Skip to main content

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (Part 1) on GoAnimate

In late January of 2012 I was looking around for ideas to create an epic animated music video on GoAnimate that told a story of a battle against the odds.

Inspiration...

This came about as a result of re-viewing, yet again,  one of my favorite GoAnimations of all time created by GoAnimator, Tripfold, called The Jet Set Concussion (The Blueberry Fiz Contention 2).

I've embeded it below. It still stands up as a great GoAnimation even now.

The Jet Set Concussion by Tripfold on GoAnimate

Animated Presentations - Powered by GoAnimate.

It's an old animation (published in October of 2009) that tells a love story of our hero of sorts in the face of aliens hell bent on destroying the world.

I like it because of how it tells the story with no dialogue. How it uses music to set the pace of the action and that it features plenty of detail and subtle animation techniques, not really seen on GoAnimate at the time (such as paralax movement of objects to give a feeling of depth). Then there is just the epic-ness of it all.

I wanted to do something along those lines so began trawling YouTube for a suitable song. Something that inspired 'epic-ness'.

In late 2011 GoAnimate's Chibi Ninja Theme and sword fighting action packs had been released and I'd yet to do anything with them. GoAnimator, Chaostoon, had had a huge success with his Swords and the follow up Swords II animations. Both are excellent but, for me, didn't quite showcase the moves in the sword fighting action packs in the way I wanted to see them. (Though in hind sight, The first Swords actual sword fight is easily better than what I've achieved in my Yoshimi animation - more on that later).

I first heard of the band The Flaming Lips when they released one of their most successful singles to date, She Don't use Jelly in 1993. It brought much attention to their quirky, alternative and experimental music.

I don't think I've ever bought any of their music but even so, their biggest songs have stuck them in my head as a band that's always done things differently. I was looking for their 1993 hit with a view to perhaps using some of it in my animation  (at that point my animation was going to feature more than one song).

Whilst searching Youtube I came across their 2002 song, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (Part 1) from the album of the same name. I had heard it before, many years ago, but seeing the title alone again was enough to make me think this is the perfect song for GoAnimate's Chibi Ninja theme.

If you read through the comments of the Youtube clip at the link above you soon discover there's some contention as to what the song is about.

The most common theory is that the song is a metaphor for a young girl fighting cancer - the pink robots representing cancer cells in her system. However according to the albums Wikipedia page this is actually the story line for a planned Broadway musical (announced in March 2007) based on the album - as described by the band's lead singer, Wayne Coyne:
There's the real world and then there's this fantastical world. This girl, the Yoshimi character, is dying of cancer. And these two guys are battling to come visit her in the hospital. And as one of the boyfriends envisions trying to save the girl, he enters this other dimension where Yoshimi is this Japanese warrior and the pink robots are an incarnation of her disease. It's almost like the disease has to win in order for her soul to survive. Or something like that.
I haven't been able to find anywhere online where Wayne Coyne confirms this is also the original story of the song. If you listen to the lyrics the metaphor doesn't quite work in my opinion.

Never the less I based my idea for my animated music video of the song on this very concept, though my pink robots simply represent the girls illness, which isn't necessarily cancer. Below is the final result.


Behind the Scenes...

As you can see the clip makes considerable use of several of the Simple Perspective techniques I recently wrote tutorials about in this blog.  It also uses GoAnimate's new scene transitions to cross fade between scenes and the new Enter/Exit feature to fade in and out individual characters.

One thing that only GoAnimators, who are really familiar with the Comedy World theme, might notice is the new camera view of the hospital bed background. I created it initially for variation but it came in useful for having the little Yoshimi fly out the window at the end.

In terms of creating the story, I did actually storyboard about the first minute of this animation because I was having a hard time coming up with ideas directly in the studio - which is how I usually work.

You can see my storyboard below which should give you a sense of how rough my storyboards are.

Yoshimi Story board - click to enlarge.

If you look at the first few panels of my storyboard you can see there's no nurse sitting next to the bed. As I put the animation its self together I added the nurse in and made it some-what ambiguous as to whether Yoshimi is the sick girl in the bed or the nurse.

The girl's father was also an addition because I needed different things to occur each time we came back to the hospital. I didn't want to keep coming back to a bed with a girl sleeping. As the story evolved it was clear the video needed to end with the girl waking up after Yoshimi successfully destroys all the robots.

Choreographing Sword Fights...

I like to think I'm really good at animating sword fights but in reality I don't think I"m all that cut out for it. Not with GoAnimate at least. This animation gave me a new appreciation for Chaostoon's Swords animation. The sword fight he choreographed in his first episode is closer to what I was hoping to achieve in Yoshimi than what I did.

To be fair on myself, it's not easy to create a sword fight where one character is considerably larger than the other. It makes it even harder to match up the preset attack and defend actions. That aside I was starting to loose patience with getting the moves I wanted to animate looking like they were actually hitting their targets.

That's why Yoshimi knocks out the first four robots relatively easily and cleans up the last one by throwing her sword. You really do need a lot of patience to do a good fight animation really well.


I think I've covered all the main things behind the scenes. It's not quite the epic animation I wanted to make but it's a step closer to doing something nearly as awesome as The Jet Set Concussion.

Popular posts from this blog

Can You Learn Reallusion's Cartoon Animator 5 for Free Using Their 137 Official YouTube Video Tutorials Sorted Into a Logical Learning Order?

Or you could just buy The Lazy Animator Beginner's Guide to Cartoon Animator . While Reallusion's Cartoon Animator is one of the easiest 2D animation studios to get up and running with quickly, learning it from all of the official, free, video tutorials can be more overwhelming than helpful. With more than 137 videos totaling more than 28 and a half hours of tutorials, spread across three generations of the software (Cartoon Animator 3 through 5) it's hard to know if what you're learning is a current or legacy feature that you either need to know or can be skipped. Many of the official tutorials only teach specific features of the software and don't relate at all to previous or later tutorials. As a result there are many features either not mentioned or are hard to find. To make your learning easier, on this page, I've collected together all of the essential, official, free video tutorials and sorted them into a learning order that makes sense. Simply start at

TimeBolt: Fast Video Editing for Anyone Creating Online Courses, Podcasts, or Vlogs.

I resisted making tutorial videos for a long time because I don't like editing. Specifically I don't like editing me teaching as I step students through a process during a screen record. I have a tendency to insert long pauses not just in the middle of sentences but between multiple words in the middle of sentences as my pace matches what I'm doing onscreen. This makes for very long and very slow paced video tutorials. To counteract this I have to edit out all the pauses. This can take hours, or even days on particularly long tutorials. For example, when I created my main course, The Lazy Animator Beginner's Guide to Cartoon Animator , I literally injured the thumb on my right hand, operating my mouse, as I spent weeks taking out all my pauses (seriously, I had to wear a thumb brace for a few weeks to fix the pain). Recently I came across TimeBolt , a very affordable, fast editing application with the featured purpose of removing all the pauses from your video (and even

Make Disney/Pixar Style Characters with Reallusion's Character Creator and Toon Figure Bases

The Extraordinary Tourist Classic Coat outfit created using Reallusion's Toon Designer for CC3. I've talked before how I've wanted to get into 3D Disney/Pixar style character animation since I first saw the animated cutscenes for the very first Tomb Raider game back in 1996. It's why I initially bought Reallusion's iClone 3D studio app as soon as I could afford a computer that would run it. But then Reallusion released their 3D Character Creator (CC) for iClone and I wanted to create my characters with that (and I did try with Bat Storm ). But the focus of CC was realism, even with ToKoMotion's stylised body morphs . Now with Reallusion's Cartoon Designer bundle for CC3 which features two packs, Toon Figures , and Toon Hair , designing Disney/Pixar style 3D characters just got a whole lot quicker. The two packs are the bare essentials for creating Toon style characters. Five body morphs (2 male, 2 female, and one adolescent body morph that w

KIT Scenarist - Free, Open Source, Screenwriting Software that Helps Research Your Ideas Too

KIT Scenarist Script Writing Software's Mascot, Alexander Cat. While you can write a script in any word processing app, if you're writing stories (screenplays) that feature characters and dialogue, a dedicated script writing app can save a lot of time formatting, letting you focus more on the actual story. Script writing apps are also very useful if you plan to send your screenplays out to production companies, or if you're collaborating with actors and other production people, who are used to scripts being in a particular standard format.  [Note: In case you're wondering there are reasons scripts follow a standard format and are always written in Courier (typewriter) font, including but not limited to; being easy to read by actors, plenty of space for notes, and the general rule that one page of a script (in this format) equals approximately one minute of screen time.] KIT Scenarist , in my opinion, is one of the best script writing apps out there for ease of use, simp

Review: Headshot Plugin for Reallusion's Character Creator 3

Headshot for CC3. Quite possibly the best 3D Avatar I've made of myself in any 3D application. Creating a realistic 3D human avatar is a whole lot easier with Reallusion's new Headshot Plugin for Character Creator 3. The plugin is an AI powered extension that can generate 3D digital humans from one photo. Which sounds like an amazing proposition but, in practice, if you're trying to achieve a specific likeness to an actual person, Headshot will give you an excellent base to work from. Headshot has two modes, Auto and Pro. Auto Mode Auto is well worth a try if you have an ideal photo of a front facing person that is properly lit and posed to Headshot's optimum requirements. It's also the only mode that will take a crack at generating a hair model. I grabbed an image of Harrison Ford, dragged it into Headshot without changing any of the default settings (other than specifying 'male' and selecting an 'old male' setting) and this is what I

AE Juice - Animation Presets, Motion Graphics, Templates, Transitions for After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Other Video Applications

Level up you video edits and animations with AE Juice's motion graphics and templates. Some days you just don't have the time to create flashy motion graphics for your latest video or animation. For some of us it's more a question of our own artistic abilities being a little less than the awesome we'd like them to be. Whatever reason a resource like AE Juice's animation presets, motion graphics, templates, and transitions packs for After Effects , Premiere Pro , and other video applications can really make your work stand out very quickly. AE Juice gives you access to an instant library of free, premade content elements and sound effects, which you can add to with additional purchases of various themed packs from their store. There are three ways to manage their content, all of which can be used in commercial projects . The AE Juice Standalone Package Manager makes it easy to browse previews of all your pack contents and to download and find just the elements yo

Murf.ai - Text to Speech, AI enabled, Real People, Online Voice Generator and Video Studio Editor

Most of us are not talented enough to perform verbal gymnastics with our voices, easily imitating people of different ages, genders, races etc. Which is real problem for solo animators with little to no budget. How do you voice multiple characters in your animations? Developments in human sounding, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Text to Speech (TTS) voices is making them an increasingly viable and affordable alternative to hiring real actors (or convincing family or friends to help out). Murf.AI is an extremely impressive online, AI voice generation service that sounds like real people. Not just a TTS service, their online studio offers a range of tools that include editing and adding AI voices to entire video projects, converting your own recorded audio to an AI voice, and uploading scripts to be converted into AI voices, and more. A selection of the 120+ available voices. Within Murf's studio you get up to 120+ AI voices in 20+ languages, as well as a library of royalty free musi