One of the all time greats in Japanese animation! (If not animation in general) Some may call him overrated, but when it comes to impressive works from a technical standpoint, very few are on Nakamura’s level. It’s to the point where many people want to animate similarly to the big bombastic cuts he does in his more recent works, but to reference an interview with legendary animator Takeshi Honda, Nakamura didn’t start that way and he started with the foundation of character acting. That’s kinda why I wanted to split this MAD the way I did because even though now he is very much known for being a highlight animator on MHA (both the show and the movies) and handling big moments on sakuga shows like Mob Psycho, Space Dandy, Frieren and One Punch Man, Nakamura was still a great animator in his own right even as far back as the 90s with his hand to hand combat on Cowboy Bebop, along with his work on Escaflowne, Ninku, Evangelion, Utena, Medabots, Dragon Ball Z movies, and other great looking projects of that time. It was moreso a natural progression to get to the point he is now, as opposed to attempting that sort of thing from the very beginning, which is why I think it’s important to highlight both aspects of his animation even if some people prefer his newer style to his older style in vice versa. Also the decision to split it this way was heavily influenced by Mankoman’s MAD on his stuff.
This was honestly the most frustrating MAD to make so far arguably because of the songs I had picked. I knew I wanted to use both New Age Blues by SIX LOUNGE and Underground by MY FIRST STORY as I could imagine the hand to hand combat working well with New Age Blues and Underground is a pretty hype song for Nakamura’s newer stuff, but at first, I did a rough edit of New Age Blues and Underground and they both weren’t working the way I was hoping. On top of that, when I started making the New Age Blues section, the Premiere project also didn’t save so I lost all of my progress and had to start fresh, but honestly I feel like that was for the best, as the second time around, I think I made it work a lot more to my satisfaction. Another thing I was iffy on was that Nakamura’s pre-2010 animation had footage in both 4:3 and 16:9, which I hadn’t had to deal with in previous sakuga MADs and I wasn’t quite feeling just mixing them together and if I kept them separate, I wanted to make the transition stand out, and I think masking the red impact frames from the Soul Eater cut turned out very well. Although I did end up cropping two scenes from the Escaflowne and Bebop movies to 4:3, which is not something I like to do because it alters the presentation of the clip. (same thing with changing the speed of clips in sakuga MADs although admittedly I’ve done that a few times to make clips sync slightly better with the songs, but I try not to slow clips down more than 85-90% speed on Premiere because then it tends to get noticeable.) Overall though it was just two clips and I’m still pretty happy with how it turned out, outside of maybe I wish I could’ve highlighted Soul Eater and Sword of the Stranger a little more than I did, as Nakamura’s contributions to those are pretty big.
The 2010s and after section of the MAD, Underground, was also frustrating because there’s just so many good cuts that I really wanted to include, but I just couldn’t fit everything. And on top of that, Underground does have some not as hype parts, and it was hard to get clips that quite worked for that, but I think I was able to make it work. I wanted to include most of his prominent works from the 2010s but I definitely wanted to emphasize MHA since he has so much work there nowadays, and yet even though I included quite a few scenes from it, there were still some great cuts he’s done that I didn’t get to include like his Iida cut from season 5.
MAG.MOE - The MAG, The MOE.