A production company founded by the alumni of the Sunrise Cowboy Bebop production team, Studio BONES produces a wide range of different anime genres. BONES productions are noted for their consistent, high quality animation and character designs, specializing in crazy, exaggerated acting.
See also TMS Entertainment, another studio that is known for consistent, high quality animation and character designs and crazy and exaggerated acting.
Studio BONES Productions include:
- Angelic Layer
- Darker Than Black
- The Daughter of Twenty Faces (with Telecom Animation Film)
- Eureka Seven and Eureka Seven AO
- Fullmetal Alchemist and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
- Gosick
- Heroman
- Jyu-Oh-Sei
- Kurau Phantom Memory
- No. 6
- Ouran High School Host Club
- RahXephon
- Scrapped Princess
- Star Driver: Kagayaki no Takuto
- Sword of the Stranger
- Wolf's Rain
- ~Tokyo Magnitude 8.0~ (In conjunction with Kinema Citrus)
- Soul Eater
- Un-Go
- Xam'd: Lost Memories
Tropes that recur frequently in BONES works are:
- Animation Bump: Like T Ms, it's there on so many levels.
- Conspicuous CG: Appears every now and again.
- Author Appeal: An older male tranvestite has appeared in Cowboy Bebop, Wolf's Rain and Darker Than Black, and has an expanded role in the latter. Kurau Phantom Memory is about two women who live like a couple. Ouran High School Host Club is about a girl who dresses up as a boy.
- Everything's Better with Rainbows: Eureka Seven Xam'd: Lost Memories, and Star Driver among others, play this straight. Rainbows are used as symbols a lot, as well as other things. It's frequently used in explosions and blasts of energy.
- Off-Model: Due to their exaggerated animation, it can happen both deliberately and unintentionally.
- Also like most Japanese studios, bad outsourcing as well.
- Production Posse: Even outside of the actual studio employees, contributors to one Bones show typically show up again at some point. Perhaps most notably, Yoko Kanno, despite being an independent composer, has scored a sizable chunk of their shows.
- If it's Bones, you can generally expect Takehito Koyasu and/or Mamoru Miyano to voice someone.