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What is One Thing Related to Animation Bothers You the Most

Last posted Dec 07, 2015 at 09:27AM EST. Added Nov 02, 2015 at 06:30PM EST
29 posts from 21 users


Losers can make their own Family Guy knock-offs (and then they're grounded).

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Last edited Nov 02, 2015 at 06:32PM EST

If by "Mr. Sandman" you mean "Mr. Enter," he's hardly "very frowned upon," here or anywhere. He has a sizable hatedom, but he's certainly not universally hated. He has his share of fans, and ultimately isn't much more loved or hated than any other controversial critic.

if you weren't referring to enter pls feel free to set me on fire and disregard everything here

Snickerway wrote:

If by "Mr. Sandman" you mean "Mr. Enter," he's hardly "very frowned upon," here or anywhere. He has a sizable hatedom, but he's certainly not universally hated. He has his share of fans, and ultimately isn't much more loved or hated than any other controversial critic.

if you weren't referring to enter pls feel free to set me on fire and disregard everything here

God Damn! Now you know that the name came from two songs by the Chordettes and Metallica and you made P.J. Dipper not very thrilled. By the way please continue.

That weekly Manga get made into weekly Anime, making the animation lower quality while adding in filler and padding to avoid catching up to the manga. I can turn a fantastic Manga into a horrific Anime. One Piece is a perfect example, one of my all time favorite Manga's but one of my least favorite Anime due to adding in so much padding that it slows the pace to a glacial speed, making an episode damn near unwatchable.

Look at One Punch Man and other seasonal Anime, and see the difference. Seriously, if One Piece just went on a Biweekly schedule, it would improve things so much and remove the need for padding and allow each episode to be animated properly.

Anime has so many nitpicks that I wouldn't even know where to begin. No Lip Syncing, designating certain animators to certain scenes so the quality drops like a rock at points, Filler. With very few exceptions, watching an anime adapted from a Manga tends to be a chore rather than an enjoyment (especially if you follow the series as it's airing, a lot of cleanup work is done for the DVD releases). I find myself having to check the history of each series and waiting till season end just to give it a chance.

But on the other side of the pacific, Western Cartoons have mostly devolved into weird near-flash low budget animation trash, so there is no escape to there either.

Yeah, you get your Fullmetal Alchemist's and your Legend of Korra every now and again, but the industry is pretty damn dirt cheap at the moment.

My complaint is more on the general public's perspective on animation which is that all animation is for children.
Obvious example being anime (I've never been into anime personally aside from some outlier shows and movies), because at least in Japan anime is a broad term given to all animation, whether family oriented or intended for mature audiences.
I feel the states see animation as nothing more than cheap kiddy fodder, including from the big studios like Disney or Dreamworks, though some of their movies don't really help when they're just made to make a quick buck (coughcoughcarscoughsharktalecoughcough).
Also the fact that nobody appreciates the artistry that goes into these movies, how many more possibilities there are than live action, and how every movie can have a distinctive art style. But nope, it's all little baby works only for the stupidest, immature crowd.
Also, I think Dreamworks gets too much hate. They're my favorite animation studio who has made my favorite animated movies (including favorite overall movie, Prince of Egypt). Plus, they can do one thing Pixar hasn't been able to do well since the Toy Story trilogy: make good sequels.
k rant done I go now

I hate certain things about anime, but one thing that pisses me off more than most is the popularity of the Tsundere trope. It can work every now and then, like Makise Kurisu who has every reason to be like that, but more often than not, it's a nice bland guy and the main love interest is a bitch for no reason even though she's loved him from childhood blah blah.

It can be very annoying how anime series end without finishing the story and expect you to keep reading the manga or light novel. It's not always bad, Hyouka has more content that they could adapt, but the show ended on a perfect note. Others just end on a total cliff hanger.

When people name certain shows "saviors of anime" I don't really agree with that. I don't think anime needs saving, and Attack on Titan or Kill la Kill aren't worthy of that title really. There is a ton of shit anime, but I can still always find good ones every year.

Last edited Nov 02, 2015 at 09:22PM EST

I think this crappy quality the One Piece anime suffers from is mostly because Toei has a lot of cheap bastards that just care about their wallets, seriously, they must have tons of money and should be setting the example being this old and experimented company, instead they are just lowering the bar, look at the original Dragon Ball Z anime, it still holds up, it has QUALITY but it's cleverly disguised, and they're mostly still frames that last for a few seconds, as far as I know that was released weekly as well, adding a lot of filler that also looked good, such a shame, specially since Oda puts so much freaking effort and detail into the manga (To the point of dangering his own health) and they can't bother because time is money, audiences won't complain and eat whatever you throw at them I guess

Also, I'd like to comment on certain censorships


I understand he is underage (Yeah…Nobody can tell he is actually 17) but ultimately is just super silly

The quality drop on certain episodes is also annoying, the Stardust Crusaders anime had great consistency with it's animation and it was lengthy, they took a break to keep the good quality but in arguably one of the most expected episodes they dropped the ball and went full QUALITY which just made me think they did on purpose (Since the next episode looked amazing again) just to sell more BD's

Last edited Nov 02, 2015 at 09:59PM EST

As an actor/VA, stale voice casting in both Japan and US is irritating to me, as well as glorification / borderline fetishisation of certain cast & crew members being insanely creepy, contributing to obsession and celebrity culture, which harms originality.

1) It is highly unlikely you will get work in the area you live unless you live in the like 2 or 3 specific places where this stuff is made.

2) Using the same voices over and over decreases originality and helps to support the usage of stock characters. Not to mention it's just dull and repetitive anyway.


And now the big one

Light novel adaptations that will inevitably go unfinished

Chaika is like the one series that gets through virtually all the LN content (although the last episode was rushed to achieve this).

Some series will run for more than 10 volumes of which at most 3 or 4 will get adapted as most shows don't go past 2 seasons.

[/2 cents]

When they change the voice actors to one whose voice difference I can note. Like seriously, it makes me so mad when I get so used to a characters voice and then BOOM next episode they've got a somewhat different voice, this bothered me so much I pretty much stopped watching dubs, and when I wanna watch a show that uses a language I don't know now I just turn subtitles on.

People talking about fillers and forget about Naruto and Bleach.
Fillers are a legitimate way to make the Anime not catch up to the manga but if you make them too damn long and very bad I will stop watching until the Cannon history starts again.
Dragon Ball had some good fillers because some of them were Toyarama's ideas.

Oh, baby, here we go.


I'm having a feeling that too many western cartoons and anime follow the same formula.

For western cartoons it's the Spongebob clones (2 rather eccentric characters and the sane but tortured one) and for anime it's just another high school anime (with sexual jokes included). Not saying that all high school anime are bad, just there are too many of them. Family Guy clones are also bad for animation.

Way too anime rely on sex jokes on their humour. Prime example: Seitokai. I would enjoy, if it wasn't nothing but sex jokes. Yes, same could be said about Panty and Stocking, but at least it has it's own charm (different art style, being over the top (I love over the top stuff btw), memorable characters). Same thing goes for fanservice. It's not that much of a problem, but if show is just fan service and nothing else, it can become uninteresting.

Totally quality CGI animation
By quality, I mean having CGI of a cutscene of a playstation cutscene or worse. Ten times worse if the entire movie is like that.


Now for the biggest, but mostly forgotten aspect of animation that bothers me.

During the time when Hanna Barbera was active, they put a thing that, in my honest opinion, should never be put in animation

LAUGH TRACKS
Not joking there. It's already a hindrance for the sitcoms, but why would you do this in an animation? Just why?

Ok that's about it

Last edited Nov 03, 2015 at 09:12AM EST

Low-budget Flash animation. Not because it's Flash, but because of the way it's actually animated. From what I know of Flash, there's a tool called the Skeleton tool which allows the animator to rig a Flash object and allow them to pose it. This is usually used in animations which don't allow for individually drawn frames or many different shapes on a character. When it is used, however, it tends to give characters who get posed a weird "bounce" between poses, which from what I can tell is because of the skeleton shifting around. Watch this and you'll see what I'm talking about, especially in shots like the hi-five at 0:20.

This is probably the most shallow and insignificant complaint in the whole thread, but I really don't like four fingered hands. I understand why most cartoons do it, I understand that it's easier to animate four fingers instead of five, but I just don't like the way they look. They look weird to me. I get particularly annoyed when shows have a mix of characters with four and five fingered hands with no clear reason why (looking at you, Gravity Falls)

Of course I would never drop a show because they use four fingered hands. Most of my favorite shows do this. It's just a thing I've learned to live with.

As an animation fanatic one of my biggest gripes with Western animated material is the reluctance to pursue serious animated works. Even though it is nice to appeal to a wider, family audience with animation since that's what sells, I think more attempts at animated shows and films with a more serious. There have been few shows in the past that have been able to aim for this type of serious tone (Batman: The Animated Series comes to mind, it handles mature topics in Batman in a way suitable for children). The constant over-saturation of comedy-based tv shows doesn't really help animations reputation as a "childish medium".

Another gripe of mine would be my annoyance to "animation purists" who hate CGi animation solely due to its hand in reducing the amount of hand drawn works. While I understand that hand drawn animation has led to some of the most legendary works in the medium, the reality is that most companies do not see the reason to spend more money on a medium that would require more time and effort. CGi animation isn't much of a cakewalk either but it still has opportunities for animators to get creative with the scenery and character designs (Abstract Thought from Inside Out being a great contemporary example).

I've always ranted about animation when I get to watching, but now I have so much I want to address I don't know where to start. I guess I'll start with anime. Needless to say, of course there are anime that don't fall under the complaints I have, but I've seen this sort of thing plenty of times for me to see a pattern.

No lip syncing and non-verbal gestures. Someone already mentioned the lack of lip syncing, but I also notice how anime also rarely apply non-verbal gestures (e.g. moving their hands during explanation, eyes that dart across the room during conversation, movements that shows the characters personality, etc.) in general. For people like me anime tends to look like a bunch of stills just panning to one side with lips that feel like yapping cardboard cut-outs because they only move one way.

Anime could really learn a lot from western cartoons about making scenes more dynamic. Notice how more expressive a simple dialogue between characters is in the Steven Universe clip with gestures rather than panning out scenes. I'd also like to bring to attention how eye movement is existent in SU compared to Haikyuu. I'd say that's the price for having really detailed eyes, BUT… MLP manages to make really expressive eyes despite being intricately detailed already. Anime tends to lack subtlety. It's honestly a rarity to see anime characters blink, which once again adds to the cardboard cut-out static-ness of the animation. Panty and Stockings is one anime I could think of that sticks out as being considerably dynamic, being 11 minutes so it crams more things into an episode, and yeah, essentially trying to mimic a western style.

Anime fashion sense It's baffling how characters dress in the most ridiculous way, especially in anime that asks you to take it seriously. Some anime manage to cop-out on this because they happen in a high-school setting so everybody wears uniform that looks normal but then it gets dull because everybody wears the same thing. Some shows need to learn its possible to make memorable outfits without looking like a sore thumb.

A lot of anime are really edgy and work too often with sex jokes and fanservice. Pretty self-explanatory I don't think I need to bring up examples.

I dislike the typical anime fights. Someone already mentioned how weekly anime has terrible animation and the pace of a snail, and this also goes for the fights in them. But even seasonal anime like One-Punch Man seems to suffer from this, although admittedly not quite as much; I think it's still watchable.

If Sonic was so fast, why did it take him forever to execute three moves? I know One-Punch Man isn't meant to be taken seriously and is pretty meta with these sort of things, but anime does this a lot, squeezing in long monologues in places where they don't belong, often the fights then end up lasting more than one episode. It ruins the flow of the battle. More action happened in one minute and a half of Samurai Champloo's fight than the whole three minutes of Saitama vs Sonic. If only all the other action scenes are like that.

Anime can't execute 'show don't tell' properly I guess this pretty much relates to the fighting and subtlety complaints above. The only exception to this are slice of life anime, and even that likes to exaggerate things from time to time. But given that its a slice of life, subtlety is already expected from most scenes so it's not as much of a pleasant surprise as it could be. I'll use humor as an example here this time.

It's a bit typical of anime to resort to chibi and/or throw in all those audio-visual cliches like the angry vein or sweat droops when it's trying to be funny. I consider them cliches but some people might actually see them as something that should be in anime. Cartoons usually rely on jokes with punchlines and natural character interactions to get its humor across.

For Western Animation I'd love to be more in-depth with this part but I've spent plenty of time already

Fart and doodie jokes are not funny They just make the show obnoxious. I can't believe TLoK resorted to this a few times.

When tropes turn into cliches Western shows are generally episodic so tropes are more prevalent in them than Anime. Tropes aren't necessarily bad; a show can use a trope but pull of a twist to make it different. Some shows usually don't do much with them so they end up predictable.

The fact that bad flash animation and adult-oriented shows are the face of cartoons When people complain about cartoons it's usually these two things that are the problem, when most of the popular cartoons right now are neither of those things (Gravity Falls, Steven Universe, Over the Garden Wall, etc). MLP is the only show right now that is still at large that's flash, but I don't think anyone would actually say MLP is along the lines of say, Johnny Test or Ricky Sprocket, unless you just generally hate Flash. And Rick and Morty is the only mature show out there to gain popularity the same level as the shows mentioned above. Archer and Family Guy also have a following, but their subcultures pale in comparison to the notoriety the other shows mention have online.

Last edited Nov 15, 2015 at 11:40PM EST

To me, it's the blatant mixing of 2D and 3D animation.

I don't hate 3D animation, and I'm completely fine with it as long as the entire movie is done in 3D. Well, at least if it's done on the Disney Pixar standards. Those janky and cheap 3D cartoons are just painful to watch.

The thing that really bothers me, is when a smoothly animted 3D object is shown beside hand drawn 2D animation with limited frames per second. They really don't go well together. I'd take a huge hand drawn spaceship that moves a few frames per second over a generic and clean computer generated block any day.

If some subtle background elements are done in CGI, then it doesn't bother me at all. I'm cool with it as long as it isn't in the immediate focus of the viewer.

For example, I've been reading the Initial D manga lately, and have really been enjoying it. This also led me to watch some clips of the early anime on YouTube, but I just couldn't bear the mixture of hand drawn animation with the 3D animated cars. It's just too out of place.

Here I go again. I have only one thing to rant about right now so I'm not expecting a wall of text as big as the last.

It's a bit of a downer when animated instruments don't sync with the music I'm no cartoonist nor am I in training to be one, but I can imagine matching up music to strums and drum beats can be difficult. I get that. Still, seeing a strum without its accompanying twang or characters playing their instruments when the song clearly paused for a bit really takes the magic out of the song once you've taken notice after replaying it for the umpteenth time. It's almost like finding out that the character on stage was lip syncing this whole time. The same can be said when there's no variation in the movements of the characters e.g. when their fingers don't move up and down the frets, when the drummer doesn't have a rhythm that follows the music, it almost feels like the character is faking it, or at the very least it just puts a damper on the whole thing. I think this is a (minor; I'm the only person I know that's whiny about this,) problem I often see in cartoons, I'm not sure about anime.

I don't think I need to point stuff out in the Steven Universe clip too much. Clearly, Steven's hand isn't moving around the fret board, his strumming doesn't really accommodate any sound, Garnet is essentially pressing only one set of keys, Amethyst hit the cymbal without making a sound at all, and well, at least I can hear Pearl's violin in the song.

As for the Adventure Time clip, well, this first complaint might be nitpicking, but Marceline is playing a bass guitar. The sounds it makes comes from plucking a string, not strumming altogether. (she actually plucks her axe in future songs.) But ignoring that for a moment, the strumming evidently doesn't match up with the music at some parts. Also again, the fingers on the frets have minimal movement.

From what I've seen, anime (especially moe ones apparently,) have a nifty trick it tends to do in situations like this. From either of the videos above, it's worth noting that the band trope in anime focuses primarily on the lip syncing of the vocalist. This keeps eyes off the instruments often, so it doesn't have to pull off much difficult music syncing often. Angel Beats was flashy and vibrant, there was strumming and noticeable movement along the frets but if I must nitpick I guess a handful of the scenes repeat, and there's hardly any syncing done between the music and the animation; even the lip syncing feels a bit off. There is a clear moment in the song when the music stops at the 1:51 mark but the characters continue to play like nothing happened. I assumed the video was delayed, but seeing all the diehards continuously praising the video in the comments it probably isn't.

Haruhi Suzumiya also re-used some shots, (holy balls they re-used this one shot like 7 times I get that it's a nicely animated riff but that's just overkill,) but those shots were actually placed to match the music. It's an example of an anime scene that I believe gave syncing music with attention, unlike what I've seen from Angel Beats. It's a bit off-screen but you can actually see Haruhi strum her guitar in time with the music as she sings. It's the first example of instrument animation syncing well with the music in this long post.

As for Western examples that I think work:

Gorillaz is an animated band so it's natural to expect they have instrument animation down, and is probably the first animated work I've seen to do so and is also probably the standard of this whole post. I think Feel Good Inc is their music video that shows this off the most.

Yeah yeah ponies yucky yuck. Honestly I'd have gotten another Cartoon example easier on the eyes for everyone but I've already spent plenty of time on this post and this is the first scene that comes to mind that does what Gorillaz did in terms of the topic of this post, which is, to emphasize on frets, strumming and plucking in tune to the music, beats that sync with the drums, etc. even the tambourine was on point. MLP's movements are very subtle by the way so it might need to be in full screen to be fully appreciated. Actually all of these need to be watched on fullscreen for optimal animation analysis.

Last edited Nov 23, 2015 at 10:10AM EST

@Onion syrup
If those videos are the ones I posted, the reason animations are reused is because the maker of the video edited the scene to include the whole song, same with Haruhi. The songs in the show don't go quite as long.

I went to the movies the other day to see peanuts, and my god, every movie aside from Kung Fu Panda 3 looked god awful, especially Norm. Ratchet and Clank looked really obnoxious too. Besides Disney and Dreamworks, I'm sick of all these 3D animated movies.

On a positive note, while western animation and anime have their shortcomings, I feel both still always manage to produce something of worth. I would actually hate it if most of what they produced is good because I can hardly keep up with the good stuff as it is.

Last edited Nov 23, 2015 at 11:55AM EST

Muumi wrote:

To me, it's the blatant mixing of 2D and 3D animation.

I don't hate 3D animation, and I'm completely fine with it as long as the entire movie is done in 3D. Well, at least if it's done on the Disney Pixar standards. Those janky and cheap 3D cartoons are just painful to watch.

The thing that really bothers me, is when a smoothly animted 3D object is shown beside hand drawn 2D animation with limited frames per second. They really don't go well together. I'd take a huge hand drawn spaceship that moves a few frames per second over a generic and clean computer generated block any day.

If some subtle background elements are done in CGI, then it doesn't bother me at all. I'm cool with it as long as it isn't in the immediate focus of the viewer.

For example, I've been reading the Initial D manga lately, and have really been enjoying it. This also led me to watch some clips of the early anime on YouTube, but I just couldn't bear the mixture of hand drawn animation with the 3D animated cars. It's just too out of place.

You should watch this film then – it's executed well.



I watched it dubbed – the dub is good.

Nima wrote:

You should watch this film then – it's executed well.



I watched it dubbed – the dub is good.

To be honest, personally I found that trailer a bit… iffy. The CGI's kinda on your face on that trailer.


I'd take this kind of animation over full blown CGI any day. Too bad it's really slow and expensive to do stuff like this these days.

But that's just my opinion though.

Last edited Nov 23, 2015 at 04:15PM EST

@Kuro Serpentina

CGI cars make me want to kill people…

Yeah… This is a good contender for least liked Disney Pixar film series.


@Dac

yes admittedly those are the clips you showed me Well, that changes a lot of things from what I posted. Now I want to see the original clips but can only find extended versions. No matter I guess, when I wrote that I got carried away and forgot this wasn't an animation analysis thread. My complaint on animated instruments is mostly on cartoons anyway.

On the topic of mixing animation styles, I think it can work, but only in certain contexts. Take Soma and Alisa's attacks from Project X Zone, for example:

When they use their God Arcs' Consume attacks (when their weapons expand to engulf the opponent), the weapons' animation briefly but noticeably changes from the usual sprite art to frame-by-frame animation. I've seen people complain that this looks weird, but I think it works perfectly. The God Arcs, after all, are symbiotic weapons composed of hundreds of microorganisms capable of literally eating enemies. They have an alien quality to them, and the shift in animation only helps emphasize that.

It's not about much individual aniamtions, but a little grief I have currently.

There's almost no action western cartoons currently

And I mean it in the style of Justice League or Avenger EMH. The only ones I can think right off the bat right now is TNMT of Nick and somewhat Ultimate Spideman (even tho that show showscase more comedy than action)

I just want another Justigue League cartoon dammit ;-;

Thrash95 wrote:

It's not about much individual aniamtions, but a little grief I have currently.

There's almost no action western cartoons currently

And I mean it in the style of Justice League or Avenger EMH. The only ones I can think right off the bat right now is TNMT of Nick and somewhat Ultimate Spideman (even tho that show showscase more comedy than action)

I just want another Justigue League cartoon dammit ;-;

Agreed. The last one I know of was Transformers Prime, which ended two years ago. There was also GLTAS and Young Justice, but those were cut short.

Skeletor-sm

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