A Few Moments of Cheers and 3DCG Anime

24 Aug, 2025

Last updated: 2025-08-24

On a whim, I decided to watch Suu-funkan no Yell wo, or A Few Moments of Cheers. Although I haven’t been so good at actually watching stuff, generally, I scan all of the new anime and look out for stuff that no one’s talking about and that I find interesting nevertheless.

Maybe this is borne out of a selfish desire to find a hidden gem, a little secret just for me. This is a long-standing habit of mine, collecting odd stories and experiences that often, I don’t even tell anyone else about, except for the occasional stranger I may share one of these moments with. But when it comes to anime, I have pretty specific tastes, and I don’t necessarily trust anyone else to know what I would find interesting. And so I have no choice but to go digging through everything myself. And in this process I don’t necessarily look for the “best” stuff, or I think I’d pretty much end up watching the same things as everyone else. Instead, I end up watching a lot of odd music videos, web shorts, and other miscellaneous anime that tend to be rough around the edges but that give me something to think about.

And that’s how I found this movie, somewhere at the bottom of the list of anime films of 2024, sorted in descending order by popularity. A couple of people I know have seen this movie, but no one’s discussed it. And maybe there’s not much to discuss. But that’s never stopped me before.

This is the first feature film produced by 100studio, a relatively new studio focused on digital anime production (according to Wikipedia), and Hurray!, which seems to be the studio founded by the director of the film, Poprika, with a little bit of support by the Ishikawa Prefecture, where the film takes place.

I don’t know a lot about 3D animation, but it looks like the entire film was made using Blender, or some similar software. I’ve been interested in how 3DCG is going to change anime for a while now, and overall I think I’m far more optimistic than other people. I don’t think there’s anything quite like hand-drawn animation, and that will always be what I gravitate towards the most. But I also can’t deny that the more I look into the now 30-or-so year old history of CG and its integration into anime, the more I’m fascinated by it. Why are artists drawn to CG? Well, because they see a tool that allows for new avenues of expression, or one that makes certain tedious tasks easier. Why are executives drawn to CG? From my understanding, it can be a cost-cutting measure. It’s the tension between the two of these things that makes it such a controversial topic. But I’ll say that anime is nothing if not a medium born out of limitations. And I really like what recent shows like Beastars, D4DJ, and Girls Band Cry do with the tools of full CG, intentionality, and the anime ethos, and I think a lot of that shines in this movie too.

What bothers me about a lot of American full CG features is that they seem to come at it from a “diorama” sort of philosophy. The characters are lovingly detailed as 3D objects, sort of like dolls, they are placed into various dollhouses, and movement follows from extremely rigidly defined (and impressive) laws of physics. The words that describe these sort of movies are often things like “realistic”, “fidelity”, or “smooth”. And although I can understand the appeal of this approach (and I can enjoy, say, stop-motion, which has a very similar sort of philosophy) it’s not necessarily what I like. In a sense, the fully CG diorama style of animation, as exemplified by Pixar, is the culmination of the “illusion of life” that classic Disney animators were trying to achieve. The appeal of anime, instead (and this is taken to the most extreme with Kanada-style “full limited” animation) is that it is always built as a series of drawings first. This was perhaps initially simply a result of constraints. Anime is a medium built out of ingenious ways of using resources economically, because animation is after all the most wasteful medium. But this approach also allows for a lot of possibilities. Although there are some principles that govern the continuity between one drawing and the next, they remain only principles. Regardless, how this plays out in anime for the most part is just a series of beautifully rendered still images, with occasional bursts of “real” movement in between.

Which brings me to this movie in particular and how it is sort of a blend between the diorama and painting paradigms, in a way that I think will increasingly become the future of anime. Right away, you notice that the movement in this anime is a bit janky and video game-y. This is because they are “just” rigid models that move around according to rudimentary physics. But, despite the fact that they are three dimensional objects, these models are not designed for movement. In other words, they are not simply dolls. Rather, they are designed to eventually “snap” into place and make sense as figures in compositions, because again, anime is a series of paintings.

There’s a phenomenon that people often point out with Disney concept art. Often times, the concept art has an incredibly distinct character and identity, and it looks completely different from the movies that are the end product (which end up all looking a bit similar to each other). With Disney, they start with the concept art and try to bring it “to life”. In the end credits of this movie, however, we see what I think might be concept art for the movie, and it made me feel as if the opposite happened. They started with the paintings, yes, but they were essentially working backwards from there to create a diorama that, viewed from a certain angle, would produce those paintings. That’s just my theory, anyway.

The compositions are really simple in terms of shapes and colors, but to me they are full of intentionality. One thing I’ve learned in life is that more complex does not always mean better, and that sometimes a small number of well-considered choices is worth more than hundreds of haphazard ones. I don’t necessarily prefer the “no outline” style myself, but it seems to me that without the black boundaries that separate the characters from the background, it is up to the artist to find a combination of colors that makes them separate but coherent together. It’s not as simple (or complex) as programming a shader and post-processing effects. And I like that despite the fact that this anime was made with CG, they still started with these sorts of design decisions.

There are a couple of anime-isms that I wanted to highlight. For one, there’s plenty of smears, as there should be. Just because modeling and rigging creates a consistent character model that can be used across scenes doesn’t mean that the “boundaries” of the character are limited to this model. Smears are the ultimate testament to the “series of paintings” philosophy. If a character can literally become a blob from one frame to the next, what can’t they do? There’s also the way that lights are rendered, like the sun and the streetlights, as abstract geometric shapes or smears. This is again a very painterly way of looking at things, I think, the sort of thing you might see in a Shichirou Kobayashi background. And maybe he took this from Manet or something, I don’t know?

So I’ve mostly been talking about this fully 3D feature as if it were a 2D one, so I should point out that the central conceit of this movie does use the fact that it’s 3D in a clever way. The movie is about—

Only me, man. Only I can write over a thousand words about an anime before explaining what it’s about.

The movie is about high school student Asaya Kanata, who loves making music videos using a software that I assume is the same software the movie itself was made with. Other characters include the certified classmate guy (window seat and all) Tonosaki Daisuke, and their teacher, Orie Yu. One day, Asaya is walking around the town (of Ishikawa) looking for inspiration and he sees a woman belting her heart out with a guitar in the pouring rain. Upon finding out that she is his new teacher, he tries to convince her to let him make a music video for the song.

I don’t want to spoil too much about the story, because I actually think it’s quite a well-written one. In broad strokes, Orie is on the verge of giving up on her art, after giving it her all for some time without finding sucess. Asaya is inspired by her music and wants to share it with the world, but he’s relatively inexperienced and fears he lacks talent. And the stoic Tonosaki quietly has his own struggles as an artist, struggling to find inspiration in the way that his friend does. The movie starts with a very anime monologue about the stars. The city lights might drown them out, but they’re still there. This is ultimately a metaphor about art that never finds its audience, and whether it means anything at all. It’s a smartly put together script that conveys its themes coherently, but there’s also a “dakara… dakara” speech at the end so I can’t be that impressed. Apparently, this was written by Jukki Hanada, who has tons of fans, and I guess is an anime writer I like? I really enjoyed what I saw of Girls Band Cry and the character work there. But yeah, I won’t try to give too many backhanded compliments here. I don’t watch anime for the scripts, but this is a good one. That’s all you need to know.

In one of the pivotal moments of the movie, we actually see Asaya making one of the music videos on his computer. This abstractly depicts him sort of floating in a three dimensional space while doing things like adjusting sliders and sketching on a digital canvas and sculpting a model of a mountain. It’s honestly a really cool scene, and would be a great advertisement for this software if I actually knew what it was called! But my point is it sort of justifies why this had to be a 3D movie. Or maybe it doesn’t, and Asaya is a music video creator because it’s a 3D movie. You know, a lot of people like to say this cliche about how a great work of art in every medium is one that could only ever be made in that medium. I think that’s silly, honestly, but we don’t have to get into that right now. Suffice it to say that this movie technically does meet that threshold, if that’s something you care about, and even if I wasn’t entirely convinced by it I thought it was cool and, if nothing else, unique. There’s some other small things here and there, some brief switches to first person POV, overlaying the contents of a phone screen over the background (which I thought was clever the first time I saw it, but I’ve definitely seen it before at this point — I wonder where?), but that’s about it. Oh, and you get to see the music video he makes at the end! Honestly, I didn't really like it, but that's okay! That's kind of what the movie's about, and I think that's beautiful. I also kind of think the weak music is a point against the film, I found the overwrought singer-songwriter stuff to be annoying and the first song in the movie I liked was the end credits provided by Fredric. But anyway.

By the way, my friend Sage has been complaining about color post-processing for a minute and my take on the whole thing is that it erases intentionality by modifying all the colors at once. This movie has an interesting take on it in this scene where the character modifies the colors of this abstract environment. It’s subtle, but the character doesn’t simply slide across the color scale from green to red. Instead, the shadows move around slowly and a new color palette is used for the “red” scene. I think that again, this shows that the artists involved were thinking about choosing the colors at every step of the way.

Now, is this movie the best anime film of 2024? Uh, maybe? Well, no, there was both Garden of Remembrance and Kimi no Iro which I liked more (actually, this movie reminded me a lot of Kimi no Iro, both movies have a similar focus on finding one’s path as an artist, but they are thematically very different). But my point is, I don’t care. It gave me a lot to think about, clearly a lot to write about too. And that’s why I like watching random anime movies on a Saturday night :)