A few weeks ago I purchased the Redline Key Animation book on Amazon JP. I had planned to do a detailed breakdown of the shots that were indentified in the book and make a blog post about it, but I decided to team with XMuradX to make another sakuga MAD together. It’s a much better experience to see a MAD with the names in the bottom left than reading a technical breakdown.
The book itself is set up like an art book, using an entire page to show off one or a few key animation frames instead of a usual key animation book which would show off all of the key frames in that particular cut. As a result, you don’t get to see the full sequences that these great animators came up with Takeshi Koike’s direction, but it’s a worthwhile purchase if you enjoyed the film. I posted some pictures on my Twitter account a while back:
Katsuya Yamada Pic
Shinya Ohira Pic
Hiroyuki Imaishi Pic
Takafumi Hori Pic
After transcribing all of the scenes from the book, Murad was constantly working every night for the next week editing the video together and double-checking with the sakuga wiki entry for Redline for anything extra we could add into the video or might have missed. Early on we weren’t happy with how Part A was coming together since there were so few scenes in the book that identified the work in the Yellow Line race (just the first cut of Chiharu Sato, Katsuya Yamada’s work, and some of Takafumi Hori’s work).
I suggested talking to Hori on Twitter since it looked like he knew English. I asked him to confirm if he did the sequence at the end of the Yellow Line race with JP crashing across the finish line and he ended up confirming that and the rest of the works you see in the first part of the MAD. Even though these cuts looked amazing, Hori had only great things to say about Koike, “Well, let’s get this straight, Takeshi Koike checked and fixed all cuts. All of REDLINE animator tried had to draw his instructions and requirement. Then Takeshi Koike draw images and animated more than anyone. I respect him, and he is my goal(^_^)”. He also said the garage sequences were his favorite shots in the movie and that Norimoto Tokura animated almost all of them, “The scene of Mogura Oyaji’s garage is really nice. Norimoto Tokura animated almost of garage scene. He is amazing too.”
Part C, the Redline race itself, was also turning out to be kind of a letdown. The parts were too short and there were too many sequences of the race itself– not Sushio’s cuts or Shinya Ohira’s amazing sequence– that were left out. We decided to ask Hori what he did in Part C– yes, maybe we should have done this the first time around– so Murad asked him. The only cuts of his in Part C that were in KA book were the cuts that had Trava punching the cockpit open and the Lynchman car getting jumped by the robots. Everything else was confirmed from Hori directly. The MAD is a lot better for it because of it.
Here are some more notes about the MAD that didn’t make it in the final cut:
-Shinya Ohira’s segment had Hokuto Sakiyama responsible for a lot of the 2nd Key Animation work. Katsuya Yamada also corrected Ohira’s drawings at a bit at 13:04.
-The cut at 8:10 (the last cut of the security robot firing at the gamblers) took a month to do and 700 drawings to complete (thanks to Kraker2K for the research on this one and for helping us on the MAD a bit).
-Sayo Yamamoto was most responsible for the storyboading (and presumably some of the original background art since she’s credited with that too) for the scenes in the Oasis Restaurant.
-Yoshiaki Kawajiri did about 20-30 cuts of Colonel Volton.
-Hiroyuki Imaishi did the Super Boins fight in the pilot movie.
-It looks like Masami Ozone was responsible for mapping out the restaurant, aquarium, and the war room.
Sakuga Powah 
Thanks. Great Post.
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