Nogizaka46's Haruka Kaki faces the harsh reality of cel animation in a workshop

Haruka Kaki has spent years saying she likes anime. What she had never considered is the work behind every shot. On November 5 she talked about it on her SCHOOL OF LOCK! segment, where she explained her time on 探究!アニメをつくる, an NHK E-tele program that shows how an animated work is made.

The Nogizaka46 member took part in a recording inside a studio. Not as a spectator: they put a sheet of acetate in front of her, paint, and asked her to color a cel. The result, she admitted, made it clear that watching anime from the couch is a different thing.

"You draw the line with a pen on the plastic film and then apply the paint on top. You have to spread it evenly. If it ends up a bit light, the background shows through and it's useless. You can't go outside the edge either," she explained, laughing.

A craft that barely exists anymore

What shocked her the most wasn't just the difficulty. It was discovering that cel animation is a practically extinct technique. The industry no longer works that way, and the machines used to turn those sheets into animation have almost disappeared from Japan.

As they told her during the visit, there is only one working unit in the entire country: the one at Kadokawa's Musashino Museum. "I thought: what kind of experience am I living?" she recalled.

That fact changed her perspective. Until now she watched anime thinking about how fun or pretty it was. After getting her hands dirty, she says she understands something else: every second of old footage is a sum of technical decisions and patience.

She did the math herself. A single cel was already hard for her. A few seconds of animation require hundreds. "People back then did this work. Now that I've tried it, I think: how crazy was that!"

A hobby that goes way back

Kaki is not new to this. Since she joined Nogizaka46 she has repeated that she likes anime. In fact, she confessed that if she hadn't passed the audition, her plan was to work professionally in that world. She was at that crossroads when the group came along.

That's why this assignment was especially exciting for her. "It's not something you can see every day, the inside of an anime production," she said on the radio.

After the experience, she wants to revisit her favorite traditional animation titles. Watch them with different eyes, paying attention to details she used to ignore. She's not the only one: her mother watched the program and wrote to her on LINE. "I'm going to watch anime more carefully, even the small details," she told her.

The 乃木坂LOCKS! segment airs on Thursdays within SCHOOL OF LOCK!, on Tokyo FM, from 23:08.

What do you think about a technique like cel animation being reduced to a single machine in Japan? Tell us in the comments.