by Rollin Bishop

As indicated within our recent annual assessment, one of our favorite efforts last year was the monthlong coverage of Gobelins graduation films — past and present. It was personally rewarding and also received well by you folks, which is basically the ideal scenario. Good work, done well, with good reception. Why not try some more thematic approaches? What better time than now? What better place than here?

Welcome to re:frame's Per Second, a month of coverage focused on all the ways animation touches video games, from the culture surrounding the medium to high-profile outliers to the everyday bread and butter of video game animation. Ready? Start!

The inciting reason for kicking off Per Second this month, of all months, happens to be extremely on the nose for us if you've been reading our work so far: Orbitals, the extremely anime Nintendo Switch 2-exclusive sci-fi co-op video game from developer Shapefarm and publisher Kepler Interactive, releases later this week. Why did Orbitals make us want to do this immediately?

I mean, just look at it:

This sort of retro anime aesthetic isn't exactly new to video games, and plenty of others have tried similar, but what Orbitals does is make the entirety much more holistic. If you're at all familiar with video games, you're likely to look at that trailer and think, "Right, of course, animated cutscenes that then transition into gameplay that looks entirely different." That's how something like Ghost in the Shell worked on PlayStation, after all, with the animated bits pretty drastically different from gameplay.

Orbitals, on the other hand, just… looks like that. Gameplay to cutscenes, cutscenes to gameplay, what you see is what you get. The animated scenes are a bit smoother, less obviously interactive, but the seams are often hard to catch unless you're looking for them. The fact that it's deliberately emulating a style that's closing in on 50 years old goes a long way to hiding transitions.

Part of what makes Orbitals stand out, and what makes us sit up and take notice, is a real devotion to authenticity. Shapefarm worked with Studio Massket (which has its hands in all sorts of anime productions) for the cutscenes and art direction, but most notably, animator Hidetoshi Yoshida (Bubblegum Crisis, Demonbane) storyboarded the entirety of Orbitals by hand. Yes, really.

This is the kind of tenacity that re:frame is designed to celebrate. (Even if, as some reviews indicate, Orbitals is more of a "great gowns, beautiful gowns" situation.) To highlight the extraordinary, to interrogate the common, and to curate the noteworthy are our guiding principles, if there are any. This month, we just so happen to be applying that to video games.

/out of frame

🎮 Rollin: I'll have more to say about Orbitals at my actual place of employment, GamesRadar+, later this week. Most of my free time, I've been playing a couple of other video games that I can't quite talk about just yet… But I can soon.

🧹 Kambole: This past week, I went to go and see Kiki's Delivery Service at the BFI IMAX in London. It's funny to watch a film like that at such a large scale, not so much a film about magic as it is one about the minute thrills and pains of living independently. At the same time, seeing the depiction of the European-inspired seaside city and the detail of the painted backgrounds feels utterly staggering blown up at that scale. I've been fortunate enough in London to see a number of Ghibli films exhibited in the past few years (thanks to the efforts of folks like the Ghibliotheque boys), but the novelty definitely hasn't worn off. With Whisper of the Heart soon to follow, there's something of a trend in the films being chosen by GKIDS and Anime LTD in that the quieter urban dramas have come out first, ones which might not be a more traditional first choice for the biggest possible screens here. But that's part of why it's exciting! On smaller screens though, you should look out for The Lovers, an indie short film made by Filipino students.

🐕 Toussaint: Remember Ersatz, the dark fantasy short I wrote about back in January? Well, the director is back with another short set in the same universe called Trench Dogs that you should definitely check out if you too have an affinity for all things grim and dark.