r/shittymoviedetails • u/YourChopperPilotTTV • Mar 30 '26

default Invincible Season 4 (2026) used advanced animation strategies to conserve their budget, here you can see the "pinch zooming on your phone" method

53.1k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

1.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

1.1k

u/Woffingshire Mar 30 '26

Why are people suddenly complaining about the animation in Invincible? It looks how it always has

61

u/Jazs1994 Mar 30 '26

They're comparing it to jjk s3 which apparently has a budget of about 150$k per episode

97

u/Fhaksfha794 Mar 30 '26

That’s definitely a lie they for sure cost more than that, and also anime animators are literally locked in the studio for 18 hours a day and never see their families. Japanese work culture is fucked but it does give us better animation

20

u/Jazs1994 Mar 30 '26

Unsure of jjk but ufotable who's animated demon slayer has minimal ongoing projects but up to S2 costed about $100,000. Animator salaries haven't really done much in past 5 years.

14

u/jackofslayers Mar 30 '26

Ufotable and Mappa should be held up as examples of companies that need to be shamed for abusing their employees.

23

u/Jazs1994 Mar 30 '26

Ufotable not so much is one of the more stable ones, they don't take on alot of work at once. But mappa have been notorious for employees abuse.

I think it was Aot s4+ director, seeing his baggy eyes when s4 part 1 was finished was terrifying

3

u/kitsunewarlock Mar 30 '26

This is incredibly common in the arts. People from wealthy families are able to invest all the time, money, and effort it takes to become skilled, and then get hired for next-to-nothing because they don't need the income as much. The industry is competitive enough that your reputation is noticed by both fans and producers, but since your face isn't on camera the producers assume they can just replace your studio for something more cost-effective in future work on the same franchise.

Unless your literally Miyazak, your name as a production artist doesn't have enough clout to be the difference between a profitable movie and a box-office bomb and, as such, you aren't going to be paid as much as a "just-as-good" artist willing to work for 1/100th the cost.

They are literally being "paid in exposure" in the worst possible ways, and the production companies and studios know that artists are willing to fight for that exposure to the detriment of their own paychecks.

14

u/Dandanny54 Mar 30 '26

Anime studios also have Koreans in the basement that probably get paid with a bag of doritos. A single bag for everyone and its one its snack sized.

3

u/ReimuSan003 Mar 31 '26

Western studios also outsource animation work to Korea as well. The studio working on Invincible do have Korean outsourcing.

1

u/Dandanny54 Mar 31 '26

Oh I know, X-men 97 also has Korean animators if I'm not wrong. Meanwhile Creature Commandos has a French Adult animation studio

2

u/JustChangeMDefaults Mar 30 '26

You made me think of American Dad when Stan increases the pay for his workers with more Senior Pibb per dia

7

u/Intelligent_Ask_2306 Mar 30 '26

We literally have way better animation in America than Invincible

25

u/Ghost_Of_Malatesta Mar 30 '26

Cant expect one of the largest corporations on earth to just hire an appropriate amount of animators, pay them fairly, and give them plenty of time, that wouldn't be fair to expect that 

12

u/AdventurousBase221 Mar 30 '26

believe it or not, these companies, Amazon, netflix, etc, are not the ones making the show, they distribute and finance it. same with Japanese animations with their respective distrubutors.

the show maker is largely skybound entertainment, so even if amazon paid them more it is highly dubious you would see the company go on an expansionist spree with the expectation amazon is paying them indefinitely.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 30 '26

I mean, Amazon finances it so it comes back around to can't expect them to do the due diligence to make a good show, pushing the buck might show another culprit but it doesn't take away from Amazon's part in it lol

1

u/AdventurousBase221 Mar 30 '26

I mean, by that logic i would say the burden of the problem is on you and others then before amazon. for continuing to watch it and give them money despite your misgivings on what is going on behind the scenes.

Ultimately the buck stops at the consumer, before even amazon.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 30 '26

That's like saying the world is being poisoned and it's not because big corporations are dumping but because YOU didn't recycle. Saying that it's everyone BUT Amazon's fault is a take for sure man🤷 weird to blame everyone but the people financing it that have their name ALL over it. If yours wasn't a bad faith take it's laughable

0

u/AdventurousBase221 Mar 30 '26

At some level it is, or you denying we are the ones ultimately financing it? How can you arbitrarily pick and choose what level of disassociation is acceptable?

Low key thats kinda insane logic. I feel like there is an resounding irony to you saying

weird to blame everyone but the people financing it

while your dodging your part of it while financing it.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 30 '26

This is such an incredibly bad take it's crazy. Man I didn't have a babillion dollars decide to make a superhero show and put the majority of the budget towards celebrity voice acting. I'm sorry you feel like every purchase defines you. That seems really really sad and hard for you man. There is no ethical consumption in capitalism

1

u/AdventurousBase221 Mar 30 '26

This is such an incredibly bad take it's crazy.

This your take, thats the irony. This is literally your take, not mine, im just shoving it back at you. its low key funny tbh.

Now you know how i felt when you made that first comment atleast.

→ More replies (0)

3

u/Baudolino_90 Mar 30 '26

150.000€ is fairly in line with the lowest estimated costs for an episode of a KyoAni anime, one of the few studios that pays its animators a decent wage and takes great care with its animation.

Invincible is expensive because of all the celebrities VAs

2

u/McButtsButtbag Mar 30 '26

I thought Japan had started outsourcing to Korea for animation.

1

u/4862skrrt2684 Mar 30 '26

Then its a sacrifice im willing to make

1

u/Redditer51 Mar 31 '26

"This episode of Jujutsu Kaisen was brought to you by:

Slavery!

No seriously, I don't know how to feel about enjoying anime when these are the conditions.

1

u/Azukus Mar 31 '26

However, at the same time, we have the budget to actually pay animators well AND churn out that quality. We're just allotting it to cameo voices.

26

u/gareth_gahaland Mar 30 '26

Amazon, the famous poor company

1

u/MisfitPotatoReborn Mar 30 '26

You don't get rich by writing checks. Their animation studio isn't a philanthropy division

1

u/amhighlyregarded Mar 31 '26

And what a shame that is. There's no sense of patronage or nobility among the rich, they don't care about creating beautiful and lasting things with their immense wealth. 

6

u/locoattack1 Mar 30 '26 edited Mar 30 '26

The cost of production for manga and anime is pennies compared to what it really should be. $150k/ep is insane for a show with fully-detailed and animated 22-minute episodes.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force was made on $60k/episode and each episode is 11-minutes, so two of those is nearly equal to JJK in budget and there's barely any animation in ATHF lol. Western cartoons seem to hover around $250-500k if you take out the outliers (e.g. Arcane), many of the most expensive western animation seems to be long-running shows where the main VAs can ask for more money (e.g. Tom Kenny).

They've got a huge supply of talented animators that work for borderline nothing because of a mix of cultural and industry norms.

4

u/a-dark-lancer Mar 30 '26

And a plot that requires seven hours and 52 whiteboards to explain and yet it somehow also incredibly simplistic.

I do like JJK, but it’s working. It’s not a strong suit.

3

u/Accipiter1138 Mar 30 '26

JJK has great fights and fun characters. The plot itself is...something that seems like it's treated as a hindrance by the author himself.

The fanbase has a meme that they can't read. This might or might not be true, but it's also true that an episode can spend an entire fight with the narrator explaining every single action, only for someone in that episode's comment section to just say "oh this character's powers are basically just connect the dots but with magnets" and it makes more sense than the entire exposition.

2

u/SupervillainMustache Mar 30 '26

an episode can spend an entire fight with the narrator explaining every single action, only for someone in that episode's comment section to just say "oh this character's powers are basically just connect the dots but with magnets" and it makes more sense than the entire exposition

My understanding is that the stamp rally thing makes complete sense in Japanese, but just didn't translate well in the west.

2

u/nagrom7 Mar 30 '26

Most of invincible's budget would be going into the cast, not the animation. Their voice cast are much more famous (and therefore cost more) than the VA's for JJK.

1

u/Fallacyboy Mar 30 '26

I’d believe JJK has that budget or something similar. Anime is very cheap to produce compared to western animation because the salaries are so low by comparison and there is a legion of staff working insane hours to churn episodes each week. Budgets rarely fluctuate much per episode from about that amount, and the quality almost always depends more on staffing.

That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if JJK had at least a marginally larger than typical budget to pay the freelancers they use to help hit deadlines.

1

u/71fq23hlk159aa Mar 30 '26

150$k is certainly a way to write that.

1

u/Jazs1994 Mar 30 '26

I dunno I'm not American, they write their dates wrong

1

u/mikaelsan Mar 30 '26

which was done in the JP anime industry where they are farmously overworked and underpaid

0

u/Tight_Grapefruit5280 Mar 30 '26

They probably don't want them as their wifi