At the forefront of this trend are the people behind a new television show called Bit The Cupid, a production of Amuse Inc. and Satelight Inc., Japan's first all digital animation studio located in Sapporo in northern Japan. The cartoon's main character is a cupid named Bit, hence the title, while the other characters are a who's who of Greek and Roman mythology, done cute.

In conventional animation, creating scenes with many changes in perspective, such as when a character is walking off into the distance and is thus appearing smaller and smaller, is a tedious affair as the image has to be drawn and redrawn, each time a little smaller. With computer animation this redrawing is done automatically after the computer graphics engineer plots out where the character or object is moving.

Many of the less expensive, conventionally made cartoons use movement that require very little change in the dimension of the moving object, which is owed to limitations on time and money, particularly when the medium of delivery is television. But with the use of computers, these limitations disappear. The upshot is that animation can appear more lifelike and dynamic at a low production cost.

The cost of doing this kind of animation falls between what the costs would be for conventional animation and what they would be for full 3D animation, according to John Cheuck, an advisor to both Amuse and Satelight. The costs for the former, he says, are around US$100,000 to US$150,000 and for the latter, US$350,000 to US$400,000.

"Satelight can do this a lot cheaper than if someone were to try to do this in the U.S.," Cheuck said "because we have already developed special software, fine tuned the system to work with traditional cell animators and computer animators."

The real cost of the system is its hardware, which consists of about 20 Silicon Graphics Inc., Indigo computers and around 100 Power Macintoshes. Satelight's animation software has eliminated the need for highly skilled and highly paid cell animators necessary in conventional animation by automating the color gradations that give the animation texture and depth. This has allowed Satelight to hire handicapped workers with no experience in the field to do the coloring on the individual cells. Where before they were doing simple repetitive assembly work, Satelight put them to work using Power Macintoshes where they had to learn how to use Adobe PhotoShop and Freehand software. The computers have been installed in the center where these workers live in Iwamizawa, near Sapporo.

The basic design is done in Tokyo, where artists create the story board that will become a finished animated feature. It is done in black and white as simple drawings which are then scanned into a computer. These pictures are sent via dial-up ISDN to Satelight's Sapporo office where the computer animator plots the movements of the characters and objects (such as falling rocks and flying arrows). Then the painting is done using Adobe System Inc's graphics software PhotoShop and FreeHand. All of this takes about one week and the finished product is a 15 minute animation that has depth and crispness that is impractical for most animators.

The Bit the Cupid series is scheduled to end this Spring, but the studio plans to come right back with a new series based on the Chinese folk tale "The Monkey King." Satelight and Amuse hope that the Asian theme will make it popular throughout Asia, and not only in Japan, where the tale is also well known and a frequent theme in television programs. The show will be translated into Chinese.

According to Cheuck, Bit may also get a new lease on life in both the United States and Europe, though he wouldn't elaborate on specific plans for broadcasters there.

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