Anime Column] 100 Anime to Watch by Keyword! 100 Anime to Watch: Vol. 14 "Kemono Friends" and more

Drinking parties among anime fans tend to be a game of association. Whenever someone says, "XXX has XXX scene," someone else replies, "Speaking of XXX scene, don't forget XXX. Anime and animation are connected by invisible threads like this. Let's follow the "anime to watch" using keywords as clues.

In the January 2017 season, "Kemono Friends" attracted a great deal of attention. The phrase "You're so XXX Friends!" would have swept the Internet before its broadcast.

The setting of the film is a facility called Japari Park. Animals transformed into beautiful girls live there. The protagonist, who has lost his memory, sets out for the "library" in the facility to learn his true identity with the help of Serval and others he has met.
The cuteness of the various animal characters, called "Friends," who have been transformed into beautiful girls (there are also UMAs such as Tsuchinoko), was supposed to be the selling point of the work. While the characters are certainly attractive, it is the science fiction aspects of the characters' backgrounds that are attracting the most attention.
The main character is apparently human, but the Friends seem to have no concept of "human. Japari Park is practically in ruins. Looking at these fragments, it is difficult to stop imagining "a world in which beautifully dressed animals survive as post-humans after the extinction of the human race" (or maybe not).

Supporting this unique worldview are the characters depicted in celluloid 3DCG.

Eisenstein called hand-drawn animation's "ability to change dynamically into any shape" "protoplasm. In other words, hand-drawn animation is nothing more than a combination of lines, and that is in fact the secret of its vitality.
This is not the case with characters drawn in 3DCG. They occupy a solid space in the virtual space and do not "change dynamically into any shape. Rather, "changelessness" is the strength and weakness of 3DCG.

The Friends act based on "the habits of the animal" and "the characterization associated with it," and since there seems to be a binding of one person per species, the habits of the animal are directly tied to the character's personality in a straight line. As a result, each character's words and actions are symbolic and iconic.
Characters who have been given iconic personalities, far from the protoplasm of animation, seem, because of their artificiality, to be distant from human beings.

Therefore, I would like to consider "characters drawn with 3DCG" as a keyword in this article.

Yaoyorozu, the animation production company behind "Kemono Friends," produced a series from 2013 to 2015 called "Tesagure! Club Activity Mono" series from 2013 to 2015.
In this series, cell-look 3DCG characters perform "Aru Aru Jokes" and "Big Comedy" in a "club activity to think about a new way of club activities" setting. It is a parody of the so-called "anime adaptation of daily life 4-koma works," and at the same time, it is a condensed version of the gag parts of those works.

The interesting thing about this work is that the characters' dialogue deviates from the prescribed lines and is developed in no small part through the free talk of the cast. In fact, it is the "humanness" of the cast that comes out from this free talk that gives the celluloid 3DCG characters a human touch.

This "humanness" (which has nothing to do with how good the acting is) is what separates the very artificial "Kemono Friends" from "Tesagure! Club Activity".
Incidentally, "Tesagure! The very first work that tapped the vein of 3DCG characters and free talk employed by " Tesagure! In this work, the three fairies living in the fairy forest, Pikupik, Silsil, and Korokoro, are the main characters, and the girls give theme talks and do improvised postrecording after watching surrealistic images.

As many of you may know, although some of the staff and production structure have changed, there is almost a straight line of connection from "gdgd fairies" to "Kemono Friends" in terms of staff. In this sense, it is significant that "Kemono Friends" (even though it is a media mix project linked to a game) has done away with free talk and the gags that come from it.

It also means that the 3DCG characters have no protoplasm and have a somewhat doll-like eeriness. This eeriness is incorporated into a surrealistic gag in "Poppy the Performer.
The main characters are "Poppy," an apprentice clown, and "Kedamono," a mysterious animal wearing a mask. The content is quite black, with explosions, character mutilations, and shootings making regular appearances, but the doll-like hardness of the 3DCG characters accentuates the surrealistic flavor rather than the cruelty, which makes it a gag.
3DCG characters are now getting quite close to hand-drawn characters, but in fact, in terms of "possibilities," there is more than one way to go.

(Text by Ryota Fujitsu)

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