THE ART OF DAN DA DAN

Trevor Hogg dodges aliens and ghosts to uncover the calculated and colourful madness of a bizarre anime adaptation

One of the essential elements of visual storytelling is the colour palette, which plays a role in setting the tone, establishing or supporting themes, and directing the viewer's attention by highlighting and de-emphasising objects depending on their importance within the frame. Going into vibrancy overdrive is the anime adaptation of Yukinobu Tatsu's manga DAN DA DAN, now is streaming on Crunchyroll and Netflix, distributed by GKIDS, directed by Fūga Yamashiro, and animated by Science SARU.

The story centres around a dare that sees a young extraterrestrial enthusiast get possessed by a yōkai and lose his testicles, while his spirit-believing classmate gets abducted by sexual reproduction-obsessed aliens that inadvertently awaken her psychic abilities – and live to regret doing so. And in the middle of all this craziness is a budding romance that holds everything together.

The character colour concepts were shared between Yamashiro and Science SARU colour designer Satoshi Hashimoto. “There was a mutual understanding so we didn’t have a lot of issues with the base colours,” recalls Hashimoto. “What we ended up dealing with more was figuring out the colours for each cut and scene, especially because this was director Yamashiro’s first time working as a full director of a series or film.

“There were a lot of times when he would get back a composited movie version of the cut, or we would look at the work in progress and he would say, ‘Oh, no, I want to do retakes’ on this and that, because maybe it wasn’t what he was expecting. Especially the action scenes in Episode 101; we were doing retakes and multiple versions for a long time to get them right.”

MANGA REFERENCES