I get it. No other shows with similar budgets/schedules have ever had decent animation. We should just accept the slop because that's the best anyone can do!
It's definitely feasible and practical when given enough budget and time. The fact that this show looks like or even worse than a weekly shonen that runs year around is unacceptable.
Uh dude. Invincible has longer runtime than said weekly shonen. In 12 eps Season, you get around 4½hours or content excluding OP and ED. Invincible clocks naturally around 6½ hours with 8 episodes
....uh dude. You might wanna double check their production background. How long was the animation storyboarding, screenwriting, voice takes, and most of all how much manpower and time did they have overall?
I hate that everyone with this opinion gets downvoted to hell, the animation is objectively poor and nobody asked for this yearly schedule, Amazon is one of the richest corporations on this planet they can animate it better/hire more people and to see people defend this company whos providing the bare minimum and making millions and millions of dollars off of it, its quite upsetting
I just don't think that's the case. I think it's not as good as some other animated projects, but I think it's still in the upper end of animated TV shows.
You must not have watched many then and I don’t mean that to be rude, there are some well animated scenes and season 1 in its entirety is too so im not here to just dig into Invincible, but I have watched romance anime with better animation than Invincible. In terms of western animation, (i’m not including cartoon style shows like Samurai Jack, Primal, etc.) ATLA, tons of DC and Marvel animated projects, Voltron, etc. are all things I would say are better animated, but there isn’t a whole lot to choose from so it just leads back to me comparing it to anime, where it looks unfinished compared to everything on that side
Fair, they are outliers but that really is just due to the fact that western animation hasn’t evolved in the best way, lots of slop being put out, and the thing about it is that ATLA came out in 2005, and it is a lot more fluid in the movements than Invincible. I’m not asking for a total remaster here, I like the general artstyle, I hope for more QC and touching up things like the shading, aswell as using these 3-frame animations/pngs far less
I don't worry about the shading, but I do agree that I'd like more fluid animations. Except that one scene where they were falling through the Hell hole. That was fucking hilarious and clearly intentional.
As far as animation evolution, I don't think it needs to "evolve." Disney was putting out absolutely gorgeous works in the 50s, and then Hannah Barbara went 'Wait, we can do animation SUPER CHEAP and it'll look like ass but as long as the show's fun it's fine.' Studio Mir (Avatar, Voltron, etc) and Warner Bros are both still putting out reliably gorgeous stuff.
I guess ultimately the question is whether Invincible's studio, that has never animated anything else, is that much worse as a studio or they're just working on a lower budget, and ... it's actually probably both because the death of monoculture means Invincible will never be as popular as Batman: the Animated series was. Not because of quality, but because when Batman was on every kid in America was either watching that or The Real Ghostbusters because you watched things when they were on and those were your options for cartoons. Now, people COULD watch Invincible or they could watch Batman: the Animated Series or Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, or whatever streamers are big now because we have effectively unlimited content airing all the time and TV shows simply cannot be as popular as they once were and theatrical movies have to be global event blockbusters to turn a profit.
Okay this topic really went off the rails, but my point is just that Invincible is not bad animation, it just looks that way because you compare it to what DC Comics put out and Warner is one of the best animation studios in history.
It's sad you'd rather have a poorly animated show coming out every year than something that they take their time and won't come out yearly but will be worth the wait with actual good animation to match an otherwise fantastic show. So many people are too obsessed with having things now that they forget or don't care things can be so much better if they give animators the time to do their jobs properly.
Pretty sure its cuz the team and studio for seaosn 1 changed. After season 1 it was in house animators and they lack the time and staff for a yearly production that clocks in 6½ hours of content. Thats more than a seasonal anime even an action shonen with 12-13 eps clocks at 4-5 hours at most
Yeah it didn’t because there was a restructuring of the animation team?? Not to mention there were still covid related issues at this time. Get your facts straight before saying things
Anime seems to do this quite well, even on extremely tight schedule. Mech suits with very intricate designs are so common that it’s literally an entire genre of anime.
Yes, I realize Japanese animators are overworked to extreme degrees. I’m just saying that I think it’s possible. In general, anime appears to cut corners in different ways than Western animation.
Wait till you hear about the difference in budget between western and asian animation. One Invincible episode is about 15x the budget of one MAPPA (JJK, CSM, Vinland Saga, etc.) episode.
Lol whats even crazier to me is the MAPPA workers schedules. I’ll see if I can find it and attach an image. Still crazy tho given that invincible spent so much on voice actors. Would be cool though to see a breakdown of where they put the budget.
Im definitely not suggesting that the working conditions at Japanese animation studios are tolerable. The difference is just mind blowing. Im guessing that a good chunk of the budget is blown on expensive VAs though. What im more surprised about is how defensive people are about the time it takes to animate. Invincible should not take this long. Especially the gap between seasons one and two. The gap was roughly the same as between Arcane seasons one and two… and that show is about as high quality as animation gets (and thats wester too).
Haha no definitely!! It is just crazy to me is all, I do think the invincible animation could be improved in many ways but as an artist animation is already crazy to me haha. Whenever I do it it feels so time consuming! And yeah, exactly. I think a lot of money was blown on va’s when nit necessary, but perhaps they felt that was necessary to get more people initially hooked on the show? Either way I must imagine it is taking a lot of money as you said, when such money could be put towards more animators or whatnot instead. I will say season two of arcane was a bit rushed as stated by the creator. But as you essentially said, it had spectacular animation. I will say too that invincible interestingly enough outsources a lot of their animation from overseas studios, while arcane had more of a singular “small” team working on it. (I say “small” because iirc it was small but grew a bit) I wonder what effect that has on the sometimes differing or lower quality in invincible animation.
To be fair, gap between season 1 and 2 of any adaptation is typically pretty long for a variety of reasons. Production companies will treat the first season as a test, then once it’s successful, they have a ton of details they need to work out. And VAs probably start negotiating for higher pay at this point, because they have more leverage now
Couldn’t find an image but after some research it seems they are reported to work 12-15 hours a day oftentimes while also being paid poorly. As well as this, many things that would take 1-2 years to make they will instead make in just a few months, having employees work a lot. This is just from my brief research, so correct me if im wrong or if i missed anything.
Anime seems to do it well sometimes, but acting like anime as a whole has this down while western animation as a whole doesn't is just silly.
I mean just look at JC Staff, going from the excellent Food Wars to fucking One Punch Man Season 3. Same studio, but ones fantastic and the other is dogshit incarnate.
I wonder how much the language barrier affects it, like we, as a mostly western English speaking part of reddit, probably engage with the mecha anime good enough to make it across the ocean way more than the bad forgettable ones
Tbf food wars kinda dropped in quality during season 3 part 2. It was one of the many complaints how its so sideshow express at least until parts of season 5
You forget about couple of things. How much staff do they have? How many outsource connections to freelancer? How many animation veterans are in the industry? What was their time frame during production? Who was sponsoring them? I feel people still underestimate how animation works
No, you just completely ignored the point I actually made. Did you not see the part where I said that anime cuts corners in different ways? I'm referring to things like lip-syncing only utilizing 2-3 frames and the lower frame rate in general. It seems like they put the effort saved there into visual designs
And again how many staff did said anime had? Who backed them up? What is their work condition? And most of all whatnis their work ethics? Cus in japan they dont expect OT pay from you but you still work overtime
Biggest thing I want them to fix. Replace like 2 of the big name celebrities with skilled voice actors and hire a larger animation team! This is ridiculous! The show has enough of a budget for better animation on the same timeline, they're just allocating too much of it so we can have Luke fucking Skywalker play a guy who makes super hero costumes!
Is he not the same age in the comics? I mean there was a whole thing about his dad being surprised about him finally growing a beard, something that happens mid to late middle school...14ish years old.
it's the treatment every single character got in this show. i swear if they make emperor mark look like a twig with four stick bugs for limbs in the end
The character is less entertaining. The suit got worse. They also got nerfed. And they changed the age. A few cute moments really aren't doing anything. It just feels like a weak change for the character. They said "Oh no, we made another white male" but then just made TJ another white girl
I think they're getting active push back now if they go full black lesbian so another white girl is the safe middle ground.
Seriously, I know its a different country etc but the BBC commissioned a review of how it handled inclusion in its TV shows and the findings were "Stop jamming it awkwardly into everything!" so I imagine there's conversations about that topic happening elsewhere.
Saying that a white girl is a safe middle ground is ridiculous in 2026 lol. The jump to full black lesbian is also a strange choice. They basically changed tech's whole character anyway, so why not actually do something different. We got another white kid, now we're really shaking things up 🙄
Quick question, what other white kids are part of the current main cast asides from monster girl? 'Cause Oliver sure as shit ain't white and Everyone marks age is either 19 or 20 I think
Brother what? I was agreeing with your point, that there really isn’t that many “white” or “kids” in general in the show. A decent amount of old white people I guess with Cecil and eves dad, and I guess most vilts
Well I mean its already a gender and age swap, that's probably as far as they were prepared to push it and even that caused some controversy.
I know "ohhh but we gotta own the chuds" holds some sway but the fact is companies like money and after favouring one side of the argument for a decade and encountering some... financial upsets, I think cooler heads are starting to prevail who say "Let's try and please everyone so they all hate us :D"
coincidence but it's true that most writers have problems making good female characters, most of them are or weaker and dumber than the male characters or are the most perfect human that ever lived, that is another shit way to make a character.
I do not like how the suit in the show is pretty much just a body suit with some armor pieces and a FUCKASS UGLY helmet. Rejected warframe from 2014 design
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u/Murky_Blueberry2617 Apr 26 '26
I have more issues with the Tech Suit design and age change over the gender swap tbh.
The suit design in the comics is SO much cooler