Introduction

What is Anime | Why Anime in Flash | About the Author

This is my mock up of the Rurouni Kenshin anime in Macromedia Flash. Entirely drawn by me using the Flash Toolset, based frame by frame on the Rurouni Kenshin Opening Animation sequence. Check out the quicktime version here

As many otaku know, anime over the net has looked fairly poor since internet video formats do not handle the anime art aesthetic very well. The anime art aesthetic uses a lot of solid coloring for the foreground characters and objects but due to signal conversion noise and all other sorts of technical issues, the clean simple elegance of anime is usually converted to a blocky artifcact filled mess when using standard internet video formats.

Enter Macromedia Flash. Flash is a 2D animation file format that requires the Flash Plug-in which know comes standard with most browsers. Flash is now for small file sizes and interactivity and has been widely used to create very stylized animating interface designs. But Flash is also being used to animators to recreate story animation over the net, like Comedy Central's South Park and ShowTime's online-only animated show WhirlGirl. But these shows don't truly tap into the power of either animation or Flash, but by combining Flash with animetion, I hope show both the beauty and splendor that is anime and tap further into the potential of Flash technology.

But of course, there are tradeoffs. While Flash can cut file sizes by a significant amount and give cleaner lines and colors, Flash's frame rate is dictated by computer speed and for complex animations the decrease in frame rate results in choppiness and a slowness that is not a problem in the standard internet video formats. But aside from file size and image quality, flash offers a lot for the animator as well. The drawing tools are pressure sensitive, have "smart" coloring algorithms, and there are owning skinning, easy to automate panning, and since the artwork is vectors, infinteless scalablitity.


QuickTime (Sorenson)	Flash

This is worse case scenario, taking QuickTime at it's worst and showing flash at its worst (in terms of picture quality). QuickTime uses Sorenson Compression allowing for a huge saving in file size and yet the file size for this sample clip is 3x that of the Flash clip. Notice the heavy pixelization and the miscolorization.