloody impressive to plan that out in cel animation at all, and it totally works, not just as an animation flex!
