After entering the company, Gu Xue was surprised to feel no sense of unfamiliarity at all. On the contrary, everything felt incredibly familiar and comforting—whether it was the messy, well-known workstations, or the dead-fat… artists hunched over with their heads down, earphones in, right hands twitching at high speed.
This—this—was a normal animation studio. There were no artists like Ema here, no production assistants like Aoi or Erika, and definitely no gothic-lolita–styled chief animation directors. This place was nothing but toe-scratching guys or toe-scratching guys with exhausted faces. Shirobako, go to hell—don't even think about tricking me into making animation.
As Gu Xue walked toward her desk based on memory, she glanced around and couldn't help but complain internally, thinking about that anime back on Earth.
She also unconsciously ignored herself—until a few young key animators who had stood up to take a break casually glanced her way, then stared straight at her.
Only then did she remember her current identity.
She quickened her pace slightly, reached her desk, pulled out the chair, and sat down as fast as she could.
It looked like shyness.
And in reality—it absolutely was shyness…
After sitting down, Gu Xue calmed herself a bit, then suddenly felt her behavior just now was stupid. She was also a little speechless. With this kind of state, she really shouldn't be working at an animation studio—she should've gone to university…
However, those messy thoughts quickly vanished, because Gu Xue noticed two cut folders on her desk.
Inside were Cut 221 and Cut 222 from Episode 6 of
"My Right Leg Is Missing a Big Toe, But That's Not a Toe—It's the Holy Sword."
In animation production, work is usually done by "cuts." You can think of them as short segments of animation, varying in length. They're already divided during storyboarding. A typical seasonal anime episode has around 300 to 350 cuts.
Just like film, animation also requires careful consideration of composition and camera work. Generally, once the storyboard for an episode is completed and approved by the director, the episode director distributes the hundreds of cuts to the key animators, explains the requirements, and then the animators start working.
For example, if a cut shows a high school girl waving her hand, the first thing to determine is: what kind of shot is it? What's the camera angle? A long shot or a close-up? What's the perspective? Who and what appears in the scene?
Simply put—it's composition.
Storyboards are very rough, with no detailed backgrounds. This step fully locks down the visual content, down to every detail required to complete the shot. The product of this step has a professional name: Layout, or L/O for short.
The key animation stage is where characters start to move—drawing the keyframes.
Using the same example of a high school girl waving her hand: once the L/O determines the angle, characters, background, and whether it's a long shot or close-up, the actual key animation begins.
The first keyframe draws the girl.
The second keyframe draws her arm moving upward—say, raised to chest level.
The third keyframe draws her arm raised higher—perhaps above her head.
The next keyframe shows her raised hand moving from one side to the other, completing the waving motion.
Of course, that's a simplified explanation.
In short, selecting accurate keyframes—before the motion, during it, after it—and drawing those key moments from start to finish is the job of a key animator.
This stage requires extremely precise control over timing, movement, and transitions.
Once all keyframes for a cut are finished, it moves on to the animation stage. Animators clean up the keyframes into closed line art suitable for coloring and add in-between frames. Key animation lines are often open, making coloring impossible without redrawing them. As for in-betweens—they're added based on the keyframes.
For example, if a waving arm has only two keyframes—one on the left and one on the right—the motion technically exists, but without in-betweens it looks unnatural, like teleportation. In-between drawings are needed to make the motion smooth and continuous.
Overall, Layout (composition) → Key Animation (keyframes) → Animation (cleanup and in-betweens) makes up the drawing pipeline of animation—the foundation that makes animation move.
And Gu Xue was a second key animator.
A second key animator's job is to clean up—to refine the first key animator's rough drawings into usable keyframes for animation.
It sounds complicated, but it's basically grunt work.
To put it simply: first key animation only draws the rough outline and movement. Clothing, facial features, hair—none of those details are drawn. The second key animator fills in all the details according to the character designs.
Low technical difficulty.
High annoyance.
Also known as cleaning second keyframes.
A massive pain in the ass.
Originally, the purpose of having second key animators was to let "people who draw well" make characters move with "the least amount of effort." Nowadays…
Under ideal circumstances, layout, first key animation, and second key animation are all handled by the same animator—but animators like that are becoming rarer and rarer.
The two cuts Gu Xue received already had the first key animation completed. The outlines and motions were done, and they were action-heavy cuts—the small climax of Episode 6.
Because no one in-house could handle them, the company had even hired an external animator.
At first, Gu Xue was actually pretty excited.
But after flipping through the rough keyframes of those two cuts, she froze.
What the hell is this?
It was painful to look at.
Rough drawings were one thing, but the motion design was a total mess. Some body proportions were distorted, and even the so-called "swinging the holy sword" motion looked twisted and unnatural…
How did this even get approved by the episode director and animation director?
So it really was a sacrificial project…
Gu Xue stared at the pile of keyframes on her desk with a look of pure disgust.
She had zero motivation to clean up and polish this pile of garbage.
But her hands itched.
Because these two cuts were so stupid they were actually kind of fun.
They were close-ups of the protagonist—his toe flying off, glowing midair, the protagonist running and jumping, grabbing the toe as it transforms into a holy sword, then plunging downward and smashing the sword into the ground.
Stupid, right?
But it had a strong cult-movie vibe.
Gu Xue liked cult movies.
Well—she liked them back on Earth.
She glanced at the existing first keyframes, thought for about two seconds, then happily decided to toss them aside and redraw everything herself.
Whether they used it or not didn't matter.
She was going to draw it.
Worst case, she'd just get fired.
Pulling out the timing sheet, taking fresh key animation paper, fixing it onto the peg bar, putting on her headphones—
When Gu Xue picked up her pencil, she was smiling brightly.
Suddenly, she felt that maybe things weren't so bad after all.
At least girls still have hands, okay…
But after drawing for a while—
She stopped smiling.
Sitting was exhausting…
And her chest was really getting in the way—damn it.
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Read a lot of more chapters of this fic on my patr eon: patr eon.com/KyoHaruhi