Over the course of the last year, Animal Crossing: New Horizons has become nothing short of a cultural phenomenon. With plenty of businesses incorporating the game into marketing strategies, a number of celebrities playing the game, and a cacophony of different fan creations provided by the Animal Crossing community, this game has left a powerful mark on the world. In fact, it's even gotten to the point where anime studios are now using it to visualize motion capture.
Admittedly, the ways in which COVID-19 has impacted the world at large has largely attributed to the widespread success and popularity of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. In many ways, COVID-19 has still dramatically impacted the production of many projects as a result, which means that companies and studios have started to implement inventive, unorthodox methods to continue to work from home.
Studio Orange, the animation studio behind the widely popular anime Beastars, revealed via Twitter, that the studio has been using Animal Crossing as a way for animators to visualize motion capture. Since there's no way for the actors to visualize scenes for the animators in person, this is actually an ingenious way for animators to get a handle on what should be happening in any given scene within the show.
It's interesting to see the many methods that studios utilize in order to craft scenes involving 3D animation. For instance, Devil May Cry 5 has a mode where players can actually see the pre-visualized cutscenes the actors did in live-action. All of the cutscenes in the game were initially done in live-action as a way for animators to get an understanding of what should be happening on screen.
The 3D CGI animation that Beastars employs is unlike most other anime. Often times, 2D animated TV shows are the standard when it comes to anime. Although, given the rising popularity of Beastars and other similar series, the use of CGI animation in TV series is starting to become more and more commonplace.
The fact that Studio Orange managed to use a video game as a way to visualize scenes within the anime is extremely impressive, to say the least. With studios like Square Enix implementing work from home policies, it's getting harder and harder for productivity to flourish given the state of the world. It will certainly be interesting to see how other production studios adapt to the current state of the world and whether or not Animal Crossing will continue to play a role in that.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is available exclusively for the Nintendo Switch.