My Hero Academia’s great animation has been lauded in almost every one of IGN's episode reviews. The superhero show’s fights are explosive on multiple levels, and you’d have a hard time finding a scene that isn’t done well. Yoshihiko Umakoshi, My Hero Academia’s chief animation director, told IGN through a translator at Anime Expo 2017 just how studio Bones goes about achieving the show's great animation.
In addition to having an experienced team, Umakoshi attributes the studio’s success with the animation quality to the staff’s interest in My Hero Academia. He said a lot of the staff are fans of the original manga, and their passion keeps it going; even Umakoshi has a favorite character.
“It’s really fun to draw the two sides of All Might. The one that’s very macho, and the wimpy version,” Umakoshi said. His favorite scene, though, doesn’t have anything to do with All Might. That goes to a moment in Season 1, Episode 2.
“That episode is very memorable to me, because that speaks to how Deku is going to be, the type of hero he is going to be,” Umakoshi said. “That actually sets up how Deku is supportive of Bakugo and actually tries to help him.”
The team's biggest challenge is often time.
The team’s dedication and experience are especially helpful when combating what Umakoshi said is the team’s biggest challenge: time. Whether it’s working on the current season or preparing aired episodes ready for Blu-ray, Umakoshi said most projects are usually back to back, so the team has little time to recuperate from one deadline to another.
“Each episode director, since they’ve worked [on] so many episodes by now, they’ve gotten used to keeping up the pace and the quality and the work process,” Umakoshi said. “I think that we’ve been able to keep the consistency in that way.”
While Season 1 had its fair share of intensity, Season 2 has been demanding not only for series' characters but also the animation team. Particularly, Umakoshi said that probably the toughest scene Bones has animated so far for My Hero Academia is Todoroki’s origin story.
“That was such a great arc. We wanted to make it as close to and not to underdo the original, so we tried to work very hard on that,” Umakoshi said. “It was very challenging.”
Looking forward to the rest of Season 2, Umakoshi said he’s interested in some of the thematic evolutions of the show.
“Deku along with his classmates, they’ve idolized All Might and they want to become superheroes. You see that the theme going through the whole season is ‘what is hero,’ and they’re trying to find what it means to them,” Umakoshi said. “The expansion of that theme going forward is something that we look forward to. The new character Stain, that development. He’s a very complicated character. The addition of Stain is going to create a huge change into the storyline.”
My Hero Academia is currently airing on Crunchyroll, Funimation, and Hulu. For more from Anime Expo 2017, be sure to check out this year’s huge Anime Expo cosplay gallery and see what’s coming to Funimation’s simuldub summer lineup.
Miranda Sanchez is an Editor at IGN. You can chat with her about video games and anime on Twitter.
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