The INSANE Music Animations of Kids on the Slope

MORE. Give me MORE. What you got for me to check out??

Yes, you are absolutely correct about the animation technique. Its called ROTOSCOPING. Its when you use live action video or photographs as a base for tracking movement of a character or an object. A great early example of this is Cab Calloway being used as a reference for a Betty Boop character singing Minnie the Moocher. Look it up, its great!

In this case, regarding Kaoru's insecurity: He is a rich kid from a very large city, classicaly trained in piano, and the other ones are poor/lower middle class merchants who wouldn't typically have access to music teachers. So he's learned how to play "correctly" using theory and they've learned by doing it in the fly. There's even a discussion where Kaoru says "I'm playing this PERFECT" and Sentaro says "Nope. Its correct, but it' s got no SWING". A love triangle comes, music "purism" becomes a (tiny) issue, post war Japan occupied by the US, some teen pregnancy happens... Then they stop talking, Kaoru becomes a doctor, Sentaro follows his faith and becomes a Catholic priest (very rare in japan), NO ONE gets the girl, and they reconnect through jazz. And that church gets the coolest priest ever. This is one of the greats, amd one of the reasons why I started listening to Jazz.

I swear, Kids on the Slope is one of my absolute favorites of Anime. Not only for the music, but characters/character development, story, themes, etc. The whole anime on its own could be a whole series for Charles. There's so much to breakdown music wise, and so many fantastic scenes.

My favorite thing about this anime is that they recorded multiple takes of the songs ,and played them better each take to match how the characters were improving through out the show. This is one of my favorite anime ever.

My favorite Anime scene of all the Animes I watched is Kids on the Slope episode 7. The accuracy of the medley of the piano & drum is super insane! You should check it out :)

4:44 I love that they made an effort to show the drummer turning the snares on. You almost never see that! But that happens almost everytime. I’m about to go binge this whole show now lol Edit: I binged the show last night and man it was amazing. Highly recommend.

I totally recommend Carole & Tuesday (THUNDERCAT performs a song for the soundtrack, and there's a character directly inspired from him) and Beck (it has a lot of cool references, which i would never expect in an anime, for example a STEVE VAI reference, or extremely detailed pieces of guitar gear, pedals etc.)

As a drummer it really irritates me to watch a movie it show and even a cartoon when music is being played and the drums don't even look like they're playing remotely the same song... As with you Charles, this BLEW MY MIND!! And the fact that I'm jealous of a CARTOON CHARACTER!! AWESOME STUFF!!

The animation technique they use for these scene requiring realism is taking real musicians as reference but It's not exactly drawing over them like in Rotoscoping, they draw main lines based on the real footage but actually draw the rest from scratch while trying to mimick every frame of the live action. That's why it doesn't look weird and fits with the actual character design of the show not the actual real life musician who they based it on and that's why also you have other effects like smear effect and action lines when the drum sticks move for example which you don't see in fully rotoscoped animations. This actually takes even more effort to do than standard rotoscoping. But the main idea is the same which is using real life to produce realistic animation

I love how in some of the close-up shots of the drummer, you can see the snare and other parts of the kit actually shaking as he plays it. Love that attention to detail. Might have to watch this anime!

You'd be doing yourself a disservice if you didn't check out the drummer who recorded on this anime. Shun Ishiwaka is a beast on the kit and is a super composer as well. He was also only 19 at the time this was made.

This reminds me of a similar anime series revolving around musicians that was called Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad. I remember being completely taken aback by the show as it was different from everything else on TV and showed real character progress in the storyline.

Carole & Tuesday comes from the same lineage as Kids on the Slope and Cowboy Bebop. It has a couple of folk singer-songwriters making their own music in an age where almost all music is produced by AI. There is a songwriting session in season 1 where they try to feel each other out through their playing - faltering at times, then finding their way back - that's just beautiful.

I'm pretty sure they traced over (rotoscoped) live musicians to get that 100% accurate animation which is really cool

This show makes me cry so much. Thank you for covering it.

They probably recorded multiple videos in multiple angles when the musicians recorded the music in the studio, then the animators used the footages for rotoscoping. That’s why everything is spot on.

I'd love to see more realistic anime/animation about modern, contemporary jazz music where it's not just another 'rag to rich' type of story but more or less a 'hard' fiction type story about being an aspiring, career musician and the long, winding journey of the said musicians to get to where they're right now (which would mirror the experiences of numerous real life musicians across the world).

Nodame Cantabile has great usage of recording actual musicians playing the pieces and animating them as well! One of the main characters is an eccentric pianist and over the course of the series goes through the highs and lows of becoming a professional. Half of the whole series is basically just watching orchestral concerts/performances and it's a joy!

Something hits real different when you rewatch Kids On The Slope and realize Yurika sounds the same as Eureka, since she's the driving force behind so many small plot developments. What an incredible series, it really captures the passion and emotion that comes from when you first start improvising, and moving beyond The Basics of music education.