BEASTARS - [Review]

Beastars is an anime created by Studio Orange that released on Netflix in October 2019, adapted from the manga of the same name by Paru Itagaki.

The show itself focuses on a cast of anthropormorphic animal characters that attend Cherryton Academy, including Legoshi the wolf, Haru the rabbit and Louis the deer, who try to work out how to live peacefully between predator and prey.

Traditionally, anime is made with 2D, frame-by-frame animation, with 3D animation either being used for scenery/environments or big, complex objects/characters. Beastars also found itself being created in 3D due to the complexity of the fur on many characters that would be difficult to draw repeatedly. Often when 3D animation has been used within anime, it looks out of place; the details of characters in 3D don't match with the drawings and the movement of the 3D objects is often way too smooth compared to that of the 2D animation, like the Colossal Titan from season 3 of Attack on Titan. However, Studio Orange already had experience with another anime beforehand that had been created entirely using 3D animation: Land of the Lustrous. Therefore, with this prior experience, they were able to use the knowledge they accumulated and take that forward onto the production of Beastars.

Land of the Lustrous Beastars

Though there are people who will say that Beastars doesn't look good visually, I'd have to argue that they're wrong, in my opinion anyway. Studio Orange have managed to masterfully make the characters still hold that recognisable anime style and look about them, despite them being 3D. The animations skip between frames, giving them that more choppy look that anime is known for, only becoming more smooth for faster actions or more intense scenes, which is common in sakuga animation anyway. One criticism I could pick would be that, as you can see in the gif above, the shadows on the head and neck of the character in Beastars don't change. You could say that this is unnatural because shadows would be changing in accordance with the light source, but a reason for this is that having the shadows constantly changing to fit the lighting would be very distracting, plus you don't really notice it as you're watching along.

The opening of Beastars is also very unsual, since it was created using stop-motion animation. The studio tasked with the opening are Dwarf Studios, who created the puppets and sets to shoot the opening with. The studio had problems creating the size of the characters—for example, Legoshi’s mouth was difficult to move at the puppet's original size, so they had to make it slightly larger to be able to have the mouth look natural and move properly. Haru is much smaller than Legoshi in the manga, and the animators wanted to keep this visual distinction. However, if they kept the sizes of the character accurate to the manga, Haru’s model would be so small that she’d be difficult to move. So, to compensate for this, both Legoshi and Haru were made 2x bigger in scale for the much needed ease of movement but to still keep a good balance between the sizes of the characters. The modelers also created a number of small assets for the characters. They wanted to be able to reproduce accurate facial expressions on the models, so created a number of different assets to enhance this, such as eyelids (closed, half open, open etc.), eyebrows in different shapes, claws and teeth etc.

Overall I've heard that the anime itself does a pretty good job staying true to the manga. I haven't managed to read a lot of the manga yet so I can't say for certain. The first season of Beastars was fantastic, so I'm very much excitedly waiting for the second season's release in 2021!