Coordination within the art department is a must – setting and color designers must work together to craft a coherent world. They draw many artboards that once approved by the series director serve as reference for the backgrounds throughout the series. Although some of the team’s work will be released posthumously in the future – look no further than Watanabe maintaining the title of art director Art Director (美術監督, bijutsu kantoku): The person in charge of the background art for the series.
The film contains the closing contributions of a handful of the studio’s most renowned animators, as well as the fingerprints of newcomers whose careers were cut tragically short equally impactful at a studio built on the premise of constantly rearing new talent. One final chance to see mechanical work by Hiroyuki Takahashi, an artist so detail-oriented that his coworkers would sometimes notice him using a magnifying glass to draw the smallest intricacies of the mechanical drawings he specialized in. The last uninterrupted brushes by Mikiko Watanabe, who at 35 years old already competed with anime’s all-time greatest when it came to evoking convincing reality with unashamedly painterly work. In contrast to that, its other unintended reality is much more tragic: having been essentially completed the day before the Kyoto Animation arson attack, it’s the final taste of an era of the studio that was brought to a cruel end. First conceived as two extra episodes for the TV series in OVA form, this side story only ended up becoming a feature-length film because the staff heading the work were so invested in its world that they went overboard with it. Violet Evergarden Side Story: Eternity and the Auto Memory Doll is a landmark work that never wished to be one. Violet Evergarden‘s side story film is a tragic remnant of the skill of many Kyoto Animation artists whose lives were cut far too short, but also a bright look towards the future by a new generation of creators who now more than ever are meant to become leading voices at the studio.
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