This is a trailer for Force of Will, an anime adaptation of a card game (of the same name) that will be out in 2018.
An anthology of six short films (think The Animatrix), Shuhei Morita (Possessions) is directing this Cthulu one that the trailer below focuses on, which is pretty neat.
Other shorts (also based on the card game) will be focused on stuff like The Monkey King and zombies.
Comments
8 responses to “When Lovecraft Meets Anime”
3DCG? Or 2D animation designed to look like bad 3DCG?
It’s hybrid. You may dislike the stylistic choices but I can tell you this is not “bad”.
It’s kind of a knee-jerk reaction for me whenever I see anime that uses 3DCG. It always looks bad to me.
I have the same reaction.. everything just moves a little oddly. Like it’s all too smooth. It’s the same feeling I get when I watch video in 30+ FPS or those TVs with motion blending.
A lot of what separates anime from most other animation is that they use limited animation approaches – keyframing and then doing a small number of interstitial frames. The amount movement from one frame drawing to the next is often quite large but we let our brains do the interpolation. 3DCG tends to draw out every frame in between key poses, which means the movement is very uniform and smooth, but the result is that the characters look stiff and unnatural as they slide from pose to pose and result is very video-gamey.
Also I think that the 3D approach is still too expensive to use if you want to achieve what you can with 2D.
The best approach seems to be when studios use 3DCG to do effects or do detailed animation of inanimate or non-characters things. Ufotable is fantastic at blending digital effects (especially lighting effects), 3D and 2D together, for example.
Yeah, that’s the one. I had a loose grip on the reason behind it but you’ve explained it exactly. I find it most jarring when there is a rotational pan around a character (especially the face), as the movement of the features gives it an unmistakable 3D object/model feeling, as opposed to the 2D flatness of a traditional animation.
This has peaked my interest, thanks for the share Luke
Animation style looks brilliant
Some sort of Robo-Ancient-One?