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Team Rocket motto animations

Team Rocket

Team Rocket

Rocket Elite
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Does everyone else agree that Team Rocket mottos were more fun to watch when they didn't use the exact same animation for it practically every time they recited it?

I think it's unfortunate that that seems to be what's going to happen throughout the Sun and Moon series as well.
 
When I watch old episodes, I get nostalgic about how FUN the motto could be! I get that the animators are probably saving time/money by running the same sequence every time, but there's definitely some wasted opportunity there.
 
The BANK animation for the Rocket Gang is solely to save time and drawings. In Japanese animation key animators are paid by the cut (shot) and in-between animators are paid by the drawing. This is why your average episode only has about 300 cuts and 3,000-4,000 drawings. When it came time for XY to begin the staff were allowed about 20% more drawings than they had been for the previous series. Of course, the character designs were also becoming more and more unwieldy. When you have to spend more time drawing more drawings of increasingly complex designs production can become a real pain in the ass, especially when most of your animators are bad and need to be supervised. Introducing a BANK animation cuts down on that and also allows for a good animator to create a cool BANK animation. Transformation, attack and combing BANK animation has really grown to be a competition between Japanese animators. When Oohashi Aito did a new Thunderbolt animation for Pikachuu in XY & Z Episode #1 he was definitely responding to Iwane Masa'aki's Thunderbolt BANK animation. Now, for Sun & Moon, Iwane is trying to one-up Oohashi with his new Pikachuu Thunderbolt.

Speaking of which, Iwane definitely tried something new with his BANK animation for the Sun & Moon Rocket Gang. His timing for the movements of the characters during their full-body walk cycle shots had a very nuanced, but 'realistic' approach. I definitely felt like he was trying to channel some of the great character animators, like Okiura, Iso or Ebata.
 
I do miss the times when they didn't rely on banking/stock footage for the motto, but there's always the bright side. Art-wise, Rocket Gang look like they came straight out of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann in the SM motto animation, which is always a plus in my book.
 
Credit where it's due, I do think that SM's stock animation flies miles above XY/any of the BW ones. It helps that the motto itself is new and supremely ridiculous. I think I will find the reuse of this less objectionable.

Still though, I miss the fact that in any given week in OS-DP you could get a wacko motto which was either thematically linked to the subject matter of the episode or unrelated to anything, ever. I can think of... 3 non-standard mottoes in XY? Pretty sad.
 
I wondered about that at the time as that animation seemed to be +++ in quality, completely out of keeping with the rest of the episode (in the best possible way).
 
As much as I complain about the stock mottos, I've been rewatching a lot of Johto lately and there were a lot of episodes where the motto was basically the same thing-- a full-body shot slowly panning up during the first half, closeups of their faces when they said their names, then some triumphant pose for the last bit. There were definitely some times they mixed it up, but on the whole it wasn't that much different than using stock animation.

I've always thought a compromise could be reached-- animate 4-5 full motto sequences and splice them together differently every episode. Of course, that was before the ridiculous Alola motto (which tbh I really don't like, their lines are too long-winded and it doesn't flow as well as the older ones) and I don't think it would work much. I think the new animation, while it looks better than XY's, is even more distracting because it starts slower and has them start in a more unnatural pose. When it goes from them standing up holding net-shooting guns to sitting down, it's super jarring.

Anyways here's hoping we get more variations this series!
 
kantoskies said:
I've always thought a compromise could be reached-- animate 4-5 full motto sequences and splice them together differently every episode.
Click to expand...
Tbf this is what they did in DP and I remember bitching about it a helluva lot. Perhaps I'd have accepted it gratefully if I knew what was to follow?...
 
There's a limited amount of time, money and animators available. That's just the reality of works of art made for commercial consumption. The staff have to make due as well as they can given the obstacles they face. Using BANK animation is a strategic maneuver meant to do good for the overall project. The production staff at least go out of their way to turn this situation into both a strength and a beloved tradition, too, by making the BANK animation a work of an ace animator.
 
I'd be more sympathetic to budget-related issues, but they have a much higher budget nowadays and they only started relying heavily on stock motto animations in nid-BW. They had a shoestring budget in Kanto and I think that's the only region they never used stock footage for the motto.
 
kantoskies said:
I'd be more sympathetic to budget-related issues, but they have a much higher budget nowadays and they only started relying heavily on stock motto animations in nid-BW. They had a shoestring budget in Kanto and I think that's the only region they never used stock footage for the motto.
Click to expand...

The directing and animation was also worse back in Kantou. If everyone had been as smart as Asada Yuuji became during Diamond & Pearl the Kantou episodes would've been much better. The smarter use of BANK animation combined with the extra drawings now allowed has definitely helped increase the quality of the series.
 
As much as I understand the financial / logistical reasons for using stock animation every episode, that doesn't change the fact that seeing the same one sequence nearly every episode for three whole years gets really boring really fast. Even though, as kantoskies pointed out, the earlier mottos were mostly just static shots of the characters, we at least got something different to look at every episode. Nowadays it's just "oh, this is starting up again, guess I have time to go and pour myself a drink or something."

And it's even worse now since the Sun & Moon motto animation looks like hot garbage.

Best Wishes! had a few motto animations that they'd cycle through (it's pretty much the only thing that series did right related to the trio) but unfortunately they didn't continue that for XY and Sun & Moon (so far). If they would at least do that then the motto wouldn't be as skippable as it is now. It's still very early in Sun & Moon so we'll just have to wait and see.
 
Sun & Moon Episode #7 has an original role call scene. The scene also introduces a new variation of the Rocket Gang theme.
 
I wouldn't get my hopes up yet, XY014 and XY017 both had unique animations (XY014 even had a unique rendition of the music too) and we all know how that turned out </3 Maybe the variations will become more frequent but I still think the animation we got in SM003 will be the standard.
 
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