The Forest

The answer is a lot. Especially in Witch Hat Atelier, where a person's hands are a representation of their entire identity.

Hands are especially instrumental to a magic system built around drawing sigils, so it makes sense for them to get extra attention through storyboarding and animation, but the crew at the impeccably named studio Bug Films took it to a new level, giving hands a leading role in their visual storytelling, even beyond what's in the original manga.

The theme is practically stated outright when the magic cops come to erase Coco's memory and Easthies examines her hand to see if she's a terrorist, but finds only the calouses and ink stains of a novice apprentice, literally learning her identity by looking at her hand.

But it goes so far beyond that too. A few minutes earlier when he first appeared, his own hand dominates the frame across these three cuts by key animator Taichi Hattori (服部 汰一) and storyboard artist and episode director Hiroshi Seko (瀬古浩司) uses it to frame Coco and Agott's faces, encroching further and filling more of the frame with each cut and leaving the girls less and less space.

But nowhere are hands more central than Qifrey's secret confrontation with the Brimmed Hat, and this 15-second-long close-up on where the camera tracks his hand as it stretches close to Dr. Eyeball, even intermingling with the almost finger-like tassles at the bottom of the robe and hangs there in anticipation for a tantalizing ten frames,

Only for the tassles to dematerialize just as he tries to grab them, and having exhausted its last bit of energy, Quifrey's hand collapses to the ground, now animated on 1's, and the camera stays locked on to this close-up.

After a brief pause in defeat, Qifrey starts to drag his hand back towards himself and it gradually forms back into a fist and rotates toward the camera for the first time as he swears not to give up. Only then do we return to a wide shot.

That's the main chunk of it, but there's an entire mini-narrative here that plays out almost exclusively through hands. There's some dialogue, but this scene would honestly work just as well without it, maybe better!

This is an adapted excerpt from this video, so check it out if you want:

purity politics

rocky spends half an earth century alone in space, which is notoriously so extremely quiet, and people have been exploring the idea of eridians experiencing a version of touch starvation in the form of like, a lack of noise. and then grace comes along. and he is just so goddamn noisy. he breathes audibly. his body has no exoskeleton, and all the little things inside of him also make noise. he snores. a thing done while sleeping.

rocky does find the fact he can hear all of his internal organs and their functions somewhat disgusting, but eventually it becomes such a comfort to him that when he and grace go their separate ways home, the hardest part is being in the quiet again. the sounds of his ship do little to comfort, because there is no heartbeat. there is no blood rushing to listen to like white noise. no disgusting mouth sounds and 'humming', those vaguely eridian-but-not-quite noises that grace insists do not have meaning.

rocky sits in his ship with the fruits of his journey actively killing him, not knowing what's wrong, not knowing how to fix it, his planet doomed and the families of his crew never receiving their remains, thinking he has failed, and the only thing he can think is that it is so quiet.