Nostalgic Anime Retrospective No.12] The power of hand-drawn mecha drawings!　The depiction of tanks in the 1988 version of "Dominion" should make your heart flutter!

The "Girls und Panzer" movie will open in theaters nationwide on November 21, and while "Galpan" has been highly acclaimed for its precise tank action using computer graphics, hand-drawn tanks scurrying around on the ground are certainly more difficult to draw. The tanks are also difficult to draw by hand, because they are combined with the ground and buildings, which also requires good directional skills. This time, we will focus on "Dominion," an anime by Shirow Masamune, as a "must-see tank anime.

There are three anime adaptations of "Dominion": the 1988 OVA (directed by Koichi Mashita), the 1993 OVA (directed by Noboru Furuse), and the 2005 OVA (directed by Higa Romafu). The "Dominion" bean tanks, moving comically around in a futuristic city, are certainly suited for animation. In this article, we will look at "Dominion" directed by Mashita, which was the first to be adapted into an anime.

Various Techniques to "Attract" Tanks

In a futuristic city, plastic-armored tanks have been introduced to the police force. Leona Ozaki, a rookie police officer, joins the "Police Tank Corps" and builds a small tank, "Dominion," from parts of a wrecked tank, and takes an active part in it. The short-cut female police officer develops an attachment to mecha, which is similar to the story of "Mobile Police Patlabor," which started in the same year.

Since this is a 1988 film, the tanks in the series are all hand-drawn. The tanks are drawn in such a way as to warp their shapes in response to the action: "When shelling, the tanks recoil and roll backward," "When hit by a bullet, the armor first dents and then explodes after a short time," etc. The drawing is fun to see how the tanks are warped in response to the action. Let's take a quick look at some of the techniques used.

(1) "Broken objects" are used to create destructive power.

Celluloid is used to depict objects that come in contact with the tanks, such as roads that are bent over by the weight of the tanks, asphalt that shatters, and trash cans that are blown away by the impact of the tanks. In the second episode, there is a scene in which tanks of both sides rush into a police station and fight while destroying the floor and walls (using the "all-cell" technique, in which the entire screen is drawn with cells). (2) Harmony processing is used to express texture.

(2) Harmony Processing to Create Texture

The soot and dirt on the destroyed large tanks and the luster of the newly completed Bonaparte are created by adding touches of light and shadow using an airbrush on top of the celluloid images. Harmony processing is a time-consuming technique, but it can even give a sense of the weight of the chassis and the thickness of the armor on a tank that would otherwise be merely a stop-motion drawing.

(3) Caterpillars are not omitted

Caterpillars are carefully drawn without omitting them. It is customary in hand-drawn animation to omit the silhouettes and colors of objects that rotate at high speed, such as drills. In "Dominion," however, the crawler tracks are drawn in sharp detail in many shots, and the number of shots is adjusted to make them appear to be moving at high speed. In some shots, the movements are so smooth that they look as if they were drawn in 3D.

(In particular, the three-dimensional track of the lead tank, the "Dominion," is amazingly hand-drawn with almost no omissions.

) In addition, the artist used double exposures to add depth to the smoke that billows up when the tank is moving, and shook the buildings in the book (a cut-out background) to express vibration, and used all the techniques possible with celluloid and film to depict the tank's weight and precision as a mechanism.

Narrative setting supporting the technology

The tanks deployed by the police tank corps are futuristic in design, with spherical wheels. The "Dominion," however, runs around on four independent crawler tracks, and its chassis looks like a World War II tank, giving it an old-fashioned look overall. Despite this, the "Dominion" is the most recently developed tank in the story.

The main character, Leona, drives her captain's favorite large tank, known as the "Tank Special," so wildly that it is scrapped in the first episode. The "Dominion" is a toy-like bean tank born from a large tank with 10 spherical wheels. The "Dominion" is a toy-like bean tank, which was created from a large tank with 10 spherical wheels. The visual contrast between the two is interesting.

The "Dominion" tanks were inherited from the "Tank Special" tanks, which were made in the age of plastic. In the age of plastic, steel armor has become a rarity. Even if plastic-armored tanks are caught in traps one after another, the steel "Dominion" is able to act alone. Thus, the tiny "Dominion," born from scrap, can be the star of the show.

As mentioned above, celluloid tanks can be drawn as heavy or as light as desired, depending on the technique used. What backs up these drawing techniques and gives them persuasive power is the story setting in which the mechanics were born. Neither the drawing technique nor the story setting is the primary or secondary factor, but they complement each other to create the presence of the mecha and the world view of the work. When we ask the question, "Why do you think that mecha is cool? the answer can be found in the drawing techniques of the animation as well as in the setting of the story.

(Text by Keisuke Hirota)