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

ygoanimation:

Animation Highlight: Junpei Ogawa 小川純平

Ogawa isn’t really talked about all too often despite how awesome he is. He’s been around the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise since DM, mostly doing key animation work under Kenichi Hara’s episodes. His style (much like Hara’s) includes a lot of high speed motion, jumpy but dynamic character animation, and extravagant, hard-hitting effects. Those are a bunch of fancy sounding fluff words, but you’ll know what I mean when you see it.

Since Ogawa’s got a LONG pedigree when it comes to Yu-Gi-Oh, I decided to make a video compiling the vast majority of his work on the series. I missed a couple of episodes, mostly just ones where I couldn’t make a solid enough guess. By the way, “(?)” means that I know that Ogawa worked on the episode, but the actual clip used is the best guess I could make.

The final video is 20 minutes long. I haven’t figured out an ideal place to upload it yet, so until I figure that out, we’ll have to live with this little teaser/gifs.

I mentioned earlier that Ogawa is similar to Hara’s style, mostly due to them working together for so long. What I want to delve into specifically is Ogawa’s action scenes, and his effects. He uses a lot of sharp effect lines, often taking advantage of multiple layers of color within the effects (especially his explosions). 

His early work in DM is hard to notice, because he probably hadn’t quite gotten into his style yet. Towards the end of DM’s run, his effects start to become a little more exaggerated, and start forming into the style more like his work now.

In GX, he worked under Hara again for every OP/ED. He made a random appearance in GX #8’s climax, bringing a level of animation generally not seen with the vast majority of its episodes being outsourced to Dong Woo Animation. #8 was no exception, but for some reason or another, Ogawa handled it.

During 5D’s, Ogawa really gets to shine with some great effects animation, unique and great to look at action scenes, and every now and then handling the climatic parts of important duels.

ZEXAL brings over more of the same from 5D’s, but Owaga tends to get locked into doing the same kinds of scenes over and over again. His parts are very often during the duel’s climax, and he animates a shot of the loser flying away into the background, and crashing hard into the ground. It still looks cool, but editing together the ZEXAL portion of the video became very tedious, with the same kinds of shots getting used again and again.

ARC-V brings back 5D’s-era Ogawa to an extent, but his scenes are usually shorter, occur more frequently. This is probably due to ARC-V having generally lackluster animation (especially compared to ZEXAL). A lot of the key animation staff is just scattered around. Production-wise, ARC-V tends to be a bit of a mess sometimes, but good ‘ol Ogawa is there to at least give us some eye candy every now and then.

I hope this proved to be at least a little bit informative! And I hope I can get people talking about this great animator, who tends to not get much time in the spotlight because he’s never stepped into an animation supervisor role himself. (He’s been doing only key animation for over a decade now!)

sliferthewhydidigeta:

Tag Force is back with all 5 generations!

This video put out by VJump showcases many of the main characters you can play with/against.

(Duels start around 1:45)

Is it just me or does Yami Yugi sound like a different VA?

Yugioh Tag Force Special will be avail to download ONLY in Japan 1/22!