The animation of 1/100 rice planting is a slow paced short, but is oddly relaxing to watch, kind of like watching rube goldberg machines completing their tasks. There is a lot to appreciate when watching things that require meticulous editing to complete. The two men who did this did an amazing job putting the animation together and not keeping it focused on a single thing without the fringes being neglected.
The choice of not adding music is rather questionable, but offers you the opportunity to add your own. My friends and I, while watching, added Minecrafts track “sweden” to it but you can choose your own like waterfalls or sounds of nature (or just add doom music you do you.). Another negative from it was the overall tempo; it was slightly too slow paced and could’ve been edited afterwards to increase the speed.
The addition of small things like the ducklets meandering through the fields just adds to the detailed editing that this piece took. The race of the two farmers was a hype for me and my friends to watch. We were betting on the winner as well. A strong point of the animation was how much was also moving on screen each frame which could be seen in their other works like 1/100 train station. I can not say enough about their overwhelming attention to detail that was put into these pieces.
The zoomed-in shots are a nice addition and aren’t used enough in poorer made stop motion where they stayed zoomed out or up close for long periods (which is understandable moving in and out setting up small camera stands and taking them back down without hitting anything is rather difficult.). If you like watching relaxing things like this I would also recommend watching 1/100 shibuya station for its amazing movements.
But the most amazing things are how they got the rice from the trucks into the fields, and made them jitter with each frame as if it had an actual engine. I honestly didn’t even think about the amazing detail that it takes to take the rice plant from the truck and put it into the ground at first and my mind was blown when rewatching it. Oh, and there was a dog which was cute.
(Spoiler Warning)
At the end of the piece they show just how dexterous they are when they make the pieces do very specific actions such as waving and dancing. I was actually in disbelief when they revealed that it was just two guys using chopsticks to move all these pieces. It could have taken hours or even days to get the seven minutes of animations they showed. Overall I think this is an amazing advertisement for their small models and honestly these guys should probably be hired to oversee some actual stop animation shows.
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8.5 out of 11 users liked this review
