ANIMATION DISCOURSE S2

[u/CryptographerLost825]

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?

[u/Bran_the_Builder]

As someone who works professionally as an animator, I have absolutely no problem with the conversations around the animation this season and think they should be happening. I've seen a lot of people try to shut it down with stuff like "DO YOU WANT THE ANIMATORS TO BE WORKED TO DEATH?!?!" which feels disingenuous because obviously that's not what people are saying...

The animation is just plain low quality, and everyone can tell. The fact that it's obvious to people who would otherwise never give a shit about animation quality (seriously, I've never seen a conversation happen at this scale before) should be a wake up call to them. Maybe it's just because we live in a post-Spiderverse world, but they seriously underestimated how important the quality of the animation was. They're blowing the entire budget for the show on the absurdly stacked celebrity voice cast, and the animation team is being mostly forgotten. And that's absolutely inexcusable when the show is being produced by Amazon of all companies. We all know how much money they have. They could literally afford to hire a team of 5,000 animators to animate the show in a month, hire all the celebrity voice actors they want, and probably not even put a dent in their daily revenue...

At the end of the day, there's really no good excuse for how bad the show looks sometimes, and I hope the negative reactions to the animation this season makes them reconsider the way the budget gets used for future seasons.

[u/BigBoi1159511 → u/Bran_the_Builder]

As someone who watches a lot of anime, season 1 of invincible was pretty mid animation wise and season 2 is just worse, compare it to animes like one punch man, attack on titan, cyber punk edgerunners, violet evergarden or even rick and morty Invincible just looks cheap.

[u/awsomedutchman → u/BigBoi1159511]

I've seen the working environment for japanese animators. They work (almost) 24/7. Last bit of AOT was appearantly finished hours before release. Not that weird it looks good if the animators are being exploited to the max. Not excusing the quality this season of invincible.

[u/BigBoi1159511 → u/awsomedutchman]

The AOT situation is solely on MAPPA studios' absolute dogshit management lately. They are known for taking on more projects than they can handle and are currently crumbling. Most of the other animation houses are relatively doing better when it comes to employee treatment. Look at one punch man, that had a normal development cycle and is one of the best animated animes to date.

[u/Several_Repeat_5447 → u/BigBoi1159511]

Most animation studios aren’t as bad as MAPPA, but they’re still very hectic and I would argue most anime projects are worked in very tight deadlines.

It’s actually getting a lot more common that anime episodes are finished last minute.

[u/SafetyAlpaca1 → u/awsomedutchman]

I mean if you gave those Japanese animators the same production time invincible S2 got it’d look just as good as their crunch work if not better, so that doesn’t even matter really. It’s a difference in talent, not work environment.