Secret Sabunga Notes #02

Go watch Silent Witch if you’re not already doing so

You can explore Silent Witch from various angles, allowing you to dig into interesting topics. For example, the way that it ever so slightly changes a joseimuke formula to make it palatable to guys who’d otherwise never give it a try; as also seen in the likes of Kusuriya, Skip and Loafer, and even Bisque. At its core, this is a sad phenomenon, but it does allow them to have access to more capable teams with ease (as much as the current industry can offer anyway) without compromising their essence. You could also look at it as an example of sound direction elevating comedy, as a showcase of the relationships building around Cygames Pictures despite being made somewhere else, a unique case of directorial task distribution and delegation…

Maybe one day I’ll have time to talk about those points at length. Instead, let me make a simpler point for now: Silent Witch is good. Not life-changingly so, but it’s consistently funny and remains rich in texture, even as amplified by the megaphone of such a comedy-focused director. As is the case with most products of the Narou mines, many elements within the series are recognizable, but they’re arranged in an amusing and well-meaning way. The premise is simple: the titular silent witch isn’t quite the genius badass that she’s known as, but rather a squirrel-shaped mass of anxiety who only revolutionized the spell-casting system because she’s too awkward to speak. The hijinks around her, combining genuine moments of coolness with disastrous social anxiety, somehow make her the most attractive person to dozens of people—regardless of their gender, sorta like in Bakarina.

That would make for an entertaining show on its own, but the unexpected layer of Silent Witch is that it also treats her like a genuine victim of trauma and a neurodivergent person. While it’s again not revolutionary in that regard, it does show thoughtfulness in its more nuanced stances. A lesser series would have linked her autistic tendencies and the traumatic past, with the former being a result of the latter, but Silent Witch makes a point to show a consistent person shaped (sometimes tragically so) by her life experiences. Initially, I wondered if having such a comedy-focused director might underplay these aspects, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how nicely all sides of this work have been treated. Mind you, the comedy is the most noticeable flavor, but that’s more due to the affinity that the project leader has for that material rather than poor execution of other aspects.

So, who is that mysterious leader I’ve alluded to multiple times? You probably don’t need me to tell you, considering that people keep making Kokkoro’s butt face (as well as various Konosuba expressions). Takaomi Kanasaki is indeed the chief director… as well as the series composer, scriptwriter for every episode, and sound director. This last role is in fact one of his highlights, since the way that music is used (and paused) and the voice direction are exceptionally funny. I believe these aspects to be just as, if not more, recognizable than the recurring funny faces on his storyboards.

Kanasaki’s role as the sole writer has accelerated the series just enough to keep an inherently amusing tempo. I understand fans of the source material worrying about the trimming that led there, but it allows the show to come across as more confident and brisker in an appealing way. In addition to all that, Kanasaki has also storyboarded 6 out of the first 7 episodes, which gives the show the type of consistent identity you can’t take for granted on TV. Again, there are conversations to be had here about how he uses delegation with creators he’s acquainted with to enable this approach, but for now I’ll just focus on one thing: these unusual methods have worked out very well so far.

Is the adaptation perfect? I wouldn’t say so. Despite the external help, there are limits to what a somewhat daring Studio Gokumi production can accomplish in 2025; this is a polite way to say that the animation in episode #06 was all over the place, including some truly broken dancing cuts. For as much as I’ve enjoyed the narrative being effectively re-edited, I could see some changes biting them in the butt eventually.

And really, even Kanasaki’s ambitious approach has risks. I found episode #07 to be great, satisfying in how the anime had structured everything for its payoff, but I couldn’t help but notice that the storyboarding for aspects like Monica’s trauma didn’t pack as much of a punch as earlier episodes. Since I have my doubts that it was an issue with the enshutsu (Kanasaki’s CyPic ties brought over Road to the Top’s director for it!), it feels like his boards may not always be quite as sharp after drawing so many of them. For now, though, none of those come even close to being a deal-breaker. Silent Witch, you’re a damn good cartoon.

Hosoda’s new film looks bad (and he knows it), but it’s not because 3D animation is sinful

Last time I made a passing comment about not wanting to talk about Hosoda’s new film, so the heavens punished me with a new trailer that looks bad on every possible level. The premise itself is already deeply disappointing, not only because of how far it is from the tone that characterizes his best films, but also in the way it leans on tired tropes. The movie could be gorgeous and I still wouldn’t be motivated to watch a badass woman’s revenge story… that is effectively an isekai gimmick, pairing her with a regular ass dude who looks like he was out delivering meals before becoming her emotional support. The premise alone makes it an uphill climb.

And let’s not kid ourselves: it sure doesn’t look like the execution is going to make up for that. Over the last few years, studio Chizu has been losing the theatrical animation stars that were contracted to them indefinitely—unsure if that’s the chicken or the egg, but all I can see is the bird shit on the floor. Scarlet looks (and sometimes moves, the timing is horrendous in spots) very awkward. Sure, it’s not going to be the ugliest anime you’ve ever seen, but those aren’t the standards you should use with Hosoda’s work. And you know who doesn’t do that? The director himself, who at least at points has been so frustrated with the results that animators in that general scene have picked up on it. By which I mean, that the notoriously spoken Aya Suzuki mentioned as much to some friends recently. Not surprised!

The one valuable conversation we can take away from it so far is about the possibilities of animation, but also about natural fits. Hosoda’s direction, at its best, was a direct evolution of Ikuhara’s very farcical, staged screens. Framing on 2D planes, breaking space and time to amuse the viewer. When it comes to using the camera, his stance was generally… not doing so. There are recurring traits still being used by his protegees like doupoji shots (repeating layouts framed from the exact same place) that they picked up from Hosoda’s greatest works. It’s an approach nurtured and developed in the specific environment of limited TV anime production, which he scaled as he became a theatrical 2D animation director. While you can achieve similar results through other means, there’s an undeniable fit between his methods and the styles that he has traditionally aimed for.

With movies like Scarlet, Hosoda isn’t using CG animation to replicate his works of the past, but rather to make something that is also synergistic with the tools. And I can respect that! Unfortunately, something can be both coherent and not good. In the same way that tools have affinities, so do the people who use them; which is why creators can excel at one type of work while being disastrous at others. A big, epic blockbuster may be a more natural fit for their current production methods, but it’s something that he has never done a great job with.

In fairness, Hosoda has used scale nicely at times, especially when deploying it in a more thematic way (we all know about his awe and preoccupations about the internet). The large setpieces with Hollywood aspirations that he’s been including in movies since Bakemono no Ko, however, are consistently low points in his modern output. Making a movie all about those, when everything else is already against it, feels like a mistake. Just like how he ditched a great writer like Okudera to write mostly subpar scripts of his own, Hosoda continues to make choices that aren’t inherently awful… but that lead to way worse films in his case.

The Dandadan anime is a bit depressing

Let’s get the negatives out of the way, while we’re at it. Mind you, I don’t particularly enjoy dragging on shows, especially not ones I’ve really enjoyed before. But do you know what I like even less? Structural mismanagement that sets projects up for failure, which is basically what Saru did with Dandadan (and it’s not alone in that regard…). This is one of the first things we published about the series, the day that the first episode was broadcast:

This sounded weird to some people at the time. Dandadan felt like those expensive, high-profile action shounen adaptations that are all the rage nowadays. It had a beloved studio too! So how could it not actually be one of those prestige projects? The answer is simple: it just didn’t have the team for it. Some renowned names in the core staff, and less prestigious yet still impressive creators among the regulars as well, but simply lacking the type of muscle that a project like that would require. Given a newbie series director with a limited reach and an overly busy studio, they’ve had to make do with a crew that punched up until they could no longer do so.

If you’re more familiar with games production, you can just look at it this way: what would happen if a modest enough team (maybe not indie but AA) were expected to make an AAA game, because it would be promoted as such? They may be able to replicate those expensive-looking aesthetics and feelings of Bigness for a while, but eventually the cracks would start showing. This isn’t necessarily about these bigger projects having greater “quality” or even meaningful “ambition”—it’s more about scope and ability to wow the masses with a type of flashiness that is costly. Aiming for that has cost problems for projects like JJK as well, but in cases like that, MAPPA has an incredible ability to press expensive panic buttons that Saru lacks. Apart from, you know, being orders of magnitude larger so they’re inherently better prepared for projects like this.

The result is a show that, for starters, got slapped with an unplanned delay halfway through. At the time of the broadcast, the first cours was already finished, but it had also become evident that they wouldn’t make it to the goal unscathed. The addition of another series director is also linked to this; not a secret, they’ve admitted as much. To make matters even worse, it stopped at the worst possible time. Dandadan sometimes slips with sexual violence it could very much do without, and the anime makes it incomparably worse by keeping the audience fixated on one such stupid instance for half a year. At the very least, that moment in the manga is so short and unimportant that you quickly forget about it, but the anime draws so much more attention to it by stopping mid-sentence… during the dumbest line it utters.

And now that it’s back, it simply feels like the floor has collapsed. Mind you, the holes were noticeable past its exceptional seventh episode, but they’ve grown so big that there might not be a floor anymore. The highs are still there; storyboards like Kawanami’s work in the second episode and Nishiyama’s most recent one are great, and the best key animators contribute sequences that will easily amaze you (especially those that abstract away the entire aesthetic). Blink once after those, though, and you’ll encounter funky drawings, compositing and continuity errors, and previously cool concepts now hideously twisted. The way each supernatural and alien being dyed the screen was cool when there was time to choose each with care and carefully tune the result so that it popped, but not now that the screen is uniformly neon green or poop filtered. Onda’s designs rule… until most of your team can’t draw them. The situation corrupts even positive aspects.

The issues with Dandadan aren’t with the people making it. A lot of them are very cool and have shown, sometimes in this show, that they have the potential to do much better. The issue is the ones that aren’t making it, the people who’ve been running this studio with a different type of reckless than the Yuasa era, and those who planned a project that was so likely to crash due to the impossible demands.

L’etoile de Paris en Fleur is The Avengers for enlightened millennial nerds

Back before the days of sakugabooru, when the most active hub for these discussions was an IRC channel and certain textboards, you could still feel some attitudes from the preceding Anipages era that never sat right with me. Obviously, Ben Ettinger did exceptional work and his forums also gathered interesting people, but there was a weirdly prevalent belief that anime only had about a dozen Truly Great animators; mostly the same theatrical superstars we’d point at nowadays, as well as very select veterans from TV projects. At its worst, this even led to misattribution of work—surely only one of those special artists could have been the person behind particularly excellent sequences.

I want to believe that with time, we’ve left that behind, but I’d be lying if I didn’t point out that the overcorrection has brought us to an even more annoying spot. Since sakuga discourse has been hijacked by mainstream shounen anime hype machines, most of whom have absolutely nothing to add to the conversation, we experience a mirror phenomenon right now. There’s a lot of parroting a select few names and calling them legends, except rather than doing so with renowned theatrical veterans, the targets are TV animators and directors on WSJ anime and the likes; this includes a lot of people with very little experience, which for as technically impressive as they can be, makes this type of reverence even more baffling. Conversely, the type of person who does nothing but scream about animator names doesn’t even know those veteran stars that once were (to a degree, wrongly) considered the only superlative artists.

This is all to say that L’etoile de Paris en Fleur sounds like an insane proposition if you’re… exactly me, I suppose. So many things stand out immediately; the choice of Katsuya Kondo as designer for a theme that evokes Ghibli so directly, the ridiculous collection of exceptional character artist in the core team, Goro Taniguchi’s redemption arc, the smart choice of Reiko Yoshida as scriptwriter for a premise that seems to fit her perfectly, a 7 year long evolution from an indie production to the final result…

Above all else, though, I’m weirdly interested in the studio. On the one hand, Arvo Animation is the reason why no one is as confident as you’d expect from such incredible key staff. On the other hand, they’re genuinely the reason why something of this magnitude exists. Kondo has notoriously brought up that he initially refused to participate, but that Arvo’s founder was so enthusiastic that he eventually accepted the job of designer and even participated as an animator.

Between the recent Kowloon Generic Romance (even Irina: The Vampire Cosmonaut to some degree) and this film, one thing that stands out is that… the people at the studio have exceptional taste? They pursue brilliant creators, and despite some plainer projects, they also pursue unique works that more financially-minded companies wouldn’t consider. My hope in this case is that the concentration of talent in the core team reached critical mass, attracting enough outsiders to make up for the studio’s lack of resources. They deserve a win, and we deserve a good film.

Witch Hat Atelier shouldn’t worry about Akane-banashi, it should worry about itself

The Akane-banashi anime was recently announced. While they’re never going to say it out loud, its planning was a bit of a bumpy road that has led to… not really the studio they had in mind to spearhead the production. Now, this isn’t to say that Zexcs aren’t competent. If anything, they’re one of those studios that have a high ceiling most people have no idea about, as the titles that showcase it are rather niche. Toshimasa Kuroyanagi’s works (The Great Passage, Backflip, to some degree Shounen Hollywood) are very interesting productions, and the company has connections to all sorts of high-profile veteran creators. It’s not the type of studio where you can take excellent quality for granted, but definitely one where the right project leader can surround himself with skillful artists.

And you know who fits that bill? Ayumu Watanabe, its renowned series director. While on its own that should be (and is!) encouraging, it also kicked off a lot of discourse as he’s also in charge of Witch Hat Atelier. It’s now fairly well-known that WHA’s production is struggling, a fact that is unfortunately filtered through the sensationalistic, not particularly knowledgeable filters of loose-lipped young overseas animators and dumbass leakers. Combined with WHA’s reach beyond usual anime viewers, and you get a messy cocktail of misunderstandings. So let’s quickly address some of those misconceptions.

For starters: ever since he became a regular TV anime director, Ayumu Watanabe has always led multiple projects at the same time. That is precisely one of the skills that make him so desirable as a director; not only is his work striking in the right scenario, but he also has that efficient mindset that you’ll find in directors raised in long-running productions. With time, he’s grown a great support network that allows him to delegate duties to assistants (like Yu Harima in Akane-banashi) whom he can trust not to lose the plot.

The sudden worry that WHA’s delay to 2026 will make it coincide with Akane-banashi demonstrates that people haven’t bothered to check what Watanabe has been up to lately, or for his entire career for that matter. Yes, those two will overlap now, but WHA was already in very close proximity to Maid-sama (tail end of 2024) regardless. His best, arguably most polished show was in 2018—a year with four TV anime directed by him. Not to say that it’s ideal, but it’s certainly not new.

Another issue that seems to have leaked way further than it should have is that the first episode’s production is taking an eternity to wrap up. So let me note, again, that this isn’t necessarily the deal-breaker that some seem to think it is; and also, that it’s not related to Akane-banashi either. Among such high-profile works, this is a relatively common phenomenon, as everyone wants a fancy opener to catch the attention of viewers with increasingly higher expectations (what amounts to that is a sad topic for another day).

The actual problem, in this case, is that Bug Film’s Kojima is downright sociopathic about it. I don’t blame ambitious creators at the studio for aiming for the moon, especially because I know for a fact that they’re inspiring rather than burdensome for most of the team rallying behind them. What I take more issue with is the producer in the lead, whose support is a whole lot more cynical. He fosters this environment not so that the artists can live up to their potential, but rather to exploit the viral potential of insane first episodes that they can’t possibly live up to. All resources go to the hook, starving out the rest of the production; to the point where even the ace animators who elevate those first episodes have to see their work processed in much worse ways later, when there’s no time and a reduced ability to get proper in-betweening, painting, etc.

Bug Films have tried to make this impossible model work in various ways. In Komi-san, it was through an absurd amount of fully outsourced episodes… which bit them in the butt in the second cours, as the somewhat reputable companies they’d asked for help in the first half were no longer available, forcing them to rely on shoddy ones. After its incredible intro, Zom100 tried a more structural type of subcontracting… and we all saw how that panned out, delays included.

Since attempting to handle matters more in-house also isn’t viable, WHA is back to fiddling with the world’s least stable jenga tower; one so absurd that later outsourced episodes are bound to finish before earlier in-house ones. Don’t get me wrong: there will be excellent work in the Witch Hat Atelier anime, and I hope that they find a way to create a good anime despite the bottlenecks and baffling resource management. But if they manage that, it’ll be in spite of this production model. And if they fail, it won’t be because of Akane-banashi.

While I’m at it, I’m also hopeful but somewhat wary about Akane-banashi’s adaptation. Again, not a matter of staff, it’s more about the inherent challenge that they’ve made a bit scarier by themselves. While the glimpses of the aesthetic in the teaser PV hint at them aiming for something within their means, the character art specifically is complex in a way that it didn’t have to be. I do love how it looks in that short clip, but the clothing folds and shading are so intricate that I initially thought its animation director had gone rogue for the sake of a fancy trailer. As it turns out, no, Kii Tanaka’s designs are actually like this. I’m more confident in this project to stay within a reasonable scope, but that feels like something they might regret despite how nice they look.

Recent news corner

• Sort of related to a previous point: I feel like Tomohiko Ito is weirdly unlucky. His career has been very successful, but the projects he’s best known for are… hardly critical darlings, let’s be honest. With his best work buried in less popular corners, he’ll forever be the SAO guy to most. But hey, here he is leading a cool-looking film that is co-entrusted with A-1’s new brand. Now this looks like something that might earn him that critical favor… oh, the PV dropped exactly the same minute as L’etoile de Paris so nerds were distracted. Nevermind. Amusing coincidences aside, Kusunoki no Bannin does look nice.

• Studio White Fox has been acquired by publisher AlphaPolis. If you’ve never heard about them, don’t start questioning your nerd creds—they’re a Narou sludge pipeline mostly associated with derivative works of dubious quality. Given the current trend of massive publishers buying one studio after the other, the upside here is that they’re at least not one of that select few that already have too much creative control… but frankly, I’m not sure that viewpoint holds much water at all. AlphaPolis aren’t shy about their wish to prioritize their (again, rather ungood) titles, and given their small size, WF won’t even get the resources and stability that those larger corporations can at least provide. More of a future worry than an immediate one—Re:Zero’s next season shouldn’t be affected, if that’s what people are panicking about—but still kind of a bummer. Independent, mid-sized anime studios are an endangered species.

• You may have noticed that the trailer for the new Gintama movie has a prestige flair that you wouldn’t associate with the series. Given aesthetic trends, I don’t blame people for suspecting that this is a cynical move to cash in on current trends—and some producer might have thought so as well! But really, the reason is that its director is Aikatsu ace Naoya Ando, who has been pursuing this type of emphatic, high contrast look where the compositing effects play a big role since before the Kimetsu craze. His usage of lighting in emotive ways is excellent, so you can look forward to that here as well. Too bad his Cars Hypmic went nowhere.

• After a million years, Sekiro is now public. The twisted poetry is that it has immediately kicked off discourse about AI animation due to qzil.la’s rancid statements (AND actions, it’s not like these people just talk) that is… well, not particularly truthful in this case, but it’s putting pressure on an evil company so it feels like a weird victory. Is it sad that any remotely unconventional style arises suspicions of AI usage among people who frankly have never watched anything but frictionless, mainstream Products? Well, yes, very sad. Does this case have much of an effect? Not really, the people involved are most renowned vets—Mukouda won’t get in trouble because of some posts. But qzil.la might, and qzil.la sucks, so whatever. Looking forward to what Kutsuna cooked!

• Haruka Kamatani……………………..

And that’s it for this week! I planned a Ruri Rocks corner, but then I remembered that I promised these to be shorter collections of notes. Since I’ve never in my life lied about the length of write-ups (don't count words here), it has been postponed until the next issue. Fun show though, perverts continue to win. Just realized that I forgot to write about Toritsukare Otoko as well, so look forward to that. That movie looks SICK.