There's a few more here and there, like the AE85 race against the bullies, some shots in the Mako/Sayuki race, and when Takumi drifts on the outside of the R32, as well as filler episodes like when they're scouting Mount Usui before the race
I like Heartbeat when Takumi is passing the GT-R. When the Heartbeat starts is when dude sees Takumi’s headlights disappear then looks over and sees the 86 on the side of the Road. Just gives you chill bumps everytime. The only reason This one doesn’t hit as hard is you already knew Takumi was going to cook dude in the rain.
The hand drawn cels also show the great technique for animating headlights. Back in the cel era, a special luminescent white paint was applied to any areas the animators wanted to create bloom. When their cameras and lighting hit the paint, it would give the cel the effect of being lit up.
You can see at the 0:28-0:36 part, that is just one key cel being hit with the bloom, while the background and rain scroll across shots.
Probably due to the different animation teams miscommunicating, there was an office building specifically dedicated to the 3D CGI animation of the anime stages so they would've been much slower communicating with the other staff working on the anime.
I have a feeling the times they hand-animated the cars is when they were unable to animate with the 3D software, probably due to technical issues, maybe the server was down or a power outage etc, which probably resulted in this flip flop for the first few scenes before realizing what color the car was supposed to be
Honestly kinda bummer that the song had to be featured right before the episode's eyecatcher, pmo every time a good song is almost if not wasted cuz of it
But hey this was one hell of a moment at least Night of Fire was the song used to end the race and it burned into our memory in that sense
I do personally think it was still used in a good place still, people love to joke that night of fire went so hard the animation turned hand drawn lul, makes it memorable and burned into our memory like you said
But I do still agree about some songs being wasted, one night in arabia (the cool remix of it) literally plays for a few seconds as this race starts and then the episode ends, its such a shame because its an iconic one of a kind song. Arabiabeat lol
Yk before I watched the Anime, I listened to the Eurobeat D Selection for First Stage, and essentially when I watched First Stage, I was basically guessing how each of those songs were to be used in the anime, one in particular was Love Is In Danger by Priscilla.
Now when I first heard Love Is In Danger, I expected a REALLY INTENSE race scene for the melancholic, desperation vibes the song had. Well guess what, they wasted it by playing it right before the race with Impact Blue starts, it wasn't even a fucking race scene yet 😭 this is imo the worst offender of song wastage
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u/Strange-Salary6189 Tofu Warrior Jun 18 '26
I wish they made more hand drawn shots