Shinya Ohira (大平 晋也) Sakuga MAD - Cordless Baby + Tsumi no Kaori

Some may say his animation is ugly and ok, maybe it’s sometimes even a bit much for me, but genuinely this man is a genius. To quote AnimeAjay, his “focus is totally on expression through abstract form, rather than adhering to rigid reality”. His work has really unique timing and no line is clean cut, and while that makes his work so interesting, it’s also for many what gives his work that “ugly” feeling. He really has made some of the greatest pieces of animation I’ve ever seen though. You look at stuff like his skateboard scene on The Animatrix or his recent contributions on Boy and the Heron and you gotta wonder “what human is capable of this?”. And clearly a lot of people thought that when he showed up on One Piece because people immediately accused his Gear 5 scene to be AI lmao. That’s kinda why I wouldn’t say his approach would work on every show because a lot of people would think he’s a bad animator or that his work is AI, but it really is interesting to see him pop up on something like One Piece. He’s very much considered premium as (aside from One Piece) he’s really only showed up on movies and very specialized projects within the past decade. He’s one of my all time favorites (only behind Kameda for my top animators) and I’m really excited to see where he’ll show up next.

These songs are definitely the least anime sounding songs I’ve gone with when it comes to these MADs, but I figured for Ohira it would have to be something pretty different. On a whim I picked Cordless Baby by SEKAI NO OWARI, but I wanted to do 2 MADs and when thinking of Ohira’s Space Dandy scene, I immediately thought of Tsumi no Kaori by Fujii Kaze. The bombastic jazz section combined with how insane that scene is felt like a match made in heaven. I’ve used SEKAI NO OWARI quite a bit in these MADs but I think this is a very different song from the other two and SEKAI NO OWARI did also do the Gear 5 OP for One Piece and the theme song for the Mary and the Witch’s Flower movie so there happened to be some correlation there. I also tried to match up some sound effects in the song like the bubbles coming up in the beginning of Cordless Baby.

I do hope I can do a few more MADs before the summer is over because after that I will mainly be focusing on school and I probably won’t be able to do these often