Watched season 2.
Good. Entertaining. A bit slow.
Looks more like the latter. It doesn’t look CGI at all, but it also appears they did like 1/4 of the frames required for animation or less.
I haven’t watched Dragon Prince so I can’t be sure, but it’s not like Godzilla or Blame or any of the CGI shows.
My very loose understanding based on two comments I read a month ago is that TDP used 3D models and cell-shading plus Sophisticated Effects and Art Stuff to achieve a hand-drawn look. However, the 3D models had a habit of looking “floaty” due to their ability have more or less unlimited frames depending on the level of rendering the team wanted to go with, plus the usual stuff like clipping and imperfections in the methods in general. So they slowed the frame rate of the 3D animations down significantly to get something closer to traditional hand-drawn animation.
The end result is that sometimes things look super floaty and disconnected, and other times small, close-up animations have an unnerving herky-jerky feel to them.
The show looks gorgeous, though, especially still shots and sweeping pans were models aren’t really moving, so I’m not sure if the weird herky-jerkiness is better or worse than the usual low-budget anime style of “well, we’ve got about 8 minutes worth of animation in 22 minutes worth of show. . . flowing monocolor backgrounds shot through with ACTION LINEZ it is, boys!”
Yeah, it’s nothing like that. It’s standard animation and near as I can tell.
It isn’t as obvious in the “action” scenes, but look when the characters are walking around or whatever. It’s like walking for 3 seconds involves maybe 9 frames of animation.
0:38 kind shows it off a bit, but it’s even more obvious when it’s just a couple people standing around and one picks up a book or something mundane.
Like, you can count the frames in my example. I put it on 0.25 speed and could count each picture easily. I got about 26 images over 4 or 5 seconds. Compared to something like Violet Evergarden (maybe not fair since it’s one of the nicest looking things ever) and it’s like a slideshow.
I just got done watching One Punch Man and it’s a hell of a lot smoother. Of course a lot of the time it goes full manga low-detail on everything as well, but the difference is really painful to look at.
I mean that’s a bit unfair, One Punch Man’s first season is one of the best animated shows. I’m slightly worried about season 2 of that since it’s a different studio animating.
Castlevania looks hand drawn where most animation today is not. They have some 3D models splashed in there and they look out of place.
I only watched episode 1 so far, but I’m in for the rest. It’s less goofy than any given anime but more goofy than Daredevil.
Nice! I enjoyed this series a lot more than I expected to.
Same here. I only checked it out because of Warren Ellis, but I’m really glad I did.
What they’re doing here is what we call ‘stepped’ animation, where rather than let the computer fill in space between keyframes with splines, you tell it to cap the motion as a freeze frame, until the next deliberate keyframe. So it’s not about frame rate, as it’ll only pop to whatever the next keyframe is set to, not every 2 frames like a typical 2d show runs at (12 drawings/sec). It’s how we typically start an acting shot, to see the major breakdown poses, before we spllne it out and refine the detail, which is by far the most time consuming and difficult aspect of character animation. I think it’s a great idea, though, to use stepped keys and a toon shader look, because while it’ll be a bit rougher on the eyes, it’s a better compromise than having spliney, less than detailled 24fps animation.
That said, typically a 2d show will not have the noticeable pops in a dialogue shot in the same way because they rarely have a change that isn’t meaningful, whereas in 3d it’s too easy to move the neck forward, or subtley turn the head, as often as you want without the work of redrawing the frame, which gives pops to a pose that hasn’t changed enough, which is a bit distracting. And on the inverse side of things, new 2d techniques of animating the ink lines or ‘strokes’ using photoshop-like transform filters (ie creating squash and stretch by animating a static drawing by pushing and pulling the lines around over time) are making some 2d look more like 3D and gives a pleasing squishy look to what otherwise would be a dead frame/drawing. So maybe a walk like was called out that only has three breakdowns but interpolates over 24 frames could look better by mushing the lines within the holds and maybe that would make the upthread criticism less pointed.
But in both cases, nothing looks better than a 2d animation or 3d animation drawn or posed on every frame, it’s just really expensive for tv budgets unless you’re doing simple kiddie stuff like PawPatrol or whatever.
Yay! I loved the series. Between this, Dragon Prince, and Voltron, Netflix is killing it with the animation series.
Hmmm…apparently the tweet is now deleted. I guess we’ll see when this is out after all. Probably soon though!
Don’t forget She-Ra too.
Worth a watch? I’ll give it a try.
It’s very girly and cheerful.
She-Ra is okay, but nothing special. It’s very try-hard compared to things like Stephen Universe and MLP. There might be an age sweet spot for it though.
Hilda, on Netflix, is very good.
Sweet. This show is so much fun. Kind of weird that season 3 is just season 2 upside-down, though.
Season 3 is out! I thought things ended pretty well in season 2, so want honestly sure where the writers would go. But, enjoying the new season a ton.
Mild spoilers: I miss Alucard being with Trevor and Sypha. Right now it seems there are 3 or 4 separate storylines going on that don’t have a lot in common. Only about 6 episodes in so maybe stuff will start to converge.
I’m like 5 episodes in and it clearly seems to be leading toward the resurrection of Dracula. Maybe I’m wrong!