Hello everyone and welcome to another issue of The Word Count, the series that aims to consistently tell you about words without using too many of them! In today’s issue, we aim to look at a very important role in anime, one where you might deliberately direct your eyes to in the credits. Today, we’re looking at “sakkan” 作監, and if you don’t like that I’m telling you about it today, then I’m going to correct that attitude with the rest of this article! Oh yeah, I also recruited a special guest for this article! You’ll find out who if you keep reading!
Kirby! Sakkan this torch!
Sakkan is actually a contraction of the role “Sakuga Kantoku” 作画監督 or Animation Director, or AD because it’s always handy to shorten things down a bit when you’re talking! Traditionally, one sakkan will be assigned to an episode of anime (though not so much these days) and will ensure that cuts on the episode are consistent with one another and not deviating too much with the overall look. There’s also the Sou Sakkan who supervises them but we won’t talk about them until another article.
The Sakkan will do two types of checks on your work. The Layout Sakkan and the Genga Sakkan. Layout Sakkan is where the Sakkan comes along and applies corrections and adjustments to the layout according to the episode director and character design sheets, usually for a few drawings. Meanwhile, the Genga Sakkan is checking whether those corrections were actually followed and also fixing other stuff they might find. This needs to be done on every frame where there’s any issues because douga folks need to trace afterwards and things have to be perfect for them!
The reason why you don’t usually see this distinction in the credits is because the sakkan of that section tends to do both Layout and Genga Sakkan. However, due to the unique pants on fire situation the industry is in, this is not always the case. Sometimes someone else has to be brought in to do those Genga Sakkan checks, where they could be credited as Genga Sakuga Kantoku (原画作画監督).
This Mecha Hoover doesn’t lose any sakkan!
Sakkan also appear in various types too because sometimes you need to have a specialist. You see, sometimes you might just have an episode that just has a lot of certain thing in it. Usually it’s something cool like mecha, so you end up with a Mecha Sakkan メカ作画監督 that just does the corrections for mecha related things. Notably, there’s also Action Sakkan アクション作画監督 and Effects Sakkan エフェクト作画監督, you can probably guess what they do. Though it can be something a bit more silly like Bear Sakkan クマ作画監督 or something. These sakkan will operate in the Layout Sakkan stage, usually before the regular sakkan, in case you were wondering.
The last type of sakkan to talk about is Sakkan Hosa 作画監督補佐. Now if you’ve not seen the word hosa 補佐 before, it means to aid or assist, so this can literally mean Assistant Animation Director. This is where I bring our special guest and douga appreciator Badbrix onto the stage!
I approached Badbrix about this particular role to get a bit more insight into what it exactly meant since he actually did it very recently. Is it that you act as an extra pair of correcting eyes to help out the sakkan? Is it that you need to help hose down the sakkan’s Honda Civic outside the studio? No. The difference between Sakkan and Sakkan Hosa is the quantity of cuts corrected. If you only did sakkan on a small amount of the cuts in an episode, then you’d likely get this title instead. Though due to the anime industry being made of wet paper towels, you end up with some productions with entire armies of sakkan working on an episode and at that point, there’s little reason to point out the difference between Sakkan and Sakkan Hosa anymore.
There better be no more sucking jokes in this article.
Don’t worry, there won’t be! I blew all my joke budget already. Just remember that Sakkan is super important for keeping everything consistent for an episode of anime, just like my wonderful sense of humour! Many thanks again to Badbrix for also being the Sakkan for this very article, clarifying what I knew and wrote already and letting me know some new stuff too, especially in regards to Sakkan Hosa! Do be sure to watch his handiwork on Kimishinu Ep.5 too! Now if you’ll excuse me, I now have to send this article off for a Genga Sakkan check!
Bye-been!
