Dolmen 2.0, on 23 February 2023 - 07:14 PM, said:
Similarly the recent attack on titan episodes have managed to seamlessly integrate CGI with handrawn animation.
See, I'd consider attack on titan to be a great example of how the majority of CGI in anime is bad, because it's so obvious how much worse it got.
There's a scene in the first season where the lady titan gets its arm ripped off and the arm goes bouncing through the street, blood splattering all over, and winds up gripping a bridge or building or something - all on camera, all looking stylish and detailed. Then there's a scene in the latest season where once again the same titan has its arm blown off and... well they don't show it actually being detached, the camera just awkwardly zooms in on her so you only see her from, like, the neck down, and the arm just falls from the top of the screen to the bottom.
It's absolutely clear that they either don't have the technology or don't have the skills to make the 3D titan models move and change the way they did in 2D earlier on. When the Attack Titan and the Hammer Titan fight and the AT gets a giant spike shoved into him, it's clearly just one solid model with the spike a fixed part of it (no wonder they never showed clearly the spike actually piercing him) and as he moves around while getting shot by a bajillion cannons the model stays exactly the same, they just draw little red splotch effects on the screen that don't actually stay on the model.
They're constantly covering the screen in explosions and other effects to hide how little the 3D models can actually do, and they'd probably get away with it in a series that started that way because it wouldn't be so obvious just how much it changed.
On the other hand, as QT points out it's not necessarily even a case of 3D vs 2D and it can be that the 3D CGI is just bad because they don't have the time/budget they need to make it good. WiT stopped wanting to make attack on titan for a reason, after all, and every season it seems like MAPPA is going through yet another production hell.
Even so, the only 3D CGI in anime that I feel has come even close to acceptable has been some of the bigger movies like the Lupin movie, and even that I don't feel has really quite captured the feel of still being an anime (rather than looking like a non-anime 3D movie). There's plenty of good 3D animation out there, but none of them have actually felt like "anime" to me even if they're made in Japan by "anime" studios. The good ones are too visually/stylistically different, and the ones that are trying to mimic a more typical anime style (like Kotobuki for example) have really bad CGI.
And those are ALL-3D CGI shows/movies. The stuff where they try to use 3D models inside an otherwise-2D show, like attack on titan, have all been a huge annoyance/disappointment for me. They never manage to make it blend in with the 2D parts seamlessly, and every single time I find myself thinking the 3D animation itself is just worse than what I've seen done in similar all-2D shows.
Help
the sequel. Standard OP protag power fantasy, but I always quite liked Anus Foldagoat.
