r/Invincible • u/CryptographerLost825 • Nov 26 '23

ANIMATION DISCOURSE S2 DISCUSSION

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

So it seems like since the last episode dropped, there’s been a lot of discourse around the animation for Season 2 overall. I’m going to try to give my most level-headed thoughts on this. As a passionate fan of the comic, after seeing how they adapted the fight on Thraxa, in my opinion the fight lacked and underdelivered on the sheer visceral gore and ferocity in the comic. This is one of the first few times I think that the show paled in comparison to the comic in terms of the scale, spectacle and amount of detail that was put into the comic. The issue is less about the blood and gore being shown in the episode, it’s more about the level of detail of the gore, battle damage and destruction. I think there’s nothing wrong in constructively levying criticism to a property I’ve immensely loved and only want to see thrive and constantly improve. In season 1 a lot of the focal moments like Guardians massacre, Machine head fight, Omni Man/Invincible showdown and by extension the Atom Eve special episode were massively improved and the elevated in grandiosity, scope and brutality, which is what I was expecting for the Thraxa fight but unfortunately its came off a bit weaker for me than the source material. Now overall I do think that S2 has stepped up the animation in terms of the character models, lighting and lack of CG models in the background, but it hasn’t made the animation really count where it matters most like in S1.

I think a lot of the fans that have concerns about how certain moments will be adapted in terms of the animation are valid. The comics only get crazier in blood, gore and spectacle from the Thraxa arc and if this animation we got for Thraxa is emblematic of how future moments will get translated, I think it’s alright to be mildly concerned. Now is it possible that they repurposed most of the budget towards the second half and namely the finale, where we’ll see the animation shine and pop off, sure. Until then I can only judge off of what we have so far. What do you guys think?

4.8k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

711 comments sorted by

View all comments

1.4k

u/Da_reason_Macron_won Nov 26 '23

I mean, yeah. The animation is just not that good. What makes it weird is that Invincible seems to be quite a pop culture phenomenon so you would expect the budget to be there if people asked for it.

People will shit on it comparing it with anime, but even if you compare it with other US action show with much less of a cultural impact (see: Young Justice or the Powerhouse Animation stuff) it still doesn't look that good. It's not bad animation, but it's not up to the quality you would expect for Amazon's flagship animated series.

556

u/MetalliicMango Nov 26 '23

You'd think that, but remember that worldwide phenomena like Walking Dead and Breaking Bad suffered from budget cuts. Companies will cut as many corners as they can unfortunately.

129

u/JohnnyAK907 Nov 26 '23

I think Amy Sherman Palladino said it best, "there's orcs to pay!"
Amazon picked the wrong GD pony too many times in the last couple of years. Seems like the strike gave them time to step back and reassess, but damage is already done for a lot of good series.
RIP The Expanse Season Seven.

82

u/uniguy2I Nov 26 '23

Considering Jeff Besos personally financed The Expanse because it’s his favourite series, I have no doubt it’s in good hands.

54

u/SaintFoehammer Nov 26 '23

Plus, The Expanse is the exception to Amazon's Rule. It's obvious Bezos loves the IP, and yeah there's some weird choices in there, but it's not as egregious as Rings of Power for example.

Plus the series chose probably the best place for a hiatus inbetween seasons, without giving book spoilers.

18

u/Garchompula The Lizard League Nov 27 '23

I'm pretty sure Jeff Bezos could singlehandedly fund Invincible season 3 off loose pocket change lmao

2

u/mikerophonyx Nov 27 '23

I'm not sure that's accurate. Iirc, Bezos picked the series up for Amazon Prime but the series is fully owned and financed by Alcon. That's one of the reasons it's so good, they have given themselves the budget to do it correctly. Alcon sells the broadcast/streaming rights to whoever will buy it and the deal was exclusivity for Prime for the first three seasons and three more. If it was an Amazon funded series, we might have ended up with something more like Wheel of Time. Alcon is currently waiting out that contract to seek out a new one with a final three season arc.

1

u/DavepcOrigins Nov 27 '23

Bezo does that?? There’s no way he actually is the one who pick shows, right?

1

u/mikerophonyx Nov 27 '23

Almost certainly not him usually but Expanse is supposedly one of his favorite shows and book series and Leviathan Wakes was the book on the og Kindle ads so I think the story is he championed it a bit.

1

u/UnderPressureVS Nov 27 '23 edited Nov 27 '23

Season 6 was always going to be the last season of The Expanse. Each season is based on one book (approximately). There’s a 30-year time skip between books 6 and 7.

Season 6 deserved more episodes than it got, but there was never going to be a season 7.

81

u/Magical_wizard_ Nov 26 '23

Walking dead also had some abysmal cgi in parts

20

u/[deleted] Nov 26 '23

That deer. 😂

12

u/tyc20101 Nov 26 '23

The axe slipping into the ground perfectly was so noticeably out of place

2

u/Deadsoup77 Nov 27 '23

Where can I see this?

7

u/[deleted] Nov 26 '23

But didnt a lot of fans check out of the walking dead after some seasons?

9

u/MetalliicMango Nov 26 '23

That was more of a writing thing, happened around seasons 5 or 6. But the budget cuts happened as early as season 2.

3

u/Current-Pianist1991 Nov 26 '23

Its because if something reaches a peak popularity, how do you milk more money from it? You start cutting corners elsewhere.

1

u/Paint-licker4000 Nov 27 '23

Breaking bad was by no means a world wide phenomenon during its run time

116

u/schebobo180 Nov 26 '23

Tbvh I would not be surprised if most of the budget went to the cast.

I mean, the cast is phenomenal, but yeah the animation is incredibly average, and at times poor.

43

u/ARandomGuyThe3 Nov 26 '23

But the cast is also PHENOMENAL you have to admit. Some of the best VAing out there

23

u/KWash0222 Nov 27 '23

The cast is great but there are definitely times when you can tell they are not seasoned voice actors.

6

u/TheG-What Nov 27 '23

As much as I love both the character of Debbie and Sandra Oh as an actress, she’s the prime culprit for this. Her voice acting is often straight up bad.

6

u/KWash0222 Nov 27 '23

Agreed. Sandra Oh is awesome and Debbie’s character is excellently written. But there are some rooough moments, not the least of which is her over-the-top crying

4

u/YoelRomeroNephew69 Nov 27 '23

Ok I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks this way. I like Sandra Oh, but I'll be real here. I don't think her voice acting is the best. She can't really... cry well with her voice.

0

u/Traditional_Shirt106 Nov 27 '23

She’s not an actress with a lot of range. Her schtick is she plays very down to earth characters, like you can believe she’s a regular slightly-hot American Asian lady going through regular family or professional drama. Dustin Hoffman and Kathy Bates are other examples - normal looking people who don’t chew on the scenery, they don’t tear their eyes out and go over the top.

2

u/schebobo180 Nov 27 '23

It is. But if indeed it was a sacrifice to the animation… then it honestly is not worth it.

One of the most popular animated shows currently deserves MUCH better animation.

Honestly episode 4 was the first time I became really worried about how they do things going forward.

The way they put in THREE b subplots to be running parallel to the battle was one of those brain fart moments they had that reminded me of how they handled Amber in season 1.

1

u/Rae_Rae_ The Astounding Wolf-Man Nov 27 '23

I love that my favourite character of 2 Kirkman adaptions are played by the same dude.

124

u/Whiskey_623 Nov 26 '23

It's the lack of shading/art style I think. Idk why but it reminds me of that 2017 Spider-Man show that lacked any shading

72

u/Fresh_Cauliflower176 Nov 26 '23

Yeah, the lack of shading is definitely noticeable. I was hoping season 2 and onwards would look like the season 2 diner teaser where there was much more shading and generally more fluid animation. I get that that was a 2 minute teaser but I thought with the 2+ year wait and the popularity the show gained from season 1, that we would get higher quality animation. That doesn’t seem to be the case, at least so far. Hopefully it improves soon.

7

u/zuesthedoggo Nov 27 '23

The teaser wasn't really meant to be emblematic of the artstyle in the show, it was just a trailer made by derpixon and not the main team working on invincible

1

u/imscrapaman Apr 11 '24

It wasn't made by derpixion

-1

u/Garchompula The Lizard League Nov 27 '23

At the same time, that teaser outright said "oh we're taking so long because of the animation." They never outright said it wouldn't look like that, but it was 100% misingenuous to get a separate team to create a different animation style purely to drum up hype.

36

u/JimmyAndKim Nov 26 '23

The biggest problem is by far the movement. It never looks convincing

41

u/Not_a_real_asian777 Nov 26 '23

There's a lot of scenes in Invincible where it kinda just looks like the characters are being slid into place rather than actually drawn in motion. The scene where Donald is watching that security video of Omni-Man, Omni-Man just sort of slides forward like a 2005 flash animation. It honestly kind of reminds me of the really low budget Boruto episodes.

13

u/Eem2wavy34 Nov 27 '23

This reminded me of the scene of omni man flying into outer space https://youtu.be/Y7Pv9_qLJFI?si=6GV3jM3kCriq2oZf

The exact same frame throughout, looked so lazy it deadass took me out of the emotional context of the moment

1

u/Traditional_Shirt106 Nov 27 '23

Plus his ass is jutted way out, like he looks like a skinny 19 year old woman. I understand that exaggeration is important in animation, but when you hold the same exact frame across multiple backgrounds it’s gonna look dumb.

1

u/Karkava Monster Girl Nov 27 '23

I really hated that series. Why the hell is the animation so dull? This is about a bright and colorful vigilante fighting colorful villains! The animation should be bright and dynamic! Bonus points if they model the backgrounds after real-life places in New York, like an anime!

73

u/Temporal_Enigma Nov 26 '23

What's worse is waiting 2 years because it "takes a long time to animate," but this is what we get.

Also, delaying Part 2 of season 2

16

u/FernFromDetroit Nov 26 '23

Wait, they’re splitting up this season into two parts and delaying it? Ugh, I hate when they do that.

7

u/IAP-23I Nov 27 '23

If leaks are true second part is coming out early January

2

u/Even-Fun8917 Nov 27 '23

My assumption was that Invincible season 2 would either end right as The Boys season 4 started, or begin its second half right as the Boys Season 4 was ending. That's what happened with Gen V. I wouldn't be surprised if they did it again.

1

u/Throwawayaway4888 Nov 27 '23

That would be nice, but even if Invincible S2 wraps up as late as the end of February, The Boys S4 premiering right after seems really early considering there hasn't been too many announcements about it, yet.

1

u/Even-Fun8917 Nov 27 '23

I'm definitely not holding my breath. To me it seems just as likely that The Boys comes out in the summer or very early fall going off of previous releases. Still, a guy can dream.

1

u/Rae_Rae_ The Astounding Wolf-Man Nov 27 '23

I would say it is so people don't cancel prime over the holiday break. Keep us on the hook into the new year.

1

u/MARATXXX Nov 27 '23

No one will cancel prime during the most common month for holiday shopping… December. Most people don’t even think about Prime as a video service, lol.

0

u/Rae_Rae_ The Astounding Wolf-Man Nov 27 '23

I think you will find that the prime service isn't as internationally used as the video service

1

u/MARATXXX Nov 27 '23

lmfao.

1

u/Rae_Rae_ The Astounding Wolf-Man Nov 28 '23

roflmao

27

u/socialistbcrumb Nov 26 '23

It does sort of come off quite bland/flat sometimes, there’s a lack of convincing lighting. I think the fluidity of the animation is actually pretty decent (at least in spurts, like Mark fighting off the Viltrumite woman) even if it’s not Cowboy Bebop.

3

u/GTCapone Nov 27 '23

I get the impression that with a limited animation budget they've chosen to sacrifice quality in some scenes to improve it in others.

2

u/socialistbcrumb Nov 27 '23

Likely true.

18

u/TheMcSpanky Nov 26 '23

You do have to remember that more popularity also usually comes with more executive and shareholders' eyes on it too.

And while I don't personally know how theirs are, I wouldn't be surprised if someone at Amazon wanted to cut corners somewhere.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 27 '23

I would be surprised if anyone at Amazon didn't want to cut corners. Profit margins and whatnot.

6

u/Sharebear42019 Nov 26 '23

Budget is only apart of it. Most anime have similar budgets but animators like ufotable vs some random company is night and day. It comes down to talent and time frame of making it

20

u/GatoradeNipples Nov 26 '23

Most anime have similar budgets but animators like ufotable vs some random company is night and day.

I think this is kind of the kicker a lot of people are missing. Invincible isn't being animated by some legendary studio that's been around for years. It's being animated by Wind Sun Sky, a very new studio who basically hadn't done a "real" project before Invincible and mostly are active doing contract animation for mobile games.

It's kind of a similar situation to Castlevania putting Powerhouse on the map. No matter how much money you throw at the studio, no matter how long you give them, things are gonna start out kind of rough. And then, as the studio's toolchain becomes more mature and the studio develops an internal knowledge-base and brings on more and better talent, things start getting better. Castlevania's early janky s1 animation ends up becoming that fucking sick as hell Trevor vs. Death fight from s4, for example.

We're seeing Invincible follow the same arc in production quality, and it's doing it relatively fast. Season 2 isn't Fate: Heaven's Feel or Edgerunners, but it's not taking nearly as many janky shortcuts as s1 did (we've only seen a couple of very quick shots where flying is represented as one frame getting tweened around the background, whereas that was everywhere in s1), and the big Viltrumite fight scene in s2e4 had some genuinely insanely good storyboarding work and animation that punches a lot closer to that weight than I expected. It's gone from being a show that honestly looks outright shabby, and is being carried entirely by its writing and VA, to a show that I can at least trust to give me a decent fight scene when necessary; if they keep trending up, we'll be having different conversations about s3/4/5 than we are about 2.

0

u/SoochSooch The Mauler Twins Nov 28 '23

But the animation in season 1 of Invincible was BETTER than season 2

1

u/GatoradeNipples Nov 28 '23 edited Nov 28 '23

Have you rewatched season 1 lately? I think you're legit forgetting just how janky and shabby the animation in season 1 was, and letting the hype from the big set pieces kind of cloud your eyes.

The only scenes in season 1 that were acceptable-looking were the big flashy set piece fights, and even then, basically the second the ass-beating stopped the animation went back to Newgrounds-tier. There's a grand total of one shot in the entire season I'd say is outright impressive, and it's the subway scene. Everything else is janky shortcuts and still frames, with the writing and VA hard-carrying it. I'd say the boarding work on Nolan vs. Mark is outright kind of bad for a lot of the fight- the lack of unique fighting styles and body language is forgivable, because there's only two participants and one's getting his shit kicked in, but what's much less forgivable is that the geography of the fight is completely fucked and borderline impossible to follow. I have no real idea where the hell they're even supposed to be in the "THINK, MARK!" scene beyond "some rocks I guess," and that should tell you a lot.

Meanwhile, season 2 doesn't have the flashy set pieces to disguise it (the two big fights we've gotten are both relatively low-key ones)... but "acceptable" is the baseline now. Season 2 at its worst looks like season 1 at its best. Season 2 at its best so far runs fucking circles around the best that s1 could come up with. The Viltrumite fight isn't as flashy as Nolan vs. Mark, but it's actually possible to fucking follow it and has tons upon tons of small touches that are really, genuinely impressive to see.

1

u/SoochSooch The Mauler Twins Nov 28 '23 edited Nov 28 '23

I'll admit, anytime I've gone back for a rewatch, I skip around to the big scenes which tend to be animated better, so 2 years later I've probably forgotten what the rough patches look like. But I genuinely don't remember any animation weirdness back then, while I definitely noticed a few this time.

For Season 1, the scenes I really remember are Omniman vs the Flaxans, the Machine Head fight, Cecil vs Omniman all the way through the train scene, and both Guardians of the Globe fights. Other than the opening alternate universe stuff, I'd put most of those above anything in S2.

5

u/Bulky_Tour6966 Rex Splode Nov 26 '23

With the money given it should’ve been but they wasted it on the voices instead

1

u/arkthearkitect Nov 27 '23

Budget is only a small part of what makes 2D animation good to begin with

2

u/Talik__Sanis Nov 26 '23

It was a pop culture phenomenon for the months during which it aired... nearly three years ago. There was no way that they could retain interest and momentum, carrying into season 2.

2

u/ThorDoubleYoo Nov 27 '23

I think budget is less the constraint than time here. They're aiming to put out a season a year, which while nice to have, means corners will be cut and the corners that get cut will be animation quality.

The only way the animation could be high quality with that kind of scheduling would be if they worked the animators nearly to death.

2

u/Salvage570 Nov 27 '23

It DEFINITELY looks better than YJ, especially the PowerPoint episodes of that show XD it's definitely nothing compared to Castlevania tho

-2

u/[deleted] Nov 26 '23

$10,000,000 an episode

40

u/Da_reason_Macron_won Nov 26 '23

Alright, then the money is being grossly mismanaged, because $10,000,000 an episode shouldn't look like this. Demon Slayer was only one and a half million for the entire season.

21

u/Warrior-pigeon- Nov 26 '23

Budget is largely irrelevant when it comes to animation quality what really matters is animation talent and time which seemingly are both missing from the Invincible production.

Just look at the difference between S2 and S3 of Demon slayer; both are good but S2 vastly overshadowed S3 despite both getting the same budget.

10

u/FaithlessnessLess673 Nov 26 '23

Ye bro, you really shouldn’t being using anime budgets as a comparison to American animation budgets. Majority of Japanese animations studios pay their animators like actual shit which is why across the board, anime budgets are far lower than American animation budgets and they also overwork their animators to the bone.

The reason why Invincible budget is so large yet still having lacking animation is because they’ve more than likely devoted most of the money to their voice actors. Just look at the voice actors for any character in the show and it becomes very clear why the animation is so lacking as they decided to get A-list actors/voice actors for pretty much every character in the show, which undoubtedly costs a ton of money.

4

u/[deleted] Nov 26 '23

Someone was saying they heard rumours the show was mismanaged last season with shitloads of crunch

5

u/Fresh_Cauliflower176 Nov 26 '23

While the voice cast has been phenomenal, they’re also some big names and would cost a lot to get on here, so it wouldn’t surprise me if a good chunk of the budget went to that.

5

u/True_Helios Nov 26 '23

Same as Arcane, only that animation is x10

5

u/[deleted] Nov 26 '23

Yep. Makes you wonder the fuck is happening behind the scenes with invincible

4

u/FaithfulBlackMan Nov 26 '23

costs a lot to hire all the A-listers they have voice acting

1

u/TheDeadlySinner Nov 27 '23

That's a lie. The only source for that number is from someone conflating the budget for The Boys.

1

u/Bink_Ink Nov 27 '23

Fair criticism. It’s leagues below a lot of popular anime, especially action sequences. And below average for American animation.

1

u/ILoveRegenHealth Nov 27 '23

I doubt Amazon is going to increase the budget for animation.

Upload was their #1 comedy show and the budgets shrank. What was polished in S1 and movie quality because so laughably cheap in S3, like SyFy Channel stuff at times.

1

u/DoctorWaluigiTime Nov 27 '23

When something becomes a hit, subsequent outings sometimes become "how much can we do it for cheap?"

Happened to the Walking Dead after the first season, when the creator and crew got fucked over by AMC. But look at how successful they were. Sadly, it's a tactic that works.

1

u/LongjumpMidnight Comic Fan Nov 27 '23

Young Justice season 1 and 2 agreed. Season 3 and 4 regularly used slide shows lol.