"Any card—so long as it exists—has a power that is needed."

yugiohdilf:

xamaxenta:

Been obsessively rewatching this clip and I’m dead certain the whole shot is animated by Ogawa as well

The sharp feline eyes on Judai and the clean silhouette of all the drawings is very similar

But its the skinny lightning/sparks effects, intensely slanted eyebrows and solid shadow under Judai’s chin that gives it away as Ogawa’s work

xamaxenta:

Another excellent animator from the ygo gallop team

Hirotaka Kato the character acting master with a funky subskill in really nice hair animation

Personally I credit them as being the only person brave enough to give us what Judai’s hair would look like when wet how and why is this important ?

Animating hair is already a very time consuming aspect of animation, especially if a character has a special style (often the case in anime in relation to a protagonist and especially so in yugioh harhar) because keeping the hairstyle of said characters iconic do and breaking it to make it believable in its own physics is difficult - and more reasonably the animator is most likely not getting paid enough to do hair animation in 2D with proper primary and secondary actions.

Another thought is usually you dont see much hair animation outside of the typical “sudden breeze” that just waves the main silhouette of the hairstyle

Usually you don’t see animators going out of their way to reimagine a characters existing design, doing it because they want to and doing it without reference of what that would like. Judai’s model sheet is as you expect

None of his character expression explorations at the base of both pages of this spread really showcase his hair having any movement - sure this is just stuff they compiled to release officially, there may be tons of pages of unreleased art from the dev and animation team for GX of all the characters but this is most likely the official bare bones reference they gave the entire team for Judai anything extra may be sketch notes from the director

Back to why the wet hair is so great

About an eighth of a second of animation and already Kato showcases so much energy in such a short amount of animation time

Aaand the same shot slowed down to a fifthish to a quarter slower, its about three beautiful frames of Judai’s hair and expression, the establishing frame of his hair flat, the movement in the second frame where he tilts his head as anticipation and a third drawing as the follow through exaggerated to lead into the quick zoom out to fit the rest of the cast in

It’s very exciting to see how in two frames Judai was set up as the anticipation and the lead into another shot of the opening, its fantastic, especially with the wave crashing onto him prior to this moment as another transitional purpose relays the comedic moment of him striking a heroic pose and then getting dunked on by a wave, the energy of youth and stuff

Also his control over character expression is exceptional and so natural and you can see Kato’s flair for great action through drawing in the way he animates the lead of motion through Judai’s fists, punctuating his shifts in expression through big arcs of body acting

yumeyumesabir:

xamaxenta:

There was one tiny shot in the GX Anime that stood out to me and it happened just before Judai versus Society of Light Asuka happened

Theyre standing on the duel arena and Asuka steps into her zone and coldly asks Judai: Did you bring it ?

This is in reference to the satellite nuke key that Judai was entrusted by the Prince’s soul??? Other half given to Edo at the time

Judai responds by simply dropping the key by the chain through his fingers

What is so special about this shot? It only lasted about a second and a half long so why did it leave such an impact on me?

The shot is set up as so, I wish I had a gif of it:

It’s an underarm shot, low angle with the camera positioned behind Judai with half his leg in camera and his clenched fist beside his thigh, Asuka is in the background blurred out because Judai’s hand is the focal point

Then there’s a soft clinking sound cue and Judai does this little trick with his hand and out drops the key and it swings pendulous for two quick rotations. He says nothing

It’s such a good piece of subtle animation, the sleight of Judai’s hand and the twitch of his fingers to allow the key on its chain to drop - it’s also pretty badass because you would expect him to hold it out and say something but he doesn’t, he just acknowledges he has it and that’s that

He’s here to save a friend he doesnt really give a shit about the key (as per his duel versus Saiou to rescue Edo which is whole other analysis because WOW Saiou really went and almost killed his childhood friend in some specifically conventient lava)

thesparkofrevolution:

Jaden has a very satisfying design to draw.

#jadenyuki #yugiohgx #yugioh #judaiyuuki #art #digitalart

nialumin:

You haven’t changed one bit

shysheeperz:

A New E-Hero! Neos

(Check out my Subbed!GX Stream Masterpost!)

A despondent Judai finds himself in hyperspace.  With the guidance of a strange yet friendly dolphin alien, Judai reunites with the cards he drew as a child which were launched into space by the Kaiba Corporation–but due to the power of the universe’s will, they became perfected cards.  Judai then duels a hostile space creature, and he begins to understand the concept of his new deck, which harnesses the power of Neo Space, a body of energy at the ends of the universe, to power up his Monsters.

Here’s a finalized!62 for you! Despite the randomness of Judai finding himself in a world 600 million miles away because of a shooting star crashing into him, this is an interesting episode that helps set up some overarching plot points we’ll see for the rest of the series, between Neo Space, the whole “power of righteous darkness” thing, and the concept of dark (good) vs light (evil) which doesn’t happen often.  We also get Judai’s mental fog due to the effect Saiou’s powers had on him clear up as he rediscovers the kid inside him, and–as a Japanese blog I looked up some lines on put it–”the start of the ‘Neos overuse’ legend,” lol.  Of course, this also sets up the next few “Judai’s lost” episodes, but we’ll see soon enough that there’s a reason for them.

Animation fix-wise, nothing to report here! (EDIT, 2021: That was a lie; one fix I came back to do under the cut!)

Enjoy, folks; I’ll be getting started on 63 soon, as Kenzan gets some time to shine, and everyone suddenly gets hungry…

Keep reading