Animation has got to be the most difficult job ever. Imagine working on something for 9 months only to have your animation be roasted online for having a smear frame. Because animators are only paid in peanuts and the occasional quarter, it’s easy to see how bad the show quality declines by a lot. Like in the first season it’s amazing, but once the 2nd season comes out, it’s easy to see how much money they burned through for season 1. Like with One Punch Man, where the first season’s animation looks so amazing and so clean. I love it(muah). But then season 2 came and it looked very stiff. Very cheap animation and it didn’t have the sauce of the first season. That was because it was animated from a different studio. So, One Punch Man took 5 years for any news of season 3. So, when the third season was announced after 5 years, people prayed that it wasn’t made by the same people who made season 2. And guess who made the third season. It was somehow even worse than season 2 and had even worse animation. It was so bad that its frames and imdb ratings were competing to see if they could get any lower. But then, season 3 pulled through. It had better animation and the characters were actually blinking.
Anyways, One Punch Man wasn’t the only one that suffered this curse. Because the internet had an online funeral for Blue Lock, which dropped in quality to the point where some of the frames are just still images from your average edit. But now, let’s talk about Invincible. So, when Amazon announced that Invincible was going to be a yearly series, both the fans and the animators were freaking out over 2 completely different reasons. So when both season 2 and 3 came out, it was awful. Some scenes were amazing while others looked like they just dragged the pngs of the characters across the screen. Another victim of bad animation was Dragon Ball. When Dragon Ball had a big movie after hiatus, the studio was like “great but how about you do this for an entire series and make sure each episode comes out weekly.” Even though it was bad, they redeemed themselves with Dragon Ball Daima which is what happens when animation was actually made patiently and smoothly. However, none of these are bad as 3D animation
3D animation is another thing that is hard to do. At least it pays better. But, you could easily mess it up to the point where it looks like a Smiling Friends bit. But you know what, being an animator sucks. Your job is on the line and one mess up could easily have some executives have you replaced by AI. So I would rather take an animation that looks awful than someone using AI to “improve” it knowing that actual people sat in a business room and looked at and approved of it.
