Saturday 22 December 2012

Birdy The Mighty: Decode Animation Analysis Part 3: Norio Matsumoto

This will be the third part of my analysis of the animation in Birdy The Mighty: Decode. Today i will be discussing the work of Norio Matsumoto. Having seen a lot of Matsumoto's work on Naruto: Shippuden beforehand, i wasn't really sure if he could top himself in this show but the scenes of animation  he produced were some of the best and most intense sequences that I have ever seen. I already extrapolated my thoughts on Shingo Yamashita's impressive work on the show in his 2 most memorable scenes in the show but for Norio Matsumoto, he was charged with bringing to life 2 of the most emotionally intense sequences in the show. The first is in the video below.




This is the same video as in my previous post but here's my analysis of Norio Matsumoto's work in this sequence. From the start of season 2 of Birdy, you'd been watching Birdy and Nataru's relationship progress and their ideals clash as to how they should deal with the fugitives and it all comes to a head with a clash of Justice (Birdy) VS Veangence (Nataru). The way that the fight plays out is rather than a full on battle like you would expect, Birdy doesn't give up on Nataru seeing reason till the very end. Its mostly a chase with Nataru just going insane and trying to beat Birdy into submission. The way in which speed is depicted in this fight is very diffrent to how most other series would protray it. Some people who are familiar with animation techniques would say that there is a gross mis-use of a technique called smearing. That would mostly be in Shingo Yamashita's scenes however. Norio Matsumoto, like most of the other animators that worked on the show, gets to also work with some background animation which makes the scenes all the more impressive to look at. After Yamashita's fairly impressive work Matsumoto takes over and the characters start to look more or less normal with slightly less detail and it continues to further show how far Nataru has fallen with him just outright trying to kill Birdy several times. The biggest change from Shingo to Norio though is that Norio has a more dynamic style in terms of the angles and the way the characters move with the biggest example being Nataru's head tilt which is definitely a Norio touch. The scene left me so emotionally drained after I saw it that I don't think there is much left for me to say about the whole sequence except for FUCKING HELL THAT WAS AWESOME. On to the next Norio scene now.


The scene starts at around 2:40 in the above video. Similar to the fight between Birdy and Nataru, Norio employs a lot of dynamic action in the movement of the characters in this scene. Unlike the previous scene this one is mostly Violin VS a shitload of robots and its rather interesting seeing the lengths the marionette goes to find Birdy. Birdy and her relationship to Violin is one of the more interesting parts of the series as it also factors into the finale and why Nataru won't listen to reason in that finale. In this sequence i found that the use of the CG was a bit distracting but seeing as it didn't last long i didn't mind. This scene as well is one in which i don't have much to complain about seeing as i would be just repeating myself as i described everything i mainly cared about in the paragraph above but this and the sequence in the finale are Matsumoto's best scenes in the series in my opinion and i will end the post with that.

Next time, hopefully i will finish the series off with a final post Tomoyuki Niho so see you then. *wink*

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