#sakuga

2:00–2:14 - high noon style showdown. the screen is visibly cut in half by a dark concrete ruin block; it's a downward-facing rubble street, Birdy high on the left, Nataru low on the right. which could mean anything. shot of a doll, then rain starting, which puts them both in silhouette.

2:14–2:15 - shot of blood washing off Nataru, close-up. he speaks, and the orchestral score kicks in.

2:15–2:21 - starts with the camera on Birdy, ankle-up. at 2:17 Nataru enters the frame already one-fifth of the way across the screen - between frames. next frame, screenshake - Nataru is on twos. next frame, pose change, a BLITZ of light covers the entire screen; you can just barely see his pose change through it. next frame the light goes out and his fist has made contact with Birdy's energy shield. Birdy is braced, the camera is blurry - assume basically every hit from here on comes with screenshake. her shield disperses into motes of light but she still has to physically brace under it: the shield is an additive to her existing blocking, not a passive defense. Nataru has hang time here, so you can see just how hard he jumped into frame - and no, actually, he lands and we're still in 2:17. i double checked.

Birdy walks backwards defensively while Nataru attacks in no martial art i can recognize - he's lunging at her like a dog, arms trailing behind him, and he throws them at her, which is weird and hard to articulate in motion. punch, punch, punch, whiff, and Birdy immediately punishes the whiff with a horizontal chop that gets blood out of his nose (her nails clawing his face open? unclear). this is 2:20. every punch that lands on her barrier gets a big impact noise. after the chop Nataru reels, Birdy palm-strikes him in the face, then leans back. she is very clearly rigorously trained - she has a stance, and you can read it in her economy of motion, while Nataru is just hurling himself at her like a human (altan) projectile.

then the big moment of the shot. Birdy whirls around, and i have to count this. stance: hunched over, elbows cocked back. next frame - she's also on twos (they're both on twos; the camera effects are on ones. it's also raining). she lunges forward, left arm winding back, right arm tucking. the camera pulls ahead of her while Nataru is still reeling from the nose strike. next pose, her face - which was in profile - turns to camera, entire upper body twisting, arms clenched up and out. here it is. next pose: her torso squares to us, face out of frame, right arm splayed, left tucking. next pose she's rotated far enough that we see her back, and her leg is tucking, and you know exactly what is about to happen.

the pose after barely changes - just the right leg tucking further up - and the next one, where the movement visibly starts (upper body bending over, leg tucked all the way), is on ones. they skip the hold on the anticipation pose to make the release more sudden. next pose she roundhouses him in the face with a high heel. the entire contact sequence is on ones. the impact gets the blue flash of her shield - hitting him now - then the next pose has her leg fully extended, the animation settles back onto twos, and she recoils for about four frames while the effects settle. phew. the whole shot ends on a 270-degree airborne kick directly to the face.

2:21–2:24 - the reaction shot, from maybe 30–45 degrees, looking slightly down onto the slope we were just on. Nataru enters lower left and shrinks in perspective as he sails toward screen right, because he just got power-kicked a couple dozen meters (i'm bad at distance). but he doesn't land on his face - the kick's momentum flips him fully vertical, and he kicks off the ground with his palm to reorient, skidding to a stop hunched over on his ankles.

2:24–2:27 - zoom on Nataru's face, eyes hidden. even i know what he's saying without needing to translate: "yare yare." reaction shot of Birdy.

2:27–2:30 - dialogue shots I don't care about. skipping.

2:30–2:34 - Nataru is hunched like a limp corpse, arms literally dangling - same camera angle as 2:21, i believe, but with Birdy in frame now. then he crosses the whole distance in frames. from the last frame of the lank pose: an anticipation for the jump, 4 frames, 2 poses. then the jump, which because of the angle plays as him approaching the camera from upper right until he fills it. two frames of the jump are actually fairly static - i think they saved money by zooming in on a single pose - and the dust in the background doesn't appear until 4 frames after he launches. 6 poses, 12 frames, and he's mid-screen, yelling. that pose holds 2 frames, then he crosses with a left hook so fast his arm is a smear. the immediate next pose takes his centerline from about 40% of the screen width to mostly offscreen. the dust cloud behind him has barely budged. he skids and plants himself over a couple of frames, the camera pans out - Birdy sidestepped him. she jumps out of frame and we cut wide.

2:34–2:39 - wide shot, their bodies very small. Birdy's jump-boost sound effect (implied to be the same underlying tech as the shield) plays every time she jumps or does anything particularly strenuous, like her high-speed dash. they bounce around the ruins, Nataru trying to catch her - Birdy is elegant, and every time Nataru lands he makes a crater.

2:39–2:40 - reaction shot.

2:40–2:42 - Nataru barely visible in the smoke of his own crater, shot from behind Birdy. he lunges at the camera, Birdy ducks away out of frame, and we get ready for The Chase Sequence.

2:42–2:48 - a relatively long shot: a pan across a panoramic background, side view of the two of them just booking it. straight-up sprinting until 2:45. they run at basically the same pace, staring at each other rather than the road. Birdy hits a ramp and jumps with the shield sound - a high, super-reverby metallic scrape, "SHEEEoooommmm…", with almost a full second of tail still lingering in the mix. she jumps; he follows.

2:48–2:52 - a really beautiful shot of Birdy continuing to move while he's stopped (???, answered in a second). we only see her, fully animated, turning a complete 360 in the air while she pleads with Nataru to stop fighting.

2:52–2:56 - the skid. if you ever see anyone talk about this scene - which doesn't happen - this might be the part they mention. the camera is dollying backwards into the interior of a building, facing Nataru from somewhere between a couple dozen and a hundred meters out. for the first 27 frames he's essentially static, occupying maybe 5% of the screen and shrinking toward 3% as the shot pulls back. the camera passes the edge of a blown-out window; one frame later, the moment the building's floor becomes visible, Nataru vanishes. one, two, three frames of nothing but the impact boom of his kickoff - a dust kickup where he was. then the dolly pitches - nose up, tail down - like the camera is physically reacquiring him. framed almost dead center in the window: Nataru, airborne, moving so violently his shirt is riding up, about 8% of the screen. next pose 10%, next pose a solid 20%, dead center - and we're back on ones. 25%, feet contact, arms pitched back to steady himself as The Skid starts. (okay, never mind - it was just that single transition pose on ones; we're back to twos, with the settling poses on threes.) he goes through four or five poses just sliding at the camera, one arm forward and one back for balance, slowly eating screen real estate until he's the entire middle third of the frame. then he pulls himself upright, and the camera keeps dollying out another in-universe foot or so over 15–20 more frames. it's hard to put into words how good this skid looks. it looks great.

(note for clarity: he's talking during the jump - they just keep his mouth hidden and don't animate it. economical.)

2:56–3:00 - a very lightly-shaded sequence that feels like Norio Matsumoto's work. Birdy is stumbling up a slope of destroyed concrete - the rubble is basically cubes - while Nataru slugs her. nothing stellar about the punches themselves, only the choreography: he is literally flinging his arms at her. there is no form. his arms reel behind him and use his whole body's momentum. the second punch lands so hard it throws him into the ground; the third, the one that sends her sailing, is a ferocious downward hammer-punch he spends the full second of recovery from the second punch's stumble winding into, and it hurls her backwards off her feet. every impact scatters a burst of concrete cubes that seem to appear from Birdy herself. the environment is extremely dark.

3:00–3:02 - a complex camera-turn shot i can't meaningfully break down; Birdy rounding a corner with him on her tail while he rips chunks out of the wall.

3:02–3:03 - all-in on Nataru's upper half and nothing else: lavish budget on a single right hook, slow and telegraphed. it even gets slow motion and a wind whoosh.

3:03–3:04 - reverse shot, Birdy dodging it over her shoulder, and she is so mad. from shot start: the first four poses spend 8 frames on anticipation - just Birdy and a black background - then Nataru's fist chops the frame in half from lower right in a smear frame. Birdy's eyes instantly pin small, shift to furrowed brows as it whiffs past by half an inch, then she lunges back and her face starts distorting until it's nearly a dog's - eyes and teeth. the shot ends with her furrowed brow - literally just nose, eyes, hair, not even forehead or mouth - filling the entire frame, plus one single frame of her arm being thrown. the impact is implied by the sound.

3:04–3:06 - Nataru sent sideways almost too fast to see, through a concrete wall, into a second wall, slumping down.

3:06–3:07 - Birdy says "Nataru!" distressedly, her hair floating back down in the reverse shot. she's clearly upset by her own hit.

3:07–3:14 - seven seconds of Nataru barely moving so he can taunt Birdy about her violence.

3:14–3:16 - Nataru's voiceover while Birdy's left eye twitches, reverse on her face.

3:16–3:22 - more lecturing, and the shot ends with Nataru's secret move: his entire silhouette glows white with blue spectral edges, a bright keening sound, and he vanishes - an effect like his body being ripped sideways into two blurs going off the left and right of frame.

3:23–3:28 - he spends the first frames teleporting in behind Birdy - because he can teleport (not new information; this is the final fight). he keeps talking instead of using the element of surprise.

3:28–3:45 - slow left-to-right pan from Birdy (onscreen about half a second) to Nataru, voiceover continuing; then voiceover over a shot of the part of the city the Ryunka destroyed.

3:46–3:50 - shot, reverse shot: Birdy, then Nataru.

3:50–3:53 - Nataru: "ore wa…", then a split-second shot of Birdy gasping.

3:53–3:54 - Nataru violently rushes the camera (with screenshake), roars, and hits Birdy dead on. we see the shot for a literal split second - but it's a very, very clear gut shot, and the sparks off her shield are the only glowing thing in this intentionally dark, drab scene.

3:55–3:56 - i replayed this five times: yes, that is a literal cannon sound effect for Birdy being punched through the concrete ceiling, because he uppercut her in the gut. then he jumps up to meet her - both of them 4–5% of the screen - and slugs her due left, and you get maybe 10 frames of that sideways impact before the cut.

3:56–3:58 - Birdy sailing away toward a concrete pillar. you know exactly what's going to happen, because they spend a full 1.5 seconds letting you watch her shrink into the screen, and then-

3:58 - she hits the pillar, with another cannon-blast sound, immediately recovers, and starts running. this is when it gets good.

3:59 - the stretch i'm confident Matsumoto animated, from the smear frames alone. she starts to sprint - not the running-away sprint, a sprint, hard enough that the energy shield is firing on every footstep. everything here takes barely a second.

4:00 - five, maybe six frames of Birdy going from screen-rear into the distance, turning from a person into a wisp of light - like filming a flashlight or a burning stick in the dark.

4:02 - she tries to sideswipe Nataru; he ducks it and hurls her onward - she spirals away like a thrown football - then he reels back, grabs two chunks of concrete, and launches them after her like cannonballs. whoosh, whoosh.

4:04 - Birdy small against concrete: one chunk barely-visibly hits her, the other gets deflected into the wall, i think.

4:06 - opens on something glowing blue with everything else smeared grey. the camera pans up over 8 frames - it's Nataru. this is your one anticipation beat, because then he zooms camera-ward again - his favorite trick - except this time the flying roundhouse makes him look like a demon. his eyes - glowing red - are visible for exactly four frames. the whole sequence is maybe twenty frames. literally blink and you miss it.

4:07 - contact, with a burst of blue light. Birdy's shield light is organic - blue falling into yellow-white, like a flare. this is not that. it's a mechanical light, his flat pure teleport-blue straight through, and whenever his energy shows up it is by far the brightest thing on screen. Birdy tumbles, hilariously smeared, ass over head backwards. let me count-

4:08 - environment shot: he's kicked her through one wall, then ONE, TWO more, and then-

4:10 - the part i think people got mad about, because everything is drawn in flat shapes and what looks like marker. i don't care, because it's awesome. Birdy is moving so fast that everything is changing every single pose shot (on twos). it's a nightmare for video encoding. every wall she goes through (of which there are many, because buildings have walls) throws a shower of orange-white sparks - her shield's colorway, blue into yellow-white into orange. the backgrounds are simplified all the way down into cubes and rectangles:

she exits that building fast enough that she's inside the next one on the next frame. four buildings. then wall one and wall two of the building after that.

4:13 - same shot - and Nataru catches up with her. we see his humanoid shape just enough to register "okay, that's Nataru," and then-

4:13–4:15 - bodies again: Birdy tumbling sidelong through more walls, taking up most of the frame, until she gasps and Nataru enters from behind camera, moving away from us - because he is about to spear-stomp her into the ground.

4:16 - which he does. and in the next shot he skids on her like a surfboard, kicking up energy sparks, and at 4:18 they both vanish in a plume of smoke that destroys the ground into a burst of rectangles and cubes.

4:20 - cut to a wide shot of the ruined city, one building sprouting a column of white smoke: Birdy getting sent skyward.

a pacing note here: the first two buildings took a split second, and sailing into the next two took another two full seconds. her flight decays. really economical - they only have to be fast at the front, and the slowdown does the physics narration for free.

4:20–4:21 - Birdy impacts the ground, going from a speck to most of the screen.

4:21 - she hand-vaults out of it, at 600 mph or however fast - you genuinely lose the ability to tell which limb is a hand and which is a foot, and i'm not scrubbing frame-by-frame to find out.

4:23 - same shot, or at least it plays as one continuous take. she's back to a full sprint, body horizontal, parallel to the ground. she hits the street corner, skids like a motorcycle (sparks), and turns 90 degrees on a dime at the exact moment Nataru enters frame chasing - except he doesn't sprint. you can tell because he reaches her corner in about 4 frames: he jumped, hurling himself like a cannonball. cut at 4:25.

4:25–4:28 - Nataru shot: his body lurching, visibly creaking and twitching, like something is physically wrong with him, while he taunts her.

4:28–4:31 - a beautiful, lavish shot of Birdy sprinting - arms pumping, full-body - while Senkawa talks to her.

4:31–4:33 - a solid two seconds of Birdy jumping and shrinking away from camera.

4:33–4:36 - background animation! the building she's running along is itself drawn in motion, sliding backwards under her while she runs slightly forward and the camera holds - with the deep background barely moving, i think to sell speed against huge scale. she reaches the end of the building and jumps off (easily hundreds of meters, just as a feat check) - and just before she lands on the next building's corner, two chunks of rubble hit that corner directly.

4:36–4:40 - Birdy has no footing, because Nataru sniped the ground out from under her landing. another gorgeous sequence of her eating shit, rolling to a stop just short of the building's edge, and bouncing out of frame frames before another piece of rubble arrives where she was. she BARELY avoids it.

4:40–4:42 - Birdy starts as about four pixels. worm's-eye from the ground, tracking her from pixels up to 3–4% of the screen as she lands dead vertical with a grunt. then the other part people remember:

4:42–4:44 - what reads at first as a bird's-eye of Birdy running, tiny - until Nataru enters taking up most of the frame, and you realize it's not bird's-eye, it's Nataru's-eye: the camera is pointed where he's looking, like a third-person shooter, as he runs along the roof edge. he jumps.

4:45 - quarter-second reaction: worm's-eye up at Birdy as Nataru lands.

4:45–4:46 - another half-second shot that is so unmistakably Gurren Lagann-school that i want to know exactly who keyed it. you can literally see the pen marks:

then a split second: Birdy gasping, camera over Nataru's shoulder, her arms coming up - she almost always blocks with an X-shaped cross-block, which is interesting; i wonder what style that's from - and Nataru clocks her dead through the middle of the block like it wasn't there. for a handful of frames she is tumbling ass over head at a velocity that would make any human being hurl chunks - a full revolution every frame or two. he hit her upper body hard enough to turn her into a human (altan) buzzsaw.

4:47–4:50 - THUD, THUD, THUD, Birdy scream. we don't see anyone. it's a lavishly animated landscape shot from Birdy's rough POV - or the camera tracking her body without rotating with her - as she's punched through several more layers of city.

4:50 - quarter second: the ruined arch (the iconic remnant of the Ryunka destruction), Birdy sailing toward it against a static background. the next setpiece is also one of the memorable ones.

4:50–4:54 - Birdy lands inside the slot of a destroyed building - wide open window bays, like a parking garage. she's winded, on the ground. then at 4:54: a glint of light hovering in the window, like a missile launch seen from miles off. it holds a solid 15–20 frames. then whoosh - something glowing rips through the frame and she barely rolls under it.

4:55 - what was that? it was Nataru throwing rebar hard enough that it glows. two pieces embed a solid foot into the concrete; a third loses momentum and just clatters. this throw is one of my favorite moments of the whole fight. three frames of the rebar in flight, on ones -

and on the fourth frame the rebar is gone, glow and all, because it's already in the wall, and the camera whips around to watch it land while Birdy rolls sideways. then the other two pieces arrive.

4:55–5:00 - static shot: black, a dark building with a hole in the upper right, and Birdy making her way down through it with her sprint-skating leaving sparks. that's it - we only see her by her sparks.

5:00–5:09 - Senkawa talking with Birdy; rubble; rumbling.

5:09–5:13 - Nataru arrives, limp and livid - doing the Azula thing (or is Azula doing the Nataru thing?): arms dangling, swaying, moving with him instead of being moved by him. Birdy approaches from frame right and grapples him into a bear hug.

5:13–5:20 - Birdy's face while she pleads with him, probably to stop. Nataru grabs her by the hair and talks back; when pulling her off by the hair doesn't work, he grabs her shoulders and headbutts her hard enough to strike sparks.

5:20–5:23 - a Nataru reaction shot so Ping Pong in its drawing that i half suspect rotoscope. which is awesome.

5:23–5:36 - shot-reverse-shots of Birdy trying to get Nataru to her ship so they can fix what's happening to his brain, Nataru fighting back. chatter chatter.

5:36 - half a second of Nataru flinging Birdy, camera on him, her facing away from us.

5:36–5:43 - the music stops being dramatic and starts being sad dramatic. Birdy rolls away, small onscreen. Nataru teleports in just to kick her in the stomach. (note: most of Birdy's rolling in this fight has been sideways rolling? weird.) then he throws a punch and grabs her back mid-swing so she can't ragdoll away from it, crumples her right in the stomach, grabs again, and throws her into the distance until she vanishes offscreen.

5:43 - Birdy is a pixel again. same technique as the rebar: tiny, then about three frames of arrival as she slams into concrete (not hard enough to break it, notably).

5:44–5:48 - a really impressive shot of the two of them finding their feet on the L-shaped slab of concrete Birdy hit - and then the slab lurches over onto its back, the light shifting across the surface as it goes (it's shaped like a chair with no legs - a back and a seat), while they both keep footing. really good.

5:48–5:53 - the slab continues to fall with the two of them anchored to it. Birdy closes and starts gut-punching him back. young-Birdy voiceover comes in and we go to flashback.

6:50 - out of flashback: Nataru, limp and livid, chasing Birdy, growing in frame as he approaches camera.

6:55 - wide side angle. i've noticed Birdy is very consistently positioned screen-left throughout this fight - i don't know if that's specific to this sequence or standard visual grammar for a reason i don't understand. Nataru approaches along the sliver of concrete they're both standing on.

6:58–7:00 - Nataru closes, but we only see Birdy - until his glowing fist enters frame and slugs her in the face. she screams "Nataru!" - a very battered-girlfriend scream - right before impact.

right after: Birdy lands on a chunk of concrete over a ledge. it tilts, and we get this genuinely cool shot - camera below his feet - of Nataru standing perfectly still while the tilting slab carries him into her. his fist is glowing. he punches her straight vertically down into the ground and everything goes black under concrete-destruction sound for a couple of seconds. we don't see what happens.

7:11–end - Birdy flat on her back, eyes shut. a slab is falling; Senkawa takes over the shared body and rolls it out of the way as the whole arch starts collapsing around them. Senkawa explains the body situation to Nataru. they come to peace, the arch comes down in a very 2009 CG shot, and Nataru teleports her out. then a paired-shot flashback: the person who saved child-Birdy was… adult Nataru??? time traveling??? at least that's how i read it - baby Birdy carried bridal-style in exactly the composition Nataru is carrying her out of the arch in now. they make out for like twenty seconds. it's awesome. Nataru's eyes are no longer bloodshot; he says "arigatou, Birdy," and then he's just - gone from the frame, with the teleport sound.

and of course, the moment he teleports her out, the sun comes up and color returns to the scene.