Super Crooks, the animated adaptation of Mark Millar’s limited comic series which focuses on super villains pulling off a major heist, is set to arrive on Netflix later this month, with the series being created by Studio Bones, who you might know best for their work on My Hero Academia. Recently, we had the opportunity to sit down and chat with the comic adaptation’s director, Motonobu Hori, who dove into his role as director as well as diving into his past in the medium of anime, including his time with the latest Berserk films.
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Motonobu Hori’s resume is vast when it comes to the world of anime, having been a key animator on countless series including the likes of Sword Art Online, Psycho-Pass, FLCL Progressive, and Ghost In The Shell: Arise to name a few. The director of Supercrooks was also a storyboard designer and key animator for the trilogy of Berserk films which documented the story of “The Golden Age Arc” with Hori being more than willing to discuss what different tactics he would take when it came to the animation of the trilogy. Both the Berserk films and the 2016 anime series have been controversial in the fan community for employing more computer-generated animation and this is something that Motonobu had taken into account with his thoughts on changing the adaptation.
“This might be a little difficult to do, because the designs were very close to the manga, but if you use CG for the characters, it lightened the gravitas. I would have liked to stick with hand drawing but maybe we could have done something similar to what we did with Super Crooks, to simplify the drawings and design quality compared to the original material. That would be a fun challenge if I was able to return to Berserk, where we could change the design to see if we could hit a level where fans could accept it.”
As a key animator in his past, Hori was able to take lessons learned when it came to Super Crooks, creating a more forgiving schedule for the animators in his role as director, remembering how little time that he had received in past projects.
How would you “fix” Berserk in the future in terms of its anime adaptations? What do you think of what you’ve seen of Super Crooks so far? Feel free to let us know in the comments or hit me up directly on Twitter @EVComedy to talk all things comics, anime, and the world of crooks and demons.
