Keiichiro Watanabe (渡邊 啓一郎) Sakuga MAD - Synthetic Sympathy

MAPPA’s star animator!!! And that’s saying something because there’s a lot of great animators on their works (whether they be in house or freelancers tho idk lmao). So K1RO is interesting. For some weird reason, even though I know his work is very technically impressive, I never really considered him as one of my favorites. That wasn’t until his effects animation in Frieren (the episode in the second cour, not the dragon one although his work on that is amazing as well). It was really mesmerizing and then I realized some shots from my favorite Mob Psycho episodes were by him too (something I would’ve realized sooner if Warner hadn’t purged Booru of Mob seasons 1 and 2 lmao) and now all of a sudden I have more of an appreciation for a lot of his other work when it comes to his distinct effects/liquid/debris/morph animation (I kinda group it all similarly lmao) as well as his hand to hand combat which you can see in stuff like JJK and God of High School. I love the thing he’s doing nowadays with having a lot of characters flail their arms around cuz I think it adds a lot of emotion to the scenes he’s on. I still wouldn’t put him in my top 10, but he’s still a phenomenal animator and I’m looking forward to his upcoming contributions, which I’m guessing will be the CSM movie unless he goes under a pen name for something like The Elusive Samurai. Now this song is something a little different for these MADs because it is actually an anime song! I’ve said in the past I really like to use non anime songs to introduce people to songs they might find to be bangers despite not being from an anime, but when thinking of songs that would work based on stuff like the Frieren effects animation, the techno beginning of Synthetic Sympathy came immediately into my mind. It kinda fits too cuz Who-ya Extended was also on JJK, albeit I think VIVID VICE is a bit safe compared to a lot of his other output but still a good song. And there’s so many scenes that synced up even better than I thought they would with the song, like Toji saying “sympathy” in the latter half. I was worried about the calm parts of the song but thankfully Mob, Sonny Boy, and a few other productions he did was presumed on helped with those parts. Overall I’m very happy I went with this choice. I have no idea who I’m gonna make a MAD on next tbh. Before this I was actually planning a Yoshinori Kanada MAD with the song Yumemiru Shoujo ja Irarenai by Nanase Aikawa, and I may still do that but this MAD literally only took 1 hour after gathering all of the clips I wanted to use because of how well everything worked out. From the list I had before though, the main ones I really want to tackle sooner rather than later Shinya Ohira, Bahi JD, Yoshinori Kanada, Norio Matsumoto, Arifumi Imai, Hiroyuki Imaishi, Kai Ikarashi, and a Mob MAD. No promises that I will do all of those but I hope to get around to them. I very much wanna tackle a Weilin Zhang MAD at some point, but I wanna wait till he’s shown up on some more projects before I make one, so that may be like next year or something