To go into more details here, I was astounded to see how much of the original illustrations were… poorly constructed. I’m talking edges of the painted frame in the shot, parts of the characters just missing because they didn’t crop the frame correctly, cels on the wrong layers, cels misaligned… it was surprising how ROUGH these were. More surprising that I never noticed!
Here’s just a sampling of the mistakes I found.
I did my best to correct these little mistakes such as re-aligning the characters to their painted shadows and fixing areas that were not painted or were cropped weird. Here’s an example of me trying to fix the mistakes in the fairy pond setting:
On top of that I tried my best to emulate the way cels were layered on top of each other. I included shadows underneath the animation frames, and even went so far as to introduce mild fogging to the background layers like what happens when you put too many cels on top of each other. When painting the characters I did not correct myself when I made a little mistake, used a dry brush that would intentionally leave cracks and imperfections, and used a slightly darker color for the painted line-work used to distinguish between the light and dark colors. Here’s a close up look of one of the frames to give an example of what I mean.
Before I ran the animation through a VHS filter I also applied film grain, dust, and scratches. I also added a very faint “jitter” to the first and last couple of frames between cuts to simulate the effect of splicing film negatives together. This was something I noticed a lot when watching old anime so I included it here too. Re-watch my animation and see if you can spot the movement between cuts!
A lot of this subtle detail gets lost when the whole thing is run through the VHS filter… but I think that despite this you still “feel” that these elements are there. Even if the filter ended up smoothing out those cracks and imperfections, the tone and roughness still yielded a more authentic look to me and was still worth the effort to put in there.
Overall I’m really proud of the work I did. It was a lot of fun to do and I learned a lot about older anime techniques in my research for this project. I’ll end on my favorite piece of inspiration. To animate Link’s run cycle I studied the way Ghibli and old Toei animations did running. Curiously I discovered most of their runs were only 4 frame long loops and the at no point is there not a foot on the ground!
That’s definitely not how I would want to animate a run, but that’s how they did it so that’s what I emulated!
Anyway, hope you all enjoy the video!
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