Myths of anime [ Part 1 ] - Why anime looks choppy ?

6:56 AM shockFX 1 Comments


There are 2 main players in animation industry , Western style , which you can refer from Disney , Pixar , Dreamworks , Blue Studio and etc , while on the other side , we have anime style , which come from various Japanese companies. 

Some movies from Pixar

Often times we can differentiate their styles as they usually use very different approach. For this time , for the very first part of this series Myths of anime , I would like to cover the topic of FPS , frames per second for anime.






As the reference photo above , the higher the frame rate , the more unique frames shows smoother movements. Generally all videos are using 24/25/30fps , same goes to anime , what makes anime different and choppy is they duplicated a frame a few times. Instead of having 25 unique frames ( all frames look different ) in a second , they copy the same frame twice , 3 times or even 4 / 5 times depends on situation. Some may have wonder why can't anime make use of all 25 frames and make their movement look smooth , especially CG animation , since you can let computer animate the in between frames with ease.

Let's look at a sample of anime - Attack on Titan



You can tell that it's an anime title , not only by the "very anime" look , but also the animation , which they duplicate a frame twice for this 24fps video , technically it's only 12fps for the animation itself because *choppy* animation is how should anime look like , how people have accustomed to it , but that's not all the stories.



Here's how they convert a 12fps animation into a smooth 24fps video.


While animation for character and smoke remain the same as 12fps , camera movement stay the same as 24fps , check out the background that it always moving from frame to frame , and some of the effects such as sparkles will be 24fps too.

But on some other anime , they could duplicate each frame for 3 times , or more , or mixed 2 and 3 times , possibly due to the style of the animation , lower budget , or very tight schedule ( weekly release series ). Combine with these various reasons , lower fps animation has seem to be a trademark for anime , and how people perceive anime , so even though you may let computer animate the rest of the frames , make 12fps or 8fps turn into 24fps , but it won't be feeling like anime anymore.


That's all for this part , more of this will be coming soon.

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