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The Animation Production Notes #02-11 – Gdrivenime

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Working closely together, CITY‘s original author Keiichi Arawi and a Kyoto Animation team built around Taiichi Ishidate defied the norms of TV animation scheduling, stylistic trends, and regular workflows, all with a single goal: creating a unique show that’d spark the imagination.

A fact about Kyoto Animation’s productions that is worth reiterating on a regular basis is that, contrary to popular belief, the studio doesn’t take much longer than the norm to make cartoons. Their staff don’t have the best frame of reference in that regard, as the vast majority have only ever worked within their own projects, but it’s a comparison that their veteran members are equipped to make. Notoriously, the late Yasuhiro Takemoto—active as a director in the era where KyoAni was an exceptional support studio for others—pointed out that they spend about as long as other companies to put together one episode. While they have slowed down their output after the tragic arson, which gives them ampler time by default, this remains essentially true to this day.

The catch to this assertion has always been that the comparison wasn’t made to the reality of production, but rather to what it’s intended to be on paper. The most common issue with TV anime schedules is compression; early episodes will take as long as initially planned and then some, but with deadlines often refusing to budge enough to compensate for that, most subsequent episodes will be sacrificed in some way or another. Be it merely spending fewer resources (time, the attention of the most precious in-house staff) or the type of outsourcing that is cheap and fast by design, such corners are constantly cut in the name of prioritization… and to be able to finish projects at all. But in an environment where nearly everything will be created in-house by skillful comrades, this phenomenon is virtually non-existent at KyoAni. Right about every episode will take around 3.5 months to animate, with none of them being thrown under the bus.

The popular framing that the studio’s exceptional quality is rooted in their company policy to always lead production committees, then, feels somewhat off. Don’t get me wrong: that is a positive trait, as studios seizing control of the production schedule tends to be rather helpful, but these results are something they achieved long before they established that rule. Ampler schedules are unarguably positive as well, but episodes produced over much longer spans of time than anything made at this studio are constantly broadcast with demonstrably worse results. Instead, it’s their unmatched commitment to mentorship and that highly skilled, deeply interconnected in-house environment that will help you understand their success.

Why bring that up now, though? To tell you that it’s not true when it comes to CITY. To make this one-of-a-kind TV show, even this highly efficient team has had (and been happy) to spend extra time crafting something special.

To properly understand the production schedule of one specific title, you still need some awareness of those that have been adjacent to it. In CITY’s case, that means that you must also understand its overlap with projects like Hibike! Euphonium S3 and the recent Maidragon film. Fortunately for fans, a fair amount of information is public this time around. For starters, series director Taichi Ishidate has been sharing his memories of CITY’s production process as weekly entries on the official site, which are also available translated on the show’s English social media accounts. Ironically, this has been one of the productions to wrap up the closest to its release date—having done so around spring, still months ahead of the broadcast—yet it’s the one where the team has been the most honest about the timeline of the production. Perhaps, in part, because Ishidate had already planned a rather candid retelling of the entire process.

As he recalls, CITY: The Animation became a reality with his casual pitch for an adaptation being, to his surprise, immediately approved back in Summer 2022. It wasn’t the first time he’s brought up the name of the series, as he’d been a fan of the series ever since it began publishing, but he hadn’t expected it to be greenlit on the spot; especially not given the ambition that you can take for granted in his projects, this time geared toward the type of work that isn’t a commercial darling. In the October 2025 issue of Newtype, his chat with original author Keiichi Arawi confirms that manga publisher Kodansha gave him immediate approval for the project. More interestingly, it also reveals Arawi’s side of the story; he was out on a family trip when his editor excitedly called to pitch a collaboration with KyoAni, the studio Arawi had always hoped to work with again. Considering that he thought he wouldn’t have the opportunity to, the sudden prospect had him physically vibrating in anticipation. Which is to say that the celebratory comic he drew after the announcement was true, except the part where it shows him at work—he was away, having fun instead!

The central event in the planning stage that followed is the writing camp that Ishidate has covered in multiple entries of his behind-the-scenes column; including the fact that the cackling at night in the room that the author and director shared bothered others, as they excitedly shared demented ideas for the show. Speaking to Animage for their September 2025 issue, Ishidate explained how this led to an extremely unusual factor that we mentioned in our previous article: the lack of an external writer. The director had felt that, back during the production of Nichijou, Arawi’s presence had been positively energizing for the studio. He was hopeful that he’d be a more active party this time around, and with some experience in the world of anime, the mangaka followed suit. As opposed to the traditional model where all creative choices are run through the author or a representative (like an editor from the publisher) for approval, he described their arrangement as absorbing as many Arawi Ideas directly from the source. His duty, then, became the role of complementing it with the team’s own and reconstructing the story alongside the author. Hence, their shared scenario supervisors role in the credits.


On that topic: the latest issue of Eureka dedicates its 300+ pages to literary criticism and homages to Arawi’s work, featuring all sorts of essays, commentaries, and interviews involving scholars and creators interested in the artistry and sociological impact of his funny comics. Unsurprisingly, it includes a lengthy conversation between Ishidate and Arawi that digs further into what that arrangement represented on a more ideological level. From the director’s point of view, Arawi’s point of view was precious—even beyond the inherent weight of the figure of the author. After all, Ishidate has personally spent his entire career making anime, and so have basically everyone at the studio. Experience is helpful, yet it leads to routines, and those asphyxiate new ideas. On the other hand, Arawi has only been involved in two TV shows, so he doesn’t really know the customs of the field. Especially with the more proactive stance he embraced, his presence was liberating; not just with the unusual ideas about how to create animation that he would pitch, but even on a management level, fostering an environment where more than ever everyone felt emboldened to share their own crazy ideas.

As far as Arawi is concerned, this all started because reading the script drafts and listening to the early schemes floating around made his brain go into overdrive. Once he started, he simply couldn’t stop himself from verbalizing whatever he had just come up with. He speaks with extreme fondness of the days that started in 2022 and continued with often weekly meetings up till 2025, going as far as calling that period one of the 5 happiest moments of his life. For the record, Ishidate shared his sweet memories as well, though he jokingly added that the actual process of making a thing has an inherently stressful side to it.

While that sounds sweet, the director has also been open about other aspects of pre-production that weren’t quite so breezy. In contrast to how the ideas flowed into paper with little to no resistance once the flood began, giving them a more visual shape was at times a bit of a struggle. If we follow the process chronologically, still dating back to 2022, one such aspect was the background art. As first mentioned during the prescreening attended by the core staff, they went through all sorts of approaches before settling on the now unmistakable, distinct look of CITY: The Animation. While this process took place, Ishidate and much of CITY’s leading voices proceeded to juggle multiple tasks: continuing their role in Eupho S3 during that year, before the design process was over and most of them could begin moving on to an active production stage.


One critical exception to that, in the sense that she skipped Eupho altogether while they tried to figure out the perfect aesthetic for CITY, is rookie art director Shiori Yamasaki. Back during those sneak peaks, the team already stressed out what we just explained: the scenery of CITY as we see it now is the result of a long process of trial and error. There are many reasons why this was so complicated, starting with Ishidate’s well-known competitive edge. To put it simply, he wanted to positively shock the original author, so the initial visual pitches were more ostensively radical; incidentally, Arawi also fueled that fire, constantly reminding them that they could make something more impressive than he did.

As time passed, though, it became clear that the way to capture his original magic would be something that sounds simple… yet ended up being as tricky as those wild approaches in the end. The team locked on the goal to depict a seamless world, as seen in the original comic. It was a vision of everything existing in one cohesive plane that keeps you wondering what may happen next, with no corner in the background hinting that it will be interacted with through its different nature. A style that blends everything, in the town where everyone is bizarrely connected.

In the aforementioned Animage interview, Ishidate explains his vision for this approach in a way that brings to mind the late Ghibli legend Isao Takahata. As his fans may already know, it was never a given that his directorial career would continue after his early 90s films Only Yesterday and Pom Poko. For as much stylistic diversity as you can conjure, there is no escaping the paradigm of commercial Japanese animation: the resulting visuals are always conceived as the union of distinct layers. There are character drawings and background paintings, which are meant to be overlaid and—despite often aiming for a harmonic result—perceived as separate elements. It’s quite telling that the industry continues to refer to those character drawings as cel layers, even though celluloids haven’t been broadly used for decades; the concept has remained fundamentally the same, despite the material evolution. In Takahata’s case, it was precisely the advance of digital tech and the conception of holistic styles like the ones we see in My Neighbors the Yamadas and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya that rekindled his passion, feeling fresh and challenging when classic procedures no longer did.

In Ishidate’s case, the initial impulse wasn’t such burnout, but he does have a broad sense of curiosity regarding animation and film altogether. By his own admission, he loves changing the type of thing he makes, hence the wild shift from Violet Evergarden to CITY. Just as that is a tonal whiplash, he was happy to have an excuse to swerve even more radically when it comes to the presentation. And, if they were really going to make something that felt like we’re observing a comic in movement, he would fully commit—while also turning it into an instructive experience. Echoing similar feelings to other veteran leaders at the studio, he laments that the convenience of technology has made it so that increasingly more aspects of anime don’t have to be drawn by animators. The undesirable consequence of that, palpable in the current anime industry, is that generations genuinely can’t depict as many things as they once did.

As a response, then, CITY had to become a show where animators must draw everything; and conversely, one where background artists would have to think and act like animators as well. This involved the establishment of a series of tricks and rules (like the way that backgrounds in CITY must always have slightly thinner lines than the characters to guide the eyes), which we can examine later as we discuss the episodes themselves. In the end, the seamless style we see in the TV show is the multilayered answer to all the director’s preoccupations. It’s an attempt to match Arawi’s sensibilities, so rooted in comics themselves. It’s also a way to challenge himself, after realizing the inherent formula for how any anime is made. And finally, it’s also a joyful anime in dark times, one that he could weaponize to ensure that younger animators don’t see their artistic horizons reduced.

Of course, for as important as Ishidate’s vision was in establishing the background art style as a tentpole of CITY’s overall vibe, art director Yamasaki played a huge role as well. After all, she was the one locked in the lab back in 2022, experimenting with all those other possibilities and finally formulating this gorgeous style. She would also be the one pushing for more inherently idiosyncratic background paintings, as she had already done alongside Ishidate; the director confirmed as much during those prescreening events, joking that the final choice may have disappointed her even though it ended up being part of a revolutionary aesthetic. In our previous writeup about CITY, we referred to the ending sequence—a 3DCG emulation of Claymation sprinkled with some real materials—as a way to appease the experimental Yamasaki. In that Animage interview, Ishidate added that her director-like mindset and vast knowledge had piqued his interest, hence the unusual choice of entrusting the closing sequence to the art director.

Now that we know what aspect they focused on during the first year of the project and who spearheaded it, we can move on to 2023. The next key staff member to drop out of other responsibilities and focus on CITY entirely was character designer and chief animation director Tamami Tokuyama. While other aspects went through more troublesome design processes, the characters themselves were rather straightforward. That said, taking this success for granted due to the similarity between their approach and Arawi’s original artwork would be a fatal mistake.

His comic sensibilities are strictly tied to the cartoon logic of his worlds, one that is quite unlike the realistic-leaning precepts of most animators at the studio. It was Tokuyama’s duty to figure out a way to marry the two, this time from a much closer position to Arawi’s than the studio had taken during Nichijou. To the surprise even of peers who’d placed their trust on her, she pulled it off as if it were perfectly natural. Ishidate notes that, as a beginner in such roles, she did her best to follow his advice early on… but that her respect for Arawi’s style and supernatural understanding of its intricacies became almost spooky to witness from the side. She quickly settled on much more compact proportions than what the late Futoshi Nishiya had done for Nichijou, with more rectangular limbs and fingers that bend reality in ways that feel like she peeked directly into the author’s mind.

With only 4 episodes under her belt as animation director, Tokuyama set off not only to design the characters but to supervise the entirety of CITY. Her final assignment beforehand was precisely alongside Ishidate, as the team behind the dazzling fifth episode of Eupho S3. We can place this next landmark for the production in the first few months of 2023, still before the animation process began in full but not that far off from it. That would happen once Ishidate had finished his own final Eupho assignment—the painful episode #09. And so, around the summer of 2023, CITY became the main job for an increasingly larger number of people at the studio.

By fall, it’s fair to say that it was already fully in motion. If you keep track of the artists at KyoAni, you may have picked up on some clues that allude to that. Specifically, a couple of people who left the studio around November 2023 and April 2024 (as confirmed by the occasional publications of their full employee list) were credited for their participation till the middle stages of the series, with one person who became freelance in Fall 2024 having worked in its final episodes beforehand as well. Although the staff blog attempts not to reveal too much information beforehand, veteran Noriyuki Kitanohara—storyboarder and episode director for CITY #02, #07, #12—tends to always include mentions of the current stage of his job that are easy to decipher in retrospect. A certain reference to working on an episode in an advanced stage of production, back in June 2024, can easily be linked to the seventh episode because of the background animation he refers to, while the sports mentions across late 2023 and early 2024 track to his first contribution.


Rather than just indicating that CITY was made early, these dates refer to the point we opened this piece with: each episode, every step of the production process, took longer than the studio’s norm because everyone was gleefully inefficient. Their task to reconstruct 13 volumes into the same number of episodes was tricky. Sure, they had the backing of the original author’s ideas and his encouragement to go ballistic with a moderate number of skits rather than cramming more of them with lesser strength, but this project started because the director loves the manga—of course he would try to cover as many chapters as possible! The solution? A non-standard episode length that has allowed them to overshoot TV anime’s standards so much that, with a couple of episodes still remaining, the series has already received two episodes’ worth of extra footage; a miracle achievable, for starters, because KyoAni broadcasts are accompanied by the studio’s own commercials, so they just had to drop their own ads. Excellent choice for the show, but one that increased their workload by a fair amount.

And again, the goal was never to include more content for its own sake, but rather to go above and beyond at all times. The sheer amount of movement and the delicate (im)balance in the character animation puts it among the studio’s most challenging works already, and that is before even factoring in every creative choice that has challenged the production norms—departures that have made the result more interesting, but the process costlier. Every episode has been in the hands of 5 small units of 4~6 key animators and one single animation director, which allows for a multithreaded progress and greatly enhances the cohesion in the result, yet also entrusts each individual with workloads that demanded a lot of time. While viewers will notice the wilder swings like episode #05 the most, there is not a second of CITY that didn’t defy the status quo. Quite literally so, as it bears repeating how every frame you see on screen was finally drawn with brush pens you couldn’t erase. This has conditioned the studio’s in-betweening units as well, grouped together in 3 large alternating groups where many capable veterans could always have anyone’s back.

After going through the ups and downs of the pre-production in 2022, the transition into the actual making of the show by 2023, and how things began to be finished across a necessarily longer process in 2024, you have a solid grasp of how CITY: The Animation came to be. The final step to understand its artistic leanings and the production dynamics at the studio is simple: you need only think about its eventual overlap with Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid: A Lonely Dragon Wants to be Loved. The recent Maidragon film understandably reached fully fledged production stages after CITY; whereas the adaptation of Arawi’s work was being worked on while Eupho S3 was still in the making, this movie had to wait until that was over for its director and sole storyboarder to move onto it. And yet, it was also finished before CITY, back in February 2025. As it turns out, a film for a series they were already familiar with was less complicated to handle than the madness Ishidate was trying to invoke for television.


With Maidragon hitting its animation stage in Summer 2024, many staff members at the studio began to handle multiple tasks at the same time. Many, but importantly, not all. It’s common for KyoAni folks to divide their attention like that when TV and theatrical projects overlap, leading to everyone but the individuals at the very core of each ongoing work—like their chief directors—working on all productions. With Maidragon being commanded by their most veteran director, given material he’s rather familiar with at this point, pretty much every director was allowed to remain focused on CITY instead; with the exception of two action-focused ones, who lent their hand for that aspect of the film. Even though they’d have normally shared responsibilities as well, quite a few of the studio’s most renowned, technically capable animators also stayed in the TV series without ever touching Maidragon’s film.

This was, in part, motivated by the contrasting philosophies between the two productions—ones that only strayed further apart due to the composition of each team. On the one hand, we have CITY: so focused on movement and traditional expression, to a degree where they constantly attempt to backport modern concepts into animation layers that had never expressed them. Consequently, what manifests on the other hand is a version of Maidragon that became an outlet for the studio’s digital team, using their skills to give extra oomph to the events in their own way. And, when it comes to the 2D animators, it became the tool to finish the process that CITY had begun. The studio’s 2024 trainees were quick to finish their training and, thanks to the lengthy process to finish each episode of CITY, were able to contribute to it since the beginning. As we noted previously, this was a more complicated, higher-stakes process than the norm, with so much involved animation requiring confident pen lines. And that appears to have been effective training, because 6 of them were allowed to step up and join the small (22 total) group of key animators in the Maidragon film, cleaning up the layouts of their more veteran peers.

With its origins, the production philosophy, and its role within the studio much clearer, we can take a more informed look at the show itself. While we should skip the first episode as we already covered that one in our introductory article, the second one is just as good a microcosm of CITY’s anime adaptation. It features the aforementioned Kitanohara in the lead; overall, he’s been one of the most active directors in the project, as a rowdy animator with an excellent affinity for the material that he already demonstrated in Nichijou. The world of CITY, so seamless that even its creators sometimes have to think hard about which department produced each part, remains perfectly unified. And yet, there’s a noticeable width to the animation range that is best appreciated under the direction of an artist like Kitanohara. The chase at the university blends some effects on the 1s, traditional articulation, and Arawi’s own impossible cartoon physics in just one short, fun sequence that sums up how inherently enjoyable the movement in CITY is.


When saying that, people will immediately think about the often cartoony (yet as we’ve seen, diverse) character animation. And they’ll be right: there is that in spades, and it’s loads of fun. However, that is only the surface. One aspect that is already clear by this early point in the show is that everything in CITY is alive, even the parts that are not literally in there; whether we count words that can stab you in the heart as diegetic or not is a debate for the ages, though. Indeed, it’s the text in CITY that deserves a shout-out for how joyful its usage is. The titles have unique movements and stylizations that fit their content, and onomatopoeia are active participants in its crazy animation sequences. Whether big or small, there’s always something amusing on screen.

There are other aspects you can highlight from this second episode alone. There is, for one, the doors that open through the level of stylization; the simple-looking, colorful style of the world allows for natural abstraction of the backgrounds in motion, which in turn enables viscerally satisfying, effective direction tricks. There is also the rather calculated series composition. The writing is happy to appear casual or even random when it comes to the everyday gags, yet it can hide the thoughtfulness in the placement of emotionally significant events, such as the relationships between Niikura and Nagumo or the beloved middle schoolers Ecchan and Matsuri. Since there are more layered examples of that a bit later, though, I believe that we should discuss something more fundamental as we move to the third episode: the appeal of CITY: The Animation.

Nichijou was happy to be consumed as self-contained, surreal bursts of madness. That is its legacy within most online fandoms, to the point where it’s erasing the fact that its anime adaptation fundamentally changed its narrative; another topic we’ve written about in the past, of course. Creating an arc for Nano rather than immediately placing the funny robot girl in school gave the TV show a throughline, which ultimately makes it about finding a place to belong. CITY, on the other hand, was born as that place to belong—for everyone. Arawi created it with a sense of place missing in its predecessor, which gleefully leaps between locations that are more hazily defined. The anime further emphasizes that with its seamless interconnection of assets and characters, all placed in the same curiously chill town. In a weird that was never true for Nichijou, which simply focuses on other aspects, the atmosphere that brews from that setting is one of the main points of appeal.

Mind you, it’s not as if CITY lacks those seemingly non-sequitur, ridiculous moments. And of course, the adaptation has just as much production muscle, if not more, when it comes to the delivery. While they may not be the bread and butter of the series like they were back in Nichijou, they still rear their head whenever Arawi simply couldn’t hold himself back. But even within them, I’d argue that CITY: The Animation’s greatest feat is the organic extension of the author’s ideas. This was true of the preceding directors, and of course, it is of episode #03’s Takuya Yamamura. Look no further than the hectic treasure hunt gag that leads to Niikura and Nagumo unearthing a scary skull. And now, consider that the way it goes into space, only eventually coming back because an astronaut gently nudged it, is an entirely original addition that somehow feels more Arawi-esque than the manga where it merely goes up and down. This adaptation is bursting with such details, in a way that greatly rewards a careful rewatch alongside the original to absorb all the ideas that the team snuck into it.

There is plenty more to appreciate in Yamamura’s work. Although the solemnity of Tsurune S2’s excellence has him broadly pegged as a refined, quiet director, the truth is that he’s always been fond of using involved camerawork for emphasis. This third episode is full of shifting points of view, be it to track a new recurring cast member or to literalize a frog in a well metaphor. And, through sheer accumulation in a show that already pulls such tricks on the regular, this further solidifies the feeling that everything is connected—a swing of the camera will always lead us to a face we recognize. Even without the same technical range to the animation as the preceding episode, it’s also worth noting that Yamamura and animation director Kayo Hikiyama emphasize the characterfulness in the types of movement. Be it Riko’s sleepy floating form or the carefully depicted demeanor of the two kids, watching the inhabitants move around feels charming on a more personal level this time around.

In contrast to Yamamura, who has already solidified himself as one of the new leaders at the studio, episode #04 comes by the hand of someone that only avid followers had been keeping track of; though given his work in the show, that may be about to change. To put it plainly, this is the first episode that Ryo Miyagi ever storyboarded and only the second one he properly directed.


Back during the production of Violet Evergarden The Movie, when he was a key animator making a name for himself, Miyagi called dibs on a particularly tricky, climactic sequence. It took him a while and he had to consult multiple seniors along the way, but it eventually reached a stage where he felt confident about the result. When he showed it to Ishidate, the director said that it indeed was looking good… but watching it inspired him, so he came up with a new idea where tactically deployed wind would amplify the emotions at play tenfold. Since properly doing so would require an essential redo—try standing in wind the same way you do when it doesn’t blow—he asked Miyagi if he was up for the task, undoubtedly readying himself to animate the sequence. Miyagi, who felt like this would demonstrably improve the scene, took up the challenge with the feeling that commercial animation production is something one must do in a team. On his own, he felt like he might’ve not come up with an idea like that.

A few years later, he continues to work in a team, but now he is one of the staff members coming up with such enhancements. Ishidate clearly took notice of him as well, because this progression has continued to occur under his wing; remember the fifth episode of Eupho S3, which teased CITY’s core staff with the Ishidate/Tokuyama duo? That was also the one where Miyagi finished his training as episode director, having passed the internal test beforehand. After directing the show’s eight episode as well, Miyagi moved on to CITY with such confidence that people who don’t keep track of staff wouldn’t ever guess he’s a rookie.

Perhaps due to his position, Miyagi seems to take note of the style set by his predecessors rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, though he does so with so much enthusiasm and ingenuity that he can escalate the already exceptional. We highlighted how episodes like Kitanohara’s exploit the background art style through occasional abstractions that increase dynamism, and that they also manage to sway the grounded thoroughness of the studio’s character animation in the direction of Arawi’s cartoon logic—weighting it toward the latter, but without erasing the former. Within just one butlerian attempt to capture the protagonist (a common happening in CITY), we have some of the best examples of those dynamics. And what about the characterfulness of the comedic animation that Yamamura had emphasized? Watching Tatewaku move so distinctly (and so anxiously) under the lead of Miyagi and animation director Nobuaki Maruki should tell you that this aspect is stronger than ever.


The real highlight of this episode, though, is in the calculated chaos that begins with the series composition choices. While many admire the astonishing episode that follows it, the buildup in the preceding one is essential to its success—and also, it’s something largely original to the anime. By grabbing snippets of different skits and coming up with new situations, CITY: The Animation can begin channeling its massive cast in a singular direction before the episode that culminates in everyone’s meeting. Of course, it’s easier to put this on paper than bring it to life, hence why much of the credit ought to go to Miyagi regardless. His connecting pathways extend to the crossroads in the eyecatches, and the casual ways in which so many characters come and go with their own agendas make the final minutes one hilarious rollercoaster.

While the flow of the most trepidant moments of action is what will catch attention, I’d point to something else as the best example of Miyagi hitting the ground running as a storyboarder. At one point, Niikura’s improvised pole vaulting goes wrong and the animation slowly suspends her in the air. Niikura, with her blue pants, set against the blue sky, waiting for her doom. You anticipate the fall and it does come… but the blue thing that drops is Wako’s penguin onesie, because once again she’s in her own world and not particularly aware of other people’s stressful ordeals. This simple way to give physical continuity and emotional whiplash at the same time is what an excellent, seasoned storyboarder would do. And also, it’s what an absolute newbie like Miyagi did.

If the fourth episode shines in such details, CITY: The Animation #05 is the show at its most overwhelming, grandest excellence. An entire volume dedicated to countless plot threads converging into one party asked for a bold response, but under no circumstances did anyone foresee what we’d eventually experience. That also goes for Ishidate himself, who after witnessing what the ideas were shaping up to be, told the episode director that they could at least relax when it came to the animation. Of course, their reaction was doing the complete opposite, resulting in an episode that will go down in history. Regardless of their degree of experience, no one involved had ever seen an episode that required multiple sets of storyboards to tell all the concurrent stories through constantly shifting panels, and chances are that they won’t see such a thing again.


One of the reasons why it was so important to carefully go over the show’s production schedule and how it differs from KyoAni’s norm, let alone from anime as a whole, was that episodes like this take outrageously long to animate even in the best environment possible. One unique aspect any viewer will immediately notice is that the mansion where all the events are set is a real-life, articulated diorama that they carefully incorporated into the animation. Tweaking those aspects is no easy feat, but do you know what’s even more work? Making it from scratch; to be precise, and according to Ishidate’s recent words to Animate Times, it took 3 months just to assemble this one part. The director loves how the result feels like a manifestation of Arawi’s ideas into a new dimension, retaining a handmade, warm appeal that you might associate with educational programs. Critically, that’s a vibe he feels is very compatible with the author, whose inspirations in classic manga like Fujiko Fujio’s works give him a childhood flavor to anyone who grew up in Japan. But for as much as he liked it, as much as the team creating the diorama had a blast, such things require extraordinary schedules.

That much is true of the 2D animation in the episode as well. Earlier, we noted that the Maidragon film was entirely skipped not just by some directors, but by ace animators who’d never miss it under regular circumstances. That very much includes CITY #05’s director and storyboarder Minoru Ota, as well as the leader of their Osaka animation team, Tatsuya Sato. The sheer complexity of the episode demanded Ota’s attention for a long time, and Sato’s workload wasn’t any less challenging. While drawing number isn’t always a useful metric, as elements like 2DFX can greatly inflate it and it says nothing of the actual quality, the 16k drawings sported by this episode (effectively, multiple episodes’ worth) feel earned and meaningful. When you consider how many sequences within it would already be excellent on their own, without that maddening context, it becomes an incomprehensible achievement. And within that massive workload, Sato appears to have personally handled around half the cuts in the episode, putting the longest break he’s ever had in-between appearances to excellent use. His snappy timing is everywhere, further enriching what was already a stunning experience.

In such a packed episode, the technical finesse is simply mind-boggling. You can lose yourself in endless rewatches not just of the narrative and character details hidden everywhere, but on the usage of panels themselves; they change shapes according to the setting and to maintain momentum, acting as parts of the animation in and of themselves. This reaches its catharsis with the equivalent of Arawi’s original spread illustrations, becoming a dynamic collection of character bubbles encompassing the entire population coming together—as officially confirmed, something drawn by a single key animator. It’s a technical marvel in ways few episodes have ever been, and somehow, that’s one of the least important parts.


The sheer scale and precision are so overwhelming that it’s easy to miss the endless details about each character’s quest, many of them original to this episode. While the manga eventually calls it quits and manifests everyone in the final destination, the anime imagines what everyone would be up to across the entire runtime. It doesn’t need to be particularly complex; in fact, the adaptation understands that Nagumo’s own quest was amusing because of its repetitive pattern, hence why it feels confident in diverting attention onto other citizens. What it needs to be, though, is always representative of what each weird individual could be up to—and that much, it greatly accomplishes. That character tightness is matched on a thematic level, once again with fun surprises. Arawi opens the series with silly mythology that, somehow, captures the vibe of the setting. And in another original sequence, this special episode’s ending also imagines how such amazing towers could have manifested in the region, ultimately making it about the collective joy that CITY represents.

And, at the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about: imagination and surprise. It’s what it took to come up with such an outrageous idea, and what it sought by including such a discordant element like the diorama in what had otherwise been a homogenous visual style. One of Ishidate’s most recurring thoughts across all interviews is that Arawi’s humor has a specific brand of intelligence to it. He doesn’t mean it in the often-mocked sense that it is simply too intellectual to be understood by the masses, nor as an allusion to the construction of the jokes being intricately planned. What the director perceived is Arawi’s ability to stimulate your curiosity—to make you imagine through the many surreal details in his world. The reason why the team didn’t want to nudge the viewer more aggressively toward punchlines is that, in talking with Arawi and experiencing his work, Ishidate felt like it’s something you should chuckle through, ponder about its ridiculous implications, rather than bursting into laughter that may make you miss more details. Incidentally, that’s a reason why Amazon’s subtitles missing an endless amount of signs is kind of a crime. There’s so much surreal charm in those!

Much of this philosophy carries over to episode #06, directed and storyboarded by Taichi Ogawa. The first aspect that stands out is the animation, which ambushes anyone who expected a quiet time after the preceding madness with the exuberant, adorable, cartoony introduction to an entire family. The individual key animator in charge of it was likely also in charge of not just much of the following gag as well, but also a heap of delightful Wako animation for this group’s reappearance in episode #11. Chances are that they were handled by the reliable Yurika Ono, new animation superstar Tomomi Sato, or the very promising Uno Nakata—three women, one answer that we hope to get out of production materials soon. Regardless of its authorship, moments like that and later showcases of the family are a great example of that emphasis on imagination.

Ishidate conceived CITY as a broadening of horizons for animators, especially those maturing in an era where supposed technological convenience risks atrophying specific muscles of expression. In a way, that’s a way to foster imagination as well, and it has a broader reach than just those young members of the studio (and of course, the audience). The person he entrusted the making of the diorama to was Joji Unoguchi, who has been at the studio since the 80s. He began in the in-betweening department, transitioned to background art when they created that department a few years later, and has handled everything from art direction to his now common role of 3D art designer/director/artist. But do you know what he had never done? Crafting a diorama for work, even though that’s related to a personal hobby that Ishidate knew of. In a way, getting such veterans to try new things is even more impressive than doing so with young staff members.

Speaking to Mantan, Ishidate compared Arawi’s appeal to that of Chaplin’s silent films. He didn’t mean that Arawi’s works evoke the mannerisms of the legendary director in a direct way; at least, that wasn’t all he meant. Ishidate could have made the association to Buster Keaton, for example, and his point would be exactly as sound. Certainly, setpieces like this have a physicality to the humor that is shared with such directors, but the more fundamental quality is that they aim to tickle your curiosity and make you wonder how such ridiculous events could come together. While reading Arawi’s work, you continue with a smile while somewhere in your head, you wonder what the incomprehensible store you only saw the sign of could entail. And in the original author’s own words for the latest issue of Newtype, his hope for the anime was that people would watch it while chuckling, wondering (and growing curious about) what the hell its creators were even doing.

Given that Ogawa directed it, episode #06 is also quite good at… well, many things. Brilliant storyboarding that somehow uses text in a more involved, original way than a source medium where words actually belong? We’ve got that. A beautiful, cel-forward experience? No doubt about it. The original author making an appearance as a music composer, within a short skit that also shifts to a style even more reminiscent of his personal animation? Somehow, we have that covered as well. But let’s be real: people associate Ogawa so much with character drama that he gets teased about it among his coworkers. There was no doubt that his first episode would be a turning point in the most emotive relationship within the show, the type of content suited to his direction and the ability to twist the knife.

And yet, even such moments don’t escape the anime’s focus on fostering the viewers’ imagination. The choice to use a hollow pumpkin to hide your feelings while bidding goodbye to your partner comes straight from Arawi’s manga, but a subtle change in the delivery represents their intent in a brilliant way. In the manga, the idea of using a pumpkin for a breakup had been pitched by another citizen beforehand, making this an amusing delayed punchline amidst that painful moment. CITY: The Animation, instead, shows you this emotive yet slightly nonsensical scene first. A new viewer is emotionally affected all the same, but somewhere in their mind, they may be left wondering about that detail; was it for no reason? It certainly feels like the hijinks that those two constantly come up in the spot. In a later episode, the skit that motivated the pumpkin plan is brought to life, also serving as a delayed punchline—one that sparked your imagination in between those two points, reinforcing what the series really wants to do. And that is to think about silly stuff, hopefully without getting hit in the face by a football.


Kitanohara’s second episode, CITY: The Animation #07, feels like a good time to bring up another unique point of appeal in the series. The episode has the director’s fingerprints all over it, sometimes literally so; despite not being credited on it, and even having alluded to “checking” the cut, there’s no way he didn’t personally key animate moments like the background animation as Niikura succumbs to late-night hunger. It’s no secret that, like multiple directors at the studio, Kitanohara sets aside certain sequences for himself and draws them uncredited. This is so casually known that, in a recent stage event for the Maidragon film featuring Ishihara and him, they casually mentioned that Kitanohara was a key animator for a movie in which he only appeared in the credits as unit director (even the studio’s official report of the event mentions it!). Amusing, though ultimately, not all that important a detail. For creators who only ever work for one highly reputable studio, and who’ve already reached the status of director, there’s no need to stuff their resume—they’re already renowned figures.

Witnessing him animate sequences like that brings to mind Nichijou, where he already penned some truly memorable chases. For someone with a blunt, animation-focused appeal, some of his traits are also distinctly more detail-oriented and modern in their execution. Kitanohara pays a great deal of attention to the physical properties of objects, often trying to use them to express psychological aspects of the characters. Since modern anime will rely overwhelmingly on the compositing team to handle concepts like reflections, that much ends up being true of Kitanohara’s work as well; not to the degree that the traditional 2D drawings don’t play a role, since that’s the core of his vision, but deeply intertwined with digital tools. And that’s where we turn to CITY’s one-of-a-kind commitment to a level of technology.

We’ve talked about Ishidate’s desire to make CITY into a perfectly unified, comic-like screen that emphasizes the cel feeling—as both an attempt to capture Arawi’s magic and a training, horizon-broadening exercise for the studio’s members. Because of that, every effect on screen must be drawn by an animator… or, on rare occasion, accomplished by other departments in a way that looks like the former did it. To say that it brings back anime to its analog era wouldn’t be accurate. The fact that it’s all drawn on paper isn’t even relevant, as that’s true of every work at the studio. Instead, it’s about that idea of cel as an absolute, inescapable truth of CITY. The show showcases all sorts of effects that, even during the actual celluloid era of animation, would never be drawn; instead, they’d be accomplished through photography and lighting tricks.

It’s precisely those tricks that every episode director in the series has emulated and expanded on in their own ways. Ishidate’s first episode proposes the idea of replacing linework with short diagonal lines to convey that something is out of focus, showing that they could also adopt modern photography ideas as long as they embraced CITY’s toolset. Every director we’ve seen has stuck to that rule, finding their own tricks in the process. One aspect that is very eye-catching in that regard is the distortions, often used to transition between scenes, which the show entrusts to animators rather than achieving them through filters; Yamamura’s episodes stand out when it comes to that, doing so in multiple ways that reach their peak with the abstract transitions during Riko’s skits. Given Kitanohara’s interests in various phenomena, he’s of course among the most active in this process of reimagination. Watching how his usual ideas become CITY-fied is frankly fascinating.


The eighth episode, marking Yamamura’s second appearance as director, is charming in ways that are all too familiar at this point. Even without his craziest usages of the camera, the flow is remarkably good. Be it using silhouettes and cute abstraction to stylishly transition in and out of flashbacks, flipping the orientation of the drawings to relive the experience of nearly falling into a whole, or subtler touches like connecting cuts in a way that informs us about the direction of a character’s gaze, it’s the type of episode that progresses so naturally that it feels like it naturally spawned in this form.

Its highlight is an excuse to talk about another brilliant side of CITY: the voice acting. The performance of the Tekaridake troupe that the show had been building up to on the side—starting with Yamamura’s previous episode, which gives it a sense of continuity—arrives in a form that is as delightful to watch as it is to listen to. The show’s voice acting is, on the whole, simply excellent. From the interviews preceding the broadcast to the weekly VA watchalong videos on the studio’s Youtube channel, it’s easy to appreciate that the cast was more motivated than ever by a series sporting visuals like they’d never seen before, which they got to act over in already polished, finished form.

Although right about everyone’s performances have been great, there are two individuals who even their peers pointed out as extraordinary beings: Niikura’s Aki Toyosaki, and Tekaridake’s Jun Fukuyama. They were so impressive in their recordings that, even when they had already finished their parts, other actors would stick around the studio to watch them voice their wacky characters as if they were possessed. Toyosaki wowed everyone in moments like the epilogue for the second episode, as Niikura faces her many inner demons; all of them voiced by her in a single take, which also happened to be the very first one. Meanwhile, FukuJun’s crowning achievement is his enthralling delivery of a classical play in the form of a breathless rap. It’s worth noting that this twist in the delivery was actually pitched by sound director Yota Tsuruoka, and that it was planned at such an early stage that Yamamura assembled a video storyboard incorporating the beat he’d come up with, ensuring that the animation was in rhythm as well. Once again, these achievements are collective victories.

Speaking of collectives, the return of Miyagi for episode #09 is another special occasion that gathers essentially every citizen. The race was one of the events that everyone who’d read CITY was looking forward to, and the execution certainly lives up to that. While its storytelling is more streamlined, it’s rather reminiscent of the already iconic fifth episode. Much like that one, it’s complemented by details that weren’t even in the original work, yet feel organically Arawi-ish. Miyagi brings back his usage of the eyecatches in a purposeful way, but by turning the positions in the podium into vignettes, it channels the usage of paneling to enrich the flavor that #05 relied on so heavily. And just like that episode, KyoAni’s ace animators went absolutely ham on it. The work of Kunihiro Hane is all over CITY #09, most noticeably when he strays a bit away from his Ishidate influences and employs looser, more liquified smears.

Once again, its structure builds up to the eventual meeting of every character into a chaotic showcase of masterful animation and storyboarding. If episode #04’s climax was impressive in how a rookie storyboarder threaded together so many concurrent adventures, the way that the now only slightly more experienced Miyagi translated Arawi’s fun spread illustrations into one nearly uninterrupted cut is astonishing. He manages to capture every incidental detail in Arawi’s surreal world and somehow adds more visual gags to it, like Niikura’s realization that she’d been chasing the wrong pendant, without interrupting the flow of the scene. And it goes without saying, but the animation itself is incredible too; I would assume that, just like the climax of #05, it’s a single key animator’s work. Perhaps the veteran Hiroshi Karata, already responsible for iconic KyoAni running.

Following Miyagi, we have an even more curious newbie director. The regular trajectory of staff members at the studio, if they choose to take the test for upper positions and manage to pass it, is to do so at relatively young ages and then commit to that path; which is to say, separating between the director and the animation supervisor ladders. Okamura is hardly old, but he has been an animation director for 10 years, having reached the stage where he’s trusted as chief animation director and character designer on occasion. Most notably, with Free!, where he has replaced Nishiya in recent entries. And yet, seemingly out of nowhere, he has decided to give direction a spin. It was the final episodes of Euphonium’s first season that saw his promotion in one field, and the finale of its third, final season where he finished his training in another. It’s worth noting that, as early as Eupho S3’s bluray specials, we’ve already seen him pivot between episode and animation direction at will. It’s possible that, with time, he’ll take up the challenge of handling it all at the same time, as the studio hasn’t seen since the earlier days of the late legend Yoshiji Kigami. Or perhaps, one day he’ll get to direct the original dancing battle animation he internally pitched. Who knows!


Although it’s not confirmed like it was for episode #05, the climax for #09 was likely key animated by a single person again. In a way, it’s inevitable: if a handful of artists split episodes that are noticeably longer than the norm, everyone is going to be entrusted with several minutes of footage. Regardless, Miyagi’s ability to synthesize these events through the storyboard blows the mind for someone with barely any experience with that task.

With such a versatile director still figuring things out, CITY #10 is a bit too early to figure definitive aspects of Okamura’s style. I can say for a fact that the episode is playful in its usage of color even by the standards of such a lively show, that he nails the idealization of nostalgic memories as wacky old men reminisce about their past, but I believe we’ve yet to see what he’s truly capable of. For now, all we have is one amusing episode that just so happens to end with maybe the most contentious trick the adaptation has pulled off—the abbreviation of an entire volume into an endless series of fake previews to a somehow real adventure.

The residual discourse about CITY’s faithfulness to the source material feels like a depressing product of our times, where reactionary, thoughtless complaints on social media are greatly overblown. It spawns from the lie that it’s at all changing the story (something that Nichijou actually did without facing such criticism!), gleefully ignoring Arawi’s role in every creative choice to instead champion the sacred status of the source material as it was originally published. Does it ever consider neat details, like how key dialogue was changed between its magazine and compiled volume versions? Of course not, because it’s not motivated by a deep, thoughtful engagement with the work. In a trend that greatly transcends this one show (and that is way more toxic surrounding other projects), cynical, vapid appeals to the honor of “original authors” is directed to the idea of them rather than the actual individuals, the ones who speak out publicly about their stances. In this pointless argument, the concept of source material merely means the way that individuals who only want something familiar first experienced it.

Mind you, I’ve been sad that some skits I love have been cut. To some degree, this includes Riko’s sleepwalk as well. But at the same time, there is both intent and authorial approval to all these choices, which feel very easy to justify in this instance. Although that’s a fun volume, it’s a fundamental departure from CITY’s ensemble cast focus and the links to its physical setting. Sending two characters to a wacky island is plenty amusing in the moment, and can be accepted by the reader as a change of pace, but it’s easy to see why it might’ve been on the chopping block—especially since it has little to no reaction to the overarching theme of dreams.

What it does accomplish is widening the world of CITY, showing the even weirder creatures and situations out there. And that much is also achieved in the form that the anime presented it, which also doubles down as a gag that only becomes funnier the more they double down on it. If all you want is the exact same events as the manga, it remains right there on your shelf, or in a wiki’s list of chapters if the presence of content is what truly matters to you. But that’s not what mattered to Arawi, who repeatedly (as he does with everyone who approaches his work) told the team that they should be trying to surpass him instead; to do more with what they include, not to include more. And c’mon, we haven’t had fake previews this good since Katanagatari pranked the entire world. It was sorely missed.


Apart from every chapter determined to have narrative or thematic importance, the initial writing camps attended by all sorts of staff (including Arawi) also turned into a way for them to vote for skits they wanted to include no matter what. Ishidate doesn’t hide that at one point he threw a tantrum to include the three old men’s adventures like Oyaji Summer, even knowing that this type of thing isn’t broadly popular. He only feels slightly remorseful about it.

To wrap up on a more positive note, before we eventually return to the series for a final write-up, we have yet another joyful episode led by Ogawa. In fact, it might be the most joyful episode by him, as if he was happy to fight that reputation as a very effective but depression-inducing director. Even by CITY’s standards, the way it presents its visual (with a plethora of background animation) feels exciting and original, in a way that you’ll never be able to guess what will be on screen next even if you’ve grasped the flow of the gag.

Although Ogawa is particularly good at his job, it’s fair to look at this episode as a microcosm of all the qualities we’ve been highlighting. Some gags have small additions that feel like they were poked straight out of Arawi’s brain; and given his continued presence, that could be the truth in certain cases. The excellent animation is matched by equally inspired voice acting, and that celification of effects that are now overwhelmingly digital continues. Even trends within the studio itself, like the attention to capture the amateur quality of non-professional art, rear their head in this episode.

But above all else, the highlight is a skit that sums up so much of the show’s appeal that you should be able to tell you whether you’re compatible with CITY or not from it. And that is the story of how, after greedily becoming youtubers, Niikura showcases her incomprehensible faith in Mambo Number 5 as the panacea that makes any crappy video funny. Or maybe she doesn’t believe it anymore, sorry Nagumo. Regardless, if you laughed like a madman or merely pondered what the hell is wrong with her with a smile, then congratulations—you’re as compatible with one of the most impressive TV anime ever made as I am. If you didn’t, my condolences, you won’t even get to enjoy the ending they edited in-universe to the song.


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