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The List - 7 Notorious Animation Meltdowns


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Dop.L



Joined: 23 Mar 2007
Posts: 725
Location: London
PostPosted: Sat Aug 18, 2018 12:22 pm Reply with quote
Oh,I remember that cabbage. Was reminded again by the recent 'shitty animation' sequence in Bakabon.

Also, there was Wizard Barristers, where a major action sequence in possibly the final episode had lots of pans across backgrounds but they didn't have time to put in the action.

Then there was that episode of Hidamari Sketch which was pretty much a slideshow for the 4:3 version but fixed by the 16:9 version as back in the day that came out two weeks later.
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Chiibi



Joined: 19 Dec 2011
Posts: 4829
PostPosted: Sat Aug 18, 2018 12:28 pm Reply with quote
Hand Shakers-"Just all of it".

Laughing

Was a bit surprised to not see Eva's last two TV episodes on here...but maybe the article doesn't mean that type of meltdown....I really thought they ran out of budget though?
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KutovoiAnton



Joined: 03 Mar 2013
Posts: 962
Location: Vladimir, Russia
PostPosted: Sat Aug 18, 2018 12:29 pm Reply with quote
I'm surprised that there's no mention of Wizard Barristers. I mean:
https://youtu.be/UhmBnaEcbfA
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Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
Posts: 11627
PostPosted: Sat Aug 18, 2018 12:33 pm Reply with quote
I was surprised that Episode 11 of Wizard Barristers didn't make the list. That was absolutely epic in its fatal lack of animation. However, the finale of Butlers x Battlers definitely gave it some competition for most bizarrely animated rush job. Loooong holds on static shots, multiple close-ups on eyes, one right after another, reused stills (regardless of what was going on in the previous shot), reused animation, missing in-betweens... just a total mess. I wonder what the hell happened. They'd been doing fairly well up until then.

Dishonorable mention goes to the entire last half of Trickster. Every episode seemed to be worse than the one before. It was as if you could see the animation team slowly losing their will to live and just wanting it to be over with.
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v1cious



Joined: 31 Dec 2002
Posts: 6235
Location: Houston, TX
PostPosted: Sat Aug 18, 2018 12:43 pm Reply with quote
Why isn't Evangelion on this list? The last episode is legendary.

KutovoiAnton wrote:
I'm surprised that there's no mention of Wizard Barristers. I mean:
https://youtu.be/UhmBnaEcbfA


probably cause not many people watched the broadcast. They fixed all that stuff in the home release.

https://www.sakugabooru.com/post?tags=wizard_barristers
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TsubomiKoneko



Joined: 10 Aug 2004
Posts: 247
PostPosted: Sat Aug 18, 2018 12:56 pm Reply with quote
Papillon Rose New Season episode 3 has a pretty horrendous animation quality drop throughout the majority of the episode, bad enough that in one duo attack between Papillon Margarette and Papillon Lily in the middle of the episode they're each missing an arm. The animation was fixed in the Japanese single DVD release of the episode, but sadly the licensed DVD with all the episodes contains the TV version so the animation is still off.

Every time the mention of animation quality drops happens I just get flashbacks to that.



The episode also didn't have audio during a solo attack from Papillon Margarette in the TV version, so I guess all around production was having a pretty bad time at that point. Something about royalties came up and they didn't release any singular DVDs past episode 3 (a box set came out with the TV versions on it, which is ultimately what got licensed, but it is censored and the opening and ending theme are from the OVA since I believe part of the royalty issue was with the music), and I have to wonder if the costs to fix the episode didn't help the situation.
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DigitalScratch





PostPosted: Sat Aug 18, 2018 12:56 pm Reply with quote
Oh man I remembered watching the first episode of Dynamic Chord and was just...Mesmerized by how stilted the animation was. Especially during the scenes with actual music.

It was like the animators were so desperate to have the “hot anime guys” look on point in those scenes that they refused to properly animate them so they can avoid going off model. What resulted is just extremely awkward closeups, still frames, and looped animation.

There was one guy who was apparently supposed to be playing a guitar, but the camera is only focused on most of his face while his body rapidly jerks up and down. So it looks like he’s casually having a date with his right hand while staring straight at you without blinking. It’s weird.

HandShakers may have been nauseating to look at, have questionable sense of architecture (I remember the doctor’s lab changing size and proportions,) and an extremely boring plot that doesn’t even make it “So Bad It’s Funny.” But at least characters moved.
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Green Luthor



Joined: 15 Oct 2003
Posts: 28
PostPosted: Sat Aug 18, 2018 1:00 pm Reply with quote
Samurai Seven had two or three episodes where the normally-decent animation quality suddenly and inexplicably... isn't good. Like "person with trembling hands trying to draw on a turbulent airplane" bad. No idea what happened there, but it was painful to watch those episodes.
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invalidname
Contributor



Joined: 11 Aug 2004
Posts: 2487
Location: Grand Rapids, MI
PostPosted: Sat Aug 18, 2018 1:03 pm Reply with quote
Gotta get a word in for my idols in Wake Up, Girls! New Chapter, where things only took five episodes to completely fall apart, leading to bizarre shot compositions whose only purpose is to avoid animating the face of the character who's speaking:

To top it off, the episode ends with a two minute meeting at the talent agency offices, which is shown entirely as an exterior shot of the office window with the characters inside simply voicing over it.
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Shiroi Hane
Encyclopedia Editor


Joined: 25 Oct 2003
Posts: 7584
Location: Wales
PostPosted: Sat Aug 18, 2018 1:22 pm Reply with quote
KutovoiAnton wrote:
I'm surprised that there's no mention of Wizard Barristers. I mean:
https://youtu.be/UhmBnaEcbfA

There wasn’t anything really wrong with the animation per se, there just wasn’t enough of it to go around...
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Blatch
Thread Killer



Joined: 26 Sep 2013
Posts: 348
Location: Northeast U.S.
PostPosted: Sat Aug 18, 2018 1:24 pm Reply with quote
TsubomiKoneko wrote:
Papillon Rose New Season episode 3 has a pretty horrendous animation quality drop throughout the majority of the episode


Holy crap! The main characters look like guys in drag. It reminded me of an infamous shot from one of the Pretty Cure shows.

And on a tangentially related note, I don't think this thread would be complete without mentioning the Himegoto anime. Forget going off model, because this show has no models to start with! All of the characters look really blobby, and their proportions seem to change in every episode. Some people theorized that the production company sabotaged the anime because it had such an offensive premise, which is very out there regarding excuses for bad-looking shows. Twisted Evil
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MarshalBanana



Joined: 31 Aug 2014
Posts: 5525
PostPosted: Sat Aug 18, 2018 1:29 pm Reply with quote
I can not remember what it was called, but there was this OVA I saw many years ago, where a whole bunch of men get short, and they have no animation when thy fall over, so it looks like a mannequin is falling over.
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Triltaison



Joined: 03 Jul 2011
Posts: 800
PostPosted: Sat Aug 18, 2018 1:31 pm Reply with quote
Aw, no love for Lost Universe and its coining of "yashigani anime" for a while? Its episode 4 was legendary for its terrible animation quality and practically the whole thing had to be redrawn for home video release. It's fantastic when your outsourced animation team doesn't have any model sheets to work from -magic happens instead.

Mike Toole's column from a while back had it and some other gems for the interested:
animenewsnetwork.com/the-mike-toole-show/2014-01-26
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Takkun4343



Joined: 19 Jul 2007
Posts: 1591
Location: Englewood, Ohio
PostPosted: Sat Aug 18, 2018 1:36 pm Reply with quote
Green Luthor wrote:
Samurai Seven had two or three episodes where the normally-decent animation quality suddenly and inexplicably... isn't good. Like "person with trembling hands trying to draw on a turbulent airplane" bad. No idea what happened there, but it was painful to watch those episodes.

If one of the episodes you're talking about is episode 7, it was intentionally supposed to look that way. As the director said, better to have a rough-around-the-edges but talented actor than a good-looking but mediocre one in your movie.

As for my go-to QUALITY episodes, Psycho-Pass #18 and 91 Days #5 deserve mention.
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SonicFanA



Joined: 12 Jul 2017
Posts: 159
PostPosted: Sat Aug 18, 2018 2:01 pm Reply with quote
I am upset to say but when the next list of anime meltdowns come out Thousand Musketeers will probably be on it. If the opening looks bad then that does not bode well for the episodes. For a second the quality went up for one episode which was a breather episode. The background art /scenery is the only positive thing I can say about it. Part of me really wants to think they are saving the best for last.
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