Animation Fundamentals with Naruto:Shippuden
Welcome back to Joel talks about his favorite shows for a grade. Today we’ll be analyzing yet another fight scene. This one is a fight between Kakashi and Obito that happened towards the end of the series. This is one of the few fights from the whole show that I found beautiful. It also shows many examples of the Fundamentals of Animation.
The fight begins with anticipation. The fighters both surge forward a little, perhaps to show that they are ready to fight. Before the small surge thing happens though, they pull back and their eyes shrink.




Skipping forward to 0:31, we see Kakashi show secondary movement by twirling his kunai as he pulls it out. This shows that he’s confident with the weapon, and that using it is second nature to him

At 0:48 we can see Obito’s facial expression become exaggerated for a split second. This gives the impression that there’s a bloodlust on Obito’s part. When compared to Kakashi’s expressions, it seems as if Kakashi does not want to fight his old friend, but that he is resigned to the fact that he has to

The tail of Obito’s cloak is also always trailing behind him, which is an example of overlapping action.

I think we see a good example of follow through when Obito casts his fireball jutsu at 1:44. His head goes down:

Before coming back up with the fire streaming from his lips

There are many more examples for me to choose from, but I will end with an example of staging being used. At around 1:10, we get a series of close up shots. If the whole fight was made up of wide shots from different angles, it would be as if we were just watching two ninjas duke it out. Thanks to these close ups, as well as interspersed flashbacks of the two sparring, the entire battle has more emotional weight to it. You really get to see how far the two characters have come





