Spoilers for Fate/Apocrypha ahead
It’s often thought about how important “Episode Directors” are, and when a particularly talented dude takes over the mantle of an episode, the result can sometimes overshadow the quality of the rest of the series. Fate/Apocrypha may not be the most loved of the Fate entries, but when the 22nd episode aired, it shook the community to its core and got quite a bit of attention.
Storyboard Artist, Episode Director and Animation Director (AD), Hakuyu Go helped this episode towards the end of apocrypha‘s 25 episodes run with Yurie Hama and Rio, who also served as ADs. During this 24-minute episode, broadcast on December 9, 2017, the animation never seemed to slow down or return to a normal state, choosing to burn brightly until the tank was empty.
The story
Episode 22 marks not so much the beginning of the climax as the beginning of that climax’s descent into insanity that the series had never ventured before that point. When we join the characters, Jaune D’Arc, Sieg and the rest of the heroes – a few remaining masters and servants – have launched an attack on the antagonists.
The villain, Amakusa Shirou Tokisada, and the remaining Servants of Black, prepare to use the Holy Grail in their floating fortress, the Hanging Gardens. Jaune D’Arc and Achilles defend two planes flown in with the Allied masters and have already faced the Servants Chiron and Atalanta.
When the episode begins, Atalanta, still furious with Jaune for her past actions, undergoes a transformation into a wild beast and attacks her. She must hold out until Achilles arrives, who has defeated Chiron but chooses to fight Atalanta to stop her now that she has gone mad. Meanwhile, Sieg has turned into Siegfried and fights against Karna, one of the most powerful Servants in the world Lot lore.
The animation
Nowadays when people think of frame rate or literally the number of frames per second, there is an idea that more is better because it produces a smoother image. However, animation as a transfer of motion can often be supported by fewer frames. Consider the work of Tetsuya Takeuchi, an animator known for directing and sometimes animating entire episodes. His work may be jerky, but the individual keyframes are packed with incredibly expressive and lifelike movements that convey a lot of emotion. As a result, the resulting animation can feel somewhat surreal. This is important to understand what makes the animation style that dominates Episode 22 so appealing.
Within seconds, the trembling perspective, the oblique angles and the deviant movements of the possessed and cruel Atalanta dominate the scene. Jaune is just a prey trying to survive a ranged attack from an animal hunter. When Jaune stings Atalanta’s monstrous wing, the mad servant tears her own wing and stumbles eerily to a troubled Jaune. While the triple battle between Atalanta, Jaune, and Achilles carries a looming sense of dread, the episode’s other battle feels heroic, epic, and final. Siegfried vs Karna is arguably one of the greatest battles in Lot history. The controversial power scale alone has sparked many a well-known debate about how Siegfried might even stand a chance.
In this way it echoes similar complaints from Destiny/Stay Night about Shirou vs Gilgamesh, and similar to that fight, apocryphathe struggle is great; broken shell be damned. It is through this episode that Masaru Yokoyama’s music has fully established itself as one of the best in the franchise, on top of that with Yuki Kajiura’s score for Fate Zero. Both fighters unleash blast after almighty blast, decimating the ground beneath their feet and creating smoldering craters of the intensity of their energy. It’s a color-coded light show to represent each player’s attacks, and while such attrition can be played out or seem pointless, the music and performances carry the burden just as much.
Clothes and hair flutter in the wind as they complement each other’s strength and the ground melts into a blazing pool of beautifully animated lava. Siegfried’s face contracts as they squeeze out as much power as possible to counter an ungodly amount of power that screams the show’s sound design to life with copious bass boost. Not to mention the story and how Astolfo’s final interjection changes the game is glorious, with the episode moving from one style to another as the animation team throws it all at the viewer. And after a glorious duel, the episode ends tragically, returning to Achilles and Atalanta, holding on to each other as they both ended the other.
Feeling out of place
It’s easy to feel a surge of excitement as you watch the episode and enjoy what SakugaBlog rightly called “the best animated episode of anime in 2017.” However, the more time that passes since the episode came out, the more the beauty, no matter how transfixing, becomes a bit more worthy of criticism.
For starters, it has a roughness that doesn’t excuse itself easily and at first the change of pace is so unexpected it’s an absolute delight. But not all of his rudeness can be excused simply because the entire episode is such a statement from his performers. Things like the shadows or the line art can be defended because they are arguably artistic choices, but things like the directing or even the setting are harder to defend.
Simply put, the transitions between these fights can be jarring and lack coherence and the settings of these scenes feel incredibly out of place. Rarely are the founding shots not contradicted by where the characters are seen in the following scenes. The battles are believed to take place in The Hanging Gardens, but the scale of the battles makes it seem like the entire Garden would fall from the sky by the end.
The beginning of the episode is a repeat of the end of episode 21, but animated completely differently. The episode feels like it was built separately from the rest of the series, with not nearly enough correction by the series director to cohesively bridge it with the main show. The construction is so elaborate it’s almost tempting to say the rest of the show is built around #22.
A judgment, or rather, a question
Fate/ApocryphaThe 22nd episode is a lot to take in. It’s a tour de force of expressive and exciting animation, focusing on emotion over sticking to convention. It’s also an imperfect piece of work, the expression of which is so clear that you wonder whether it even elevates the art it’s part of or just co-opts it to do something neat.
Obviously people in the industry were excited about it. There were tweets about the staff gathering to eat pizza and watch live and Nakaya Onsen even made a poster of everything for the occasion, as if it were something in the cinema; as if it were an event in itself. With such heartwarming hype among the makers, is it really necessary to worry about the flaws?
“Is it good?” is an extremely difficult question to answer because it depends on how one qualifies good or bad animation at the end of the day. And “at the end of the day” is the operative phrase. When all is said and done, did this episode deliver anything exciting and tell a good story? If so, then maybe a little roughness is worth it.
Source: Disgaeamad/Sakuga Blog
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