OK, some minor spoiler warnings here for the uninitiated, before you click that link above. It’s the climactic sword fight in the anime movie Sword of a Stranger, directed by Masahiro Andō, but it’s worth watching because while Andō may have directed the film, Yutaka Nakamura—the star animator and longtime BONES employee—put some of his finest cuts into this scene.
If you’ve watched any of the popular action anime to make it to the United States in the past two decades, you’ve seen Nakamura’s work on display. He was the one tasked with making Spike Spiegel’s fight scenes in Cowboy Bebop flow like the movements of Bruce Lee. He’s the one who drew the giant steampunk robots of Escaflowne with a speed and courtly grace—but also with an attention to their weight that was true to their size. The wolves in Wolf’s Rain look realistic—which any animator will tell you is a hard thing to do—because he had his hands on them. The flashy moves of G Gundam—an anime so weirdly jingoistic it’s almost unwatchable—are somehow mesmerizing because of the intricate detail he worked into its robots’ fingers and the fluidity of the destruction they cause. You can read translated portions of an interview he gave in 2003 about a lot of this and his reactions to a lot of questions about his work is laughter. It’s awesome.
Sword of the Stranger offers a great entry point to guy’s style—marked by a lightsaber-like animation of swords, explosions of terrain (snow, in this case) around his characters’ movements, and facial reaction shots to stuff like Spike Spiegel’s shoe connecting with a goon’s jaw. It’s the duel above between the movie’s antiheroic ronin Nanashi and its sadistic invading foreign soldier Luo-Lang. The fight itself is filled with surprises, frenetically dizzying camerawork, and perspective shifts that capture a surprising amount of character in the midst of the action—from Nanashi’s resolute breathing to Luo-Lang’s sweat-soaked bloodlust. (And we can’t ignore the fact a sweeping score from Naoki Satō propels the scene even more. The movie snaps from rote period piece to samurai epic almost at the drop of a hat.) Most artists work their whole lives wrestling with themselves to put out work that even gestures at being this creative, detailed, and fluid. Nakamura did it with a scene that lasts less than five minutes, and he’s still working—most recently on the acclaimed anime adaptation of Blood Blockade Battlefront. As one of the rare regular staff animators in the anime industry (almost all of his stuff has been work for the studio BONES for several years now), he’s going to keep producing terrific work, but for my money the Sword of the Stranger fight might always be my favorite. Its adrenaline is high, its environment is one any adrenaline-happy kid would dream of prancing perilously around, and it works a lot of what was dope about Bebop into a sword fight.
Once you’re done with the scene above, check out this YouTube clip entirely devoted to Nakamura’s animation work and see what else you’ll recognize of his best stuff. Definitely read this long interview with him over at Wave Motion Cannon and Nick Creamer’s writeup on his more recent work for My Hero Academia, too.
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