Too Many Losing Heroines! / Makeine’s cheeky romcom antics hide a dramatic edge, a mix that its promising rookie director calls a bright, cheerful nostalgia. To convey this feeling already channeled by the original author, his team physically and emotionally rooted the series in its real setting to a degree that is hardly seen within similar works.
What would you imagine Makeine’s keyword was in the mind of series directorSeries Director: (監督, kantoku): The person in charge of the entire production, both as a creative decision-maker and final supervisor. They outrank the rest of the staff and ultimately have the last word. Series with different levels of directors do exist however – Chief Director, Assistant Director, Series Episode Director, all sorts of non-standard roles. The hierarchy in those instances is a case by case scenario. Shotaro Kitamura? Was it simply romantic comedy? A more specific term, like loser heroines? In that vein, maybe melancholic love? Given Yanami’s adventures, perhaps calorie intake? You wouldn’t be wrong with any of those, as they’re all important aspects from the source material that his team set to preserve in the adaptation. Makeine is a multifaceted romcom for starters, one that approaches common tropes with loud irreverence but also with an underlying, genuine love for the genre’s ideals—romanticizing its romance, as it were.
Constructing a narrative around the girls who’d been rejected in a more standard setup for the genre isn’t an exercise in deconstructing its norms, but rather a way to tell a story within that framework from an angle that wouldn’t normally be explored. That does often allow it to poke fun at genre conventions and fosters a ridiculous tone for its comedy, but it also imbues the series with intrinsic pain; after all, they’ve already lost once. The flippancy and the romanticism, the good and the bad, the slim and the fat: Makeine’s romcom comprises those dualities.
Then, what is the exact answer to the question? When it came to envisioning Makeine’s totality, the term that Kitamura chose during pre-production was cheerful nostalgia. He revealed that much in an interview for the September 2024 issue of Newtype where he explained how he approached his first project; since the enchanting delivery may have given you the wrong idea, it’s never too early to remind people that this is his debut as series directorSeries Director: (監督, kantoku): The person in charge of the entire production, both as a creative decision-maker and final supervisor. They outrank the rest of the staff and ultimately have the last word. Series with different levels of directors do exist however – Chief Director, Assistant Director, Series Episode Director, all sorts of non-standard roles. The hierarchy in those instances is a case by case scenario.. At the core of his vision, we find the word nostalgia evoking a mix of contradictory feelings, pleasant and painful both. In addition to that, there’s an inherent look at the past with fondness, which makes sense when dealing with a group of girls moving on from treasured romantic feelings that weren’t reciprocated. By adding cheerful as a modifier, you’re tipping that balance towards the amusing chaos that is common within the series, but not invalidating its more pensive side. Add the two words together, and I say you have a pretty good summation of Makeine’s ideas.
Now that we know the goal Kitamura aimed at with this broad, somewhat vague term, the next step is understanding how he attempted to evoke those feelings. To do that, it’s helpful to consider where the director comes from—something he recently did himself, in the first part of an interview for Febri. When asked about his origins and mentors, he shouted out works like Utena and his own interest in staff interviews as the reason to pursue animation in the first place, and studio OLM as his doorway into the industry. While working on unassuming kids’ cartoons, he recalls learning a lot from Norihiko Sudo (series directorSeries Director: (監督, kantoku): The person in charge of the entire production, both as a creative decision-maker and final supervisor. They outrank the rest of the staff and ultimately have the last word. Series with different levels of directors do exist however – Chief Director, Assistant Director, Series Episode Director, all sorts of non-standard roles. The hierarchy in those instances is a case by case scenario. of Zoids Wild, the project that allowed Kitamura to begin handling creative duties) and one Naohito Takahashi. If you happen to know the latter, much about Makeine’s style may have immediately clicked into place for you.
Takahashi’s career is that of an exemplary unsung hero. He’s the type of artist with a legacy orders of magnitude more important than people realize; something that is sadly unlikely to change, now that he has retired just as quietly as he worked. His tenure at Studio Giants across the ’80s and ’90s speaks for itself: an attractive, refined animation director who derived a naturalistic style of direction that wouldn’t extinguish the fun of more eccentric projects. In addition to that, he was an already excellent yet ultimately overlooked mentor back then. Although most people (rightfully) point at Kazuya Tsurumaki as one of the greatest protegees of Hideaki Anno, not many pay attention to the fact that he learned animation directly under Takahashi for many years—something that also influenced the directorial style he would later develop, with fellow Giants member Masayuki as a bridge between these interconnected schools of direction.
While comparatively better known of a link, it’s easy to argue that Takahashi also doesn’t get enough credit for propping the career of the much-beloved character designer and animation director Yuriko Chiba. After learning under him, the two became a killer duo that would wow anyone who’d pay attention to their projects, be it in individual episodes or in the productions they led together. Notably, that includes those who’d invite them to the founding of studio OLM, and all-timer directors seeing their output as a challenge. Despite that tremendous respect behind closed doors, however, it’s fair to say that Takahashi never received recognition from a wide audience.
His best-known work—Berserk (1997), with Chiba as a chief animation director—is rarely even linked to his name, and remains curiously underrated for such a popular series; perhaps because his polite, sometimes poetic naturalism is mistaken for sloppiness, conflated with the conservative production. The actual masterpieces where the duo’s elegance shines best, such as 1999’s To Heart, are adored by superfans, stand as historically influential within the industry, yet remain unknown to most people. In a way, a summary of Takahashi himself.
During the late stages of his career, Takahashi faded into obscurity even more. By the time Kitamura started learning the ropes as a director, he had effectively stepped away from the grind of TV anime, mostly working on films headed by other folks at OLM. Every now and then, he’d rear his head on TV with some storyboards; case in point, the single episode of Zoids Wild he boarded right before Kitamura got similar opportunities. And yet, that nearly retired veteran is a mentor that an up-and-coming star is shouting out as a big reason why he’s able to accomplish what he’s doing with Makeine. A show that, incidentally, retains the wacky fun of the source material while also imbuing it with elegant, poetic dramatizations of the mundane—sounds familiar now, doesn’t it?
Besides these stylistic similarities, understanding where Kitamura comes from can help you grasp why this adaptation approached Makeine from a very particular angle. There rarely is a singular correct route in a creative process. For an anime series directorSeries Director: (監督, kantoku): The person in charge of the entire production, both as a creative decision-maker and final supervisor. They outrank the rest of the staff and ultimately have the last word. Series with different levels of directors do exist however – Chief Director, Assistant Director, Series Episode Director, all sorts of non-standard roles. The hierarchy in those instances is a case by case scenario., that means that you may first look at a story in specific terms and then figure out which creative choices best express them… but you could also begin with an abstract vibe, an atmosphere and the techniques that naturally convey it, then mold the storytelling to maintain that intangible feeling you’re seeking. Given that Kitamura sought that type of abstract concept over any specific term relating to the plot as his starting point, you can easily guess where his instincts trend. And again, this makes a lot of sense given all these influences: from the works of Kunihiko Ikuhara he admired as a youth to the atmospheric master he learned from, Kitamura gravitates towards the expression of intangibles, towards storytellers whose material choices arguably come first.
Mind you, this isn’t to say that he doesn’t care about the original story. It’s clear that Kitamura has approached the source material with respect, and if anything, he initially questioned why a romcom with beautiful girls was pitched to him in particular. Speaking to Newtype, he revealed that the initial proposal—by someone at A-1 Pictures, merely 2 years ago—surprised him a bit given these leanings of his and the known desire to employ them to tell dramatically-charged stories. When he actually read the books, however, he immediately saw a compatibility between his style and the less obvious qualities lying below Makeine’s cutesy surface, so he happily accepted the job. Though it wouldn’t be easy to formulate in specific terms, being that it was his first project, the relationship between Takibi Amamori’s writing and the physical setting of the story spoke to a director with a taste for specific atmospheres.
It’s no secret that Amamori grew up in Toyohashi, in the prefecture of Aichi. This isn’t simply to say that he’s open about it in interviews where he professes his love for a location he finds unique, but also that Makeine itself is bursting with love for the city and its surrounding areas. Not a single event happens in an indistinct location, but rather in specific places that gradually build the image of this romanticized Toyohashi. For a series forced to depict a great variety of food by a glutton otter, Makeine goes out of its way to stick to products found in its setting; even Japanese viewers have been ambushed by this thoroughness, suddenly finding out that the Black Thunder bars both Yanami and Asagumo love to eat as a snack had always been a breakthrough story for a Toyohashi company.
Although valuable in its own right, the process of constructing a believable setting—because it is a real one, as seen by an author who loves it dearly—is only the first step in Amamori’s scheme. As seen within the text as well as in his afterwords, the author tends to build direct links between specific character beats, the tentpoles of the atmosphere, and those material markers of the setting. The adult’s first love lemonade that makes an appearance in the show (and that the staff also got samples of) was introduced by Amamori in a scene that describes the perceived maturity of someone who has fallen in love. Out of all the libraries in the city, Nukumizu and Komari specifically visit the central one; after all, that one is the oldest and most inherently nostalgic, a point the author also sought to emphasize even before Kitamura identified it as the soul of Makeine. Similar trains of thought led to the inclusion of other incidental details of the city, like the night markets that evoke a specific moment of excitement in the afternoon while you watch them get set up. The series uses the city as just another element of its language, so an adaptation simply had to incorporate that.
While the more explicit references are sometimes blurred away in the anime, the accumulation of reality in Kitamura’s TV show occurs all the same. As he first noted in an interview with a local newspaper and has repeatedly alluded to since then, his team did no less than 10 location scouting trips to become deeply acquainted with the setting. Because of this thoroughness, they were able to merge this pre-production process with the making of the show itself; a great deal of shots in Makeine use photos from their real locations with members of the staff posing as the characters, as the constant trips across the project allowed them to frame them as the directors intended in the storyboards.
It’s worth noting that objectively reproducing Toyohashi was hardly the point. Resources like Google Maps have made it easy to incorporate photographic materials as backgrounds, but even if you avoid the crudest pitfalls—like accidentally including watermarks and similar errors—a thoughtless inclusion isn’t going to ground the events in a meaningful way. What exceptional efforts like Makeine succeed at (for the most part) is picking elements so characteristic that they can only be read as an authentic location, while also finding ways to evoke familiarity through that highly specific setting. That, and still make the visuals click together pleasantly, of course.
Kitamura himself noted that he hadn’t even gone to Toyohashi before, but as someone from a relatively small city as well, he instantly felt at home. Much of the pre-production was spent in nailing the elements that would evoke a summery feel the strongest; not just because it happens to be the season that the first two arcs are set in, but also because the idea of being in a modestly-sized city during the holidays would be relatable to many viewers. They may not make that connection consciously, but still vaguely recall time spent in similar places, or simply relate to the universal—yet so precisely captured—feeling of summer heat that Makeine casually irradiates. That is the type of nostalgia they set to capture, pleasing an author who also thinks that, by capturing the setting’s atmosphere with such finesse, the fleeting, brilliant youth of the characters that inhabit it is conveyed.
In the process of refining that concept of cheerful nostalgia into summer in Toyohashi, Kitamura relied on the duo he calls their secret weapons. Aoi Otani and Keigo Arihara are the two concept artists who joined the project so early that the identity of the show hadn’t been determined yet. This is particularly easy to appreciate in the rejected samples of Otani’s boards, which are beautiful in their own right but sport very different colors than the distinct look of the show. It wasn’t just their constant discussions with the director and the trips to Toyohashi that narrowed it down: the interaction between the two concept artists also helped them reach the perfect balance. Commenting on another old artboard, Arihara noted that Otani used to paint a darker world for Makeine while it was the opposite for him. Eventually, they met in the middle for what would be Makeine‘s unmistakable aesthetic.
The result of that process is an art style—and most importantly, an associated mood—that you can close your eyes and immediately picture. Thanks to Otani and Arihara’s artboards, the show is able to paint an internally consistent world; one with a recognizable gamut of greens and blues dying the characters and that, without feeling blistering hot, gets across the idea of a humid summer. The amber colors of the clubroom, which the characters tend to visit later in the day, stand out by contrast. That also applies to special scenes as well as the third arc altogether: having moved onto the fall season, the palette becomes more earthen, while the afternoons shine in deep reds we hadn’t seen before—something that also matches the emotional intensity of the arc. Even without accounting for their surroundings, a simple look at Yanami and Nukumizu’s lunchtime can immediately tell you when that is happening and how it feels.
Although we’ve been saying that the show does a fantastic job at embodying the feeling that both author and director aimed for, there’s one part that does it even better: the opening and ending sequences. The two complement each other, forming a duality like that of the series altogether. For starters, we have a vibrant intro directed and storyboarded by Takayuki Kikuchi, whom we’ve highlighted before as one of the most brazen artists in this A-1 production line led by his fellow Yuichiro Kikuchi. Despite being rooted in the physical setting just like the show itself, the opening’s joyful pop art aesthetic, bouncy animation, and somewhat diegetic typography give off a fun farcical feeling that immediately sets it apart. Right off the bat—or rather, after the second episode where it debuted—it showcases the first half of Kitamura’s cheerful nostalgia.
What about the other half, then? How would you materialize that feeling of romanticized nostalgia in animation? An excellent way, for example, would be to bring back the production method that defined the look of anime for decades, and that we moved on from so long ago that it’s now effectively impossible to recreate. Nostalgia for cel animation and actual film is so common at the moment that creators left and right attempt to recapture their look, but lacking the physical tools to create the former, it tends to be digital mimicry; something that can yield interesting results in the right hands, mind you.
Creators like Junchukan Bonta, however, belong to the resistance who refuse to let the actual methodology get lost—even if they have to reinvent it by cobbling together their own tools. Just last year, their guest appearance on a certain vtuber short film caught our attention; going out of their way to use real film for a type of shot everyone fakes digitally nowadays is the sign of an interesting creator, a madman, or both. The production assistantProduction Assistant (制作進行, Seisaku Shinkou): Effectively the lowest ranking ‘producer’ role, and yet an essential cog in the system. They check and carry around the materials, and contact the dozens upon dozens of artists required to get an episode finished. Usually handling multiple episodes of the shows they’re involved with. for that Chronoir special was Yuutarou Ito, another member of the Kaguya-sama management crew who has held the position of production desk in a TV show for the first time with Makeine.
Unsurprisingly, it was Ito who approached Bonta for the ending sequence, and he got exactly what the team needed: a gorgeous, idealized version of the love in romcom series, as seen through genuine rose-tinted glasses. True to the series’ spirit, the live-action component of the stop motion sequence is the real school that serves as the setting, with the aforementioned concept art duo behind the animation; while it was Otani who drew and painted the cels this time around, Arihara also assisted them in the process. Even the song embraces the nostalgic angle of this sequence, as all endings in the series happen to be covers of older love (and heartbreak) songs by the leading loser.
Who are those beloved failures, though? The first arc in Makeine has enough time to introduce and sink all their relationships. We’re first introduced to the series through a beautiful sequence that, from a different vector than the ending, idealizes the youthful love of romantic comedies. After all, this is the world that light novel-brained protagonist Nukumizu loves to gaze at—one that he separates from his own. Instead, the protagonist’s reality has him sit in a restaurant as he accidentally witnesses someone else’s dramatic love story… and its descent into pathetic comedy. The dynamic that is immediately established there sums up the show: Anna Yanami brazenly walks in to dump her trauma and expose her radical views, and Nukumizu might as well be complaining in a lost alien language because his rude quips have no place within her sacred mind palace.
The first episode already establishes that Nukumizu is the type to dodge close contact with people at school whenever possible and that Yanami is the type to not care about that in the least. Could this relationship head somewhere romantic, then? If you asked Makeine itself, it would cheekily deny the possibility… while still closing that first episode with a loving depiction of Yanami on the roof; her beauty in Nukimizu’s eyes highlighted by some cuts animated on the 1s, and an atmosphere directly reminiscent of the romance he was idealizing at the beginning of the episode. After that, they do grow noticeably close across the series—and not just after they formally seal their friendship with a rejection (?) to end the first arc. This shrinking relationship has a neat visual representation in how close they sit together, as Yanami’s careless approach (especially during their lunchtime together) is something that Nukumizu eventually gives up fighting against.
That teasing will-they-won’t-they amid both madness and drama is something that happens with the other heroines introduced in the first episode. Lemon is a sweet girl who traded all her brainpower for aptitude in sports, hopelessly in love with a dense guy who recently got a definitely not criminal girlfriend. Komari, on the other hand, is a tragically shy creature who was both saved and eviscerated by the developing couple in charge of the literature club; she is, after all, in love with its vice-president Shintarou yet also deeply indebted to his soon-to-be girlfriend and president Koto. After just one episode, there really are too many losing heroines already.
This unlikely mix of outgoing people, nerds, winners, and losers gathering around the literature club have their first major outing together in episode #03—one that is particularly interesting from a production standpoint too. Production desk Ito personally requested Shinichiro Ushijima to storyboardStoryboard (絵コンテ, ekonte): The blueprints of animation. A series of usually simple drawings serving as anime’s visual script, drawn on special sheets with fields for the animation cut number, notes for the staff and the matching lines of dialogue. it; the two had met during Ito’s rookie days in the production of I Want to Eat Your Pancreas, and he believed that he demonstrated the range you need for a series like Makeine. Where the episode truly stands out, however, is from an animation standpoint.
The Yanami sequences at the end of the first episode that we were just highlighting were animated by Hiroaki Gouda, one of the most renowned members of this team. Seeing stunning character art like that in motion sums up why he’s got such a strong reputation as a character designer and illustrator, on top of his animation prowess. What that couldn’t convey, though, is that a truly unleashed Gouda has a tendency towards fun elasticity in animation. Makeine sticks to the pleasant, standard reinterpretation of imigimuru’s designs by Tetsuya Kawakami, but on exceptional occasions, the team is willing to allow someone else to take control. One of the two episodes without Kawakami supervision is precisely this third one, which realizes that the idea of correcting Gouda is nonsense and that the team would be best served learning from his excellence instead. As a result, the episode’s animation is much more playful, looser in form, but also sustained by more comfortable posing. Lemon’s highlight sequence by Yasuyuki Kai and Yuichiro Ida proves that this approach is also compatible with the more romantic side of Makeine.
The first arc comes to an end with another remarkable storyboardStoryboard (絵コンテ, ekonte): The blueprints of animation. A series of usually simple drawings serving as anime’s visual script, drawn on special sheets with fields for the animation cut number, notes for the staff and the matching lines of dialogue. by Kitamura, who excels at depicting the separation that Nukumizu selfishly decided must exist between his world and Yanami’s. After making it clear that they stand on even ground—allegedly as two rejected friends—the show moves onto Lemon’s arc. But before helping her process her misery, much of her own making, episode #05 already makes a point to highlight another great quality of Makeine: the incidental humor. Again, this is true of the show as a whole; the first arc, for example, already had background gags about how impossibly successful the students are, which just makes it funny that we’re following the lives of the rare losers among them.
Known as an outlandish director, Masakazu Ohara takes this to the next level with perhaps the funniest storyboardStoryboard (絵コンテ, ekonte): The blueprints of animation. A series of usually simple drawings serving as anime’s visual script, drawn on special sheets with fields for the animation cut number, notes for the staff and the matching lines of dialogue. in the whole series. The ridiculous idea that Yanami’s dad was paid his full salary in the form of noodles so she’s now trapped in pasta hell is introduced at the start, and without ever addressing it properly, leads to a hilarious clubroom scene; boxes full of those leftovers are all over the club, but Ohara finds ways to frame a whole conversation while maintaining everyone’s expressions visible, yet hilariously never addressing what is happening around them. This deranged spirit is maintained until the end, with the now infamous NTR joke. The team had decided to end every single episode with a final punchline or cliffhanger, and since this one was going to culminate with a misunderstanding about unfaithfulness, at the scriptwriting stage itself they were already looking for a word that contained those three letters for the storyboarder to frame in comedic fashion.
An aspect that sadly also becomes relevant with this fifth episode is Makeine’s poor production schedule. This is not to say that the episode is particularly shoddy—if anything, it’s another example of a team we’ve been calling resourceful for years being forced to make up for yet another instance of bad planning. To be fair, though, it’s more like another team was made to come help; literally and figuratively, a fake team at this point. A look at the credits might tell you that quite a few creators and managers from the Fate/strange Fake crew appeared in this episode. A more attentive one, especially if you factor in everyone who went uncredited from supervisors to the directors themselves, would reveal that this episode was by all means animated by that production line. With their own project in a dreadful limbo and this other popular title at the studio in dire need of help, this emergency in-house juggling had to save the day. The results are good, but as usual, the circumstances that led to it were not.
On a brighter note, the switch to Lemon’s arc also means the debut of another fantastic ending. Hers is an unrequited love that grew gradually, like the namesake fruits in the sequence. As gorgeously rendered here, she has been trying to hold back her longing—but what if she let loose and pursued the person she loves? Those feelings haunt her across this arc, but in this ending, we see the beautiful upside of those dreams. Lemon herself is idealized in a much more adult form, as director Akihito “Kasen” Sudou sought a specialist in tuning up realism like Souta Yamazaki to reinterpret her look. A design process densely packed with meaning and the smart choice to execute most of it in the same plane of animation makes this entire sequence nostalgic from a different angle than the preceding ending, and not any less excellent than it.
For Lemon herself, the ending also beautifully sums up her ups and downs. Sure, the water motif that was so freeing in the pursuit of her love eventually leads to her having to wake up by herself. But that comes after having experienced her ideal form of romance, so active and joyful as the cheerful athlete she is. This is all bathed in a starry sky, something that is derived from the lyrics of the song but also from her own arc; it was a visit to the planetarium that led to her accidentally revealing her crush, and it’s talking about the stars that she begins to move on from that relationship.
We can do some moving on as well, because at this point the show reaches Komari’s arc. Like every other losing heroine, she gets a gorgeous ending sequence of her own. This time it was Makeine’s settei manager Kazuki Kawagishi who was entrusted with its fate, and when thinking about the core of the character—under the acerbic surface of a girl who can hardly articulate words other than die—he could only think of the watercolors of Kiiro Aose; like the character, ones that feel kind, frail yet valiant. As seen in the making-off, the stunning sequence is composed of a ridiculous number of gradually shifting paintings, sometimes with the help of underlying traditional animation by Megumi Maeda.
As mentioned earlier, the switch to the final arc is also noticeable in the world itself. Kitamura noted that, while as of late it has been hard to feel a contrast between September and the preceding summer heat due to otherwise extreme weather, he wanted to emphasize the colder side of the season to make it feel as special as it was to him back in the day. While Arihara was a bit remorseful about his artboards for the fall still containing elements from the summer version, these were ultimately very useful for the series directorSeries Director: (監督, kantoku): The person in charge of the entire production, both as a creative decision-maker and final supervisor. They outrank the rest of the staff and ultimately have the last word. Series with different levels of directors do exist however – Chief Director, Assistant Director, Series Episode Director, all sorts of non-standard roles. The hierarchy in those instances is a case by case scenario.; the seemingly contradictory mix of temperature, lighting, and mood captured the vision of change that is synonymous with autumn for the director. That much is true for Komari as well, since the environment where she has felt somewhat comfortable is about to lose the third-year students who welcomed her.
To bid them goodbye as they deserve, Komari is planning to go all out with the preparation for the upcoming school festival; a club exhibit that Yanami will eventually dub a love letter to her old crush and that Nukumizu will choose to interpret in a more positive, broader showcase of gratitude towards her seniors. When Komari unsurprisingly pushes herself beyond her limits, however, it’s time for the alleged protagonist to begin gathering the eccentric students he’s been coming across in previous arcs—something that sounds heroic until you consider that he is incapable of doing any of the tasks he entrusts to others. No wonder Komari is pissed that you don’t give her a good reason to praise you, Midwater.
It’s no coincidence that this unlikely group comes together in episode #09, storyboarded by Kei Oikawa. If you’ve followed this production line, you’ll know that he’s yet another guest with Kaguya-sama experience, and if you know about his career as an individual, then you’ll realize this material is very much up his alley. Oikawa is known for his ability to foster the feeling of a found family within comedic gangs, and this festival only stands a chance to be a success for our main characters precisely because of the relationships that have been built so far. As the ying to this wholesome yang, episode #09 also features action star Takashi Torii tapping into his experience with other types of action with the self-explanatory role of Karen Himemiya Bust Coordinator. Incidentally, specialized tasks like that exist even when they’re not publicly given a funny name, though they’re much funnier when that does happen—you can thank production assistantProduction Assistant (制作進行, Seisaku Shinkou): Effectively the lowest ranking ‘producer’ role, and yet an essential cog in the system. They check and carry around the materials, and contact the dozens upon dozens of artists required to get an episode finished. Usually handling multiple episodes of the shows they’re involved with. Tetsuya Tamura for it.
Another aspect of this arc that stands out during the festival and its preparations is the feeling of a lived-in school, bursting with students and their individual adventures. While the series doesn’t have the near-psychotic attention given to background characters in a KyoAni production, where the idea of a mob is essentially banned, animators were encouraged to adlib with unnamed students to give more life to the setting. For this festival, this was elevated to a directorial level, making these casually populated and spacious layoutsLayouts (レイアウト): The drawings where animation is actually born; they expand the usually simple visual ideas from the storyboard into the actual skeleton of animation, detailing both the work of the key animator and the background artists. a priority. In that regard, the tenth episode was storyboarded by WIT-affiliated animator Tatsuya Murakami, who also put together 3D models of the festival to find the right angles to frame his first storyboardStoryboard (絵コンテ, ekonte): The blueprints of animation. A series of usually simple drawings serving as anime’s visual script, drawn on special sheets with fields for the animation cut number, notes for the staff and the matching lines of dialogue.. This approach plays to the strengths of this arc, but also of Murakami himself; while he’s a rookie storyboarder, Murakami has been working on projects where that type of 3D-aware framing by the directors themselves is key to the production, such as Spy x Family.
Although it’s this arc in particular that emphasizes it, Makeine as a whole has also relied on 3D layoutsLayouts (レイアウト): The drawings where animation is actually born; they expand the usually simple visual ideas from the storyboard into the actual skeleton of animation, detailing both the work of the key animator and the background artists. as part of that effort to realistically root its events. The truth is that since #04, all episodes have credited one specific layout artist for providing 3D guidelines to reinforce that aspect. The person behind it is the mysterious Tomoko Torii, who comes across as a star veteran hiding under an obvious pen name. Their first credited appearance ever was when they singlehandedly key animated My New Boss Is Goofy #02, with neither additional clean-up nor the intervention of any animation director. Within Makeine, they’ve held that overarching role while also contributing to the animation since the very beginning. Torii is in fact the first animator credited in the series, so they may have contributed to its impressive intro; after all, actual A-1 youngster Mirai Harashima is right behind them, and we know for a fact that she contributed to the scene in the cafeteria between Nukumizu and Yanami according to Kitamura’s Newtype interview.
Leaving suspicious staff members aside, Komari’s arc comes to an end under the expert hands of Kitamura yet again. Komari has successfully bid goodbye to her kind seniors, but what about now? She’s inheriting the position of president effectively by default, but that’s something she’s neither prepared for nor a goal she genuinely wants to accomplish. Despite likely being the best writer among them, she doesn’t particularly care about the literature club; it was a place she treasured because she felt comfortable with the previous members, and while she likes its current group too, her insecurity makes her fear that such a ragtag gang can fall apart at any second.
The writing’s answer to this predicament is admittedly a bit messy. Nukumizu is admonished for selfishly seizing control of the presidency, and for good reason at that. Komari was undoubtedly trying to improve herself as a person by training her social skills. And yet, Nukumizu’s move is ultimately correct too, which leads to common awkwardness in this genre when it comes to the agency of the girls. That said, teenage feelings are a goddamn mess, and Makeine is a well-meaning series with a fantastic director, so it’s no surprise that this arc has if anything hit harder than all the previous ones.
While Komari’s adventures were the final arc, Makeine still found some energy to screw around with a final episode that in many ways acts as an escape valve. This original adventure written by the original author—who cheekily gave it the same title the series had before being properly published—never departs too far from Makeine’s overarching rules, but it’s clear to the eye that it gave more freedom to animators to let loose. Alongside the ever-present Kitamura there is one director you’d love to have on such an occasion: the aforementioned Kasen, who storyboarded and co-directed it to follow up his Lemon ending.
Given his training at studio Trigger and his friends’ taste for fighting animation, Kasen is assumed to be another flashy action star. He has repeatedly proved that it’s a role he can handle just fine, but also that it’s at best just one side of him. Up until this point, his most renowned work was an ending sequence for Attack on Titan—one of the biggest action hits in recent times, yet also a sequence with tangible tenderness and beautiful stylization. As we watch Yanami’s trendy photos devolve into adorable scrunkly demons with looser forms, his willingness to let the team deform the characters further than even Gouda had dared to becomes obvious. In a show that has fostered a naturalistic depiction of its world in the way Makeine has, a ridiculous horror scene that looks straight out of a Trigger title turns into an even funnier twist than it would normally be.
But again, Kasen is an artist of many talents. Previous storyboards of his had stood out for his ability to capture moments of intimacy with very polite camerawork; framing that obscures parts of the characters when they’re at their most vulnerable so that it doesn’t feel like we’re forcefully walking into them. In between its looser moments of madness, this episode also casually does so, even building a cheeky final gag around this idea of limited visibility. With such an elegant, funny result, you’d never be able to tell that it got finished the day before the broadcast.
A regular series might have chosen to end with Komari’s climactic arc instead, but wrapping up with this goofy yet weirdly romantic final outing feels like the right way for Makeine to go. It’s quite the fitting end from a personnel point of view too, with a curious accumulation of inspirations. As the original author, Amamori has professed his love for Kaguya-sama, a series that was animated by this crew, and for KonoBi—a manga by Makeine’s designer, which also had an adaptation led by one of the directors we just talked about. Another known source of inspiration was BokuYaba, a great romcom that showcased its absolute best direction in the sixth episode of the first season. The person in charge of it? Kasen, just like this finale. The leading girl? A glutton whose given name is Anna, just like Yanami. I think I believe in God after typing all this. I’ll go pray for a sequel I suppose.
Support us on Patreon to help us reach our new goal to sustain the animation archive at Sakugabooru, SakugaSakuga (作画): Technically drawing pictures but more specifically animation. Western fans have long since appropriated the word to refer to instances of particularly good animation, in the same way that a subset of Japanese fans do. Pretty integral to our sites’ brand. Video on Youtube, as well as this SakugaSakuga (作画): Technically drawing pictures but more specifically animation. Western fans have long since appropriated the word to refer to instances of particularly good animation, in the same way that a subset of Japanese fans do. Pretty integral to our sites’ brand. Blog. Thanks to everyone who’s helped out so far!
Become a Patron!