No, I’m not talking about the first episode of the new season of Hayate, though as it turns out it’s being released through Crunchyroll very shortly after broadcast for those paying subscribers (and a week later for cheapskates like myself, which suits me just fine). I’m actually going to talk about the rather unusual extra shipping with the Limited Edition of the recent Hayate no Gotoku!! Episode 0 OAV – the Hayate 3D disk.

The Hayate 3D disk is about seven minutes of footage mostly pulled from the accompanying OAV, and is 3D as in one of those features where you are supposed to wear those doofy red/blue lensed glasses in an effort to imbue whatever image you are seeing with a 3D effect – except this is anime, so it’s still 2D. Mostly.


So, what they’ve basically done is leave the base background as it was, whilst those items further into the foreground (like the characters and the palm trees) have had the images intended to be seen by the left and right eyes separated by varying degrees. It’s the kind of thing that’s achievable with rather less effort that it would have in the past thanks to the digital animation pipeline – just tint and shift your layers around a bit, then multiply them together. It’d be pretty straight forward to replicate the same effect in Photoshop.

What this results in is a the creation of something of a sense of depth to the image – so in the above picture, Sayuka appears rather more distinctly towards the front of the image than the other characters, whilst those palm trees on the right appear clearly before of the rest of the shrubbery. Kind of neat, really.

What it doesn’t really result in is what you could actually call a 3D image – the left and right iterations of each layer, other than the colour tinting, are the same image. To actually create a sense of solidity to go with the depth, they’d have to use images from minutely different angles, and they’d have to match up pretty much perfectly. I doubt many animation studios would want to go through the horrendous pains of doing that.

So, in order to get around that, they add in a couple of minutes of footage of some Hayate-related figures.

Not that Hinagikus chest is a particularly good display of 3D ^^;

Hayate 3D isn’t really anything other than a curiousity. On one hand, it does look kind of neat, but at the same time it also clearly displays that this kind of thing really isn’t going to work in the current home setting with the old red/blue effect.

The problem is that anime is really way too saturated with colour for it to really work – there’s too many strong colours which appear with too much variance between each eye. That fact that the footage used is from a beach episode, where the strong blues of the sky and sea are not visible through the red lens, results in an annoying level of disparity between the two images, and there’s plenty of strong reds to irritate the other eye as well. I guess my not-entirely-great red/green colour vision doesn’t really help me much either. It’d be kind of interesting to see this kind of thing done with the kind of polarized glasses technology typically being utilized in theatres these days, but that’s never going to happen given animes reliance on the home video market for profit.