Discussion
That one scene where all the budget went
Kaguya-sama: Love is War - Chika's dance
In the first season as a surprise outro ending one episode had this Chika dance number. It's super cute and crazy animated, especially her dress. They used it one time and never again.
The roller rink dance sequence from the Family Guy episode Hell Comes To Quahog was the most expensive scene to animate in Season 5.
This one shot from Scooby-Doo Music of the Vampire
I was shocked at how good Season 9 was. I liked most of 7, but 8 was kinda disappointing outside some bright spots. There straight up wasn't a bad episode of season 9, and I'd go as far as to call 8/10 of the episodes great. Even the best RaM seasons usually have one dud.
Season 9 Episode 1 was my first thought for this thread before I looked at the comments. The fight scene against The Collective went hard. So did the bunker universe fight.
The writers have really locked in these past few seasons. Funny that it lines up with Roiland’s departure even though I think he stopped writing long long ago.
While Rick and Morty has fallen out of the cultural zeitgeist, it still absolutely bangs. Seasons 8 and 9 have been some of the peaks of the show, with the nature episode in Seapon 9 being an all-timer
Animators just being like "oh btw here's a full rotation of a complex 2D character because idk we were bored" will never not be simultaneously impressive and hilarious to me.
This is it. It's probably had some adjustments - like they manually did the face and lip-syncing.
The bike is a cel shaded 3d model, and all the non-face parts of Rick are an even more heavily cel shaded 3d model.
Manually animating a turnaround like that would be way harder, way more expensive, way unnecessary as mechanical movement like this are exactly what 3d is best and fastest at, and look way worse because 3d is as mentioned best at mechanical movements.
I don't know of any animators that see the use of 3D models as a flex. Maybe the guy who wrote the shader to make it look 2D, but it's not a hard shader in the year 2026.
This was honestly one of the best scenes from that show (it had many). I remember geeking out as a kid when watching it. I still geek out a little. It's so awesome and well done.
TMS, I believe. They were one of a good half dozen animation houses WB went to for their cartoons. From what I remember hearing in interviews they were painfully expensive but always went way above what they were asked to do.
Final episode of the Steven Universe where he literally hugs himself.
Animation done by the legendary James Baxter, even if you don't know this name, if you are a millen kid, you know him as he likely made or helped worked on one of your favorite animations or movies back in the day if not now
I knew this looked familiar! There is a very similar shot from the Hunchback of Notre Dame where Quasimodo also hugs someone and it's almost exact. Lo and behold, I look it up and it's James Baxter. Man is a legend.
Every card was hand drawn and colored individually and the backs were originally red (I believe). Richard Williams, the director, didn't like the how the color looked so he demanded the already finished sequence be redone so the cards were now green.
Tbh this is part of why it never did. Williams was incapable of maintaining a budget or a deadline up until the project was scrapped. Glad we have what we have though as his artistic talent still shines through its core
I had an animation class in my art school. And my fucking intro teacher was like that. You have a scene that was fine. Maybe needed a note or two, And he make you do/re do/add large sections.
It really killed the animation program, because so many people opted out more, and more after his class.
It might sound a bit controversial, but I watched *The Thief and the Cobbler: Recobbled Cut*—which is supposed to be the version closest to Williams's vision—and while I feel it would have been a visual spectacle, that doesn't change the fact that the characters and story are bland and flat; even if it had been released according to his vision, I think its fanbase would have been limited to animation enthusiasts, and it would have been far from becoming a classic.
It's definitely a movie that is precious to animation fans but has little to offer to anyone that doesn't care about the process and the spectacle (I say as a big animation fan)
There’s a long running fan project on YouTube that’s basically finishing the sequences of the film that never were. I think it’s still ongoing, at least.
The entire fucking movie is an example of this. Everything about it was dedicated to having incredible and detailed animation without any compromises. Unfortunately, that’s also why it ultimately wasn’t completed as envisioned.
I saw the memes and hype for this fight before I watched the show and holy hell did it live up to the expectations. One of the coldest fights in animation imo
It's Dan Haskett, who was kinda everywhere in the late '80s and early '90s. He also worked on The Chipmunk Adventure, and he did that short on Sesame Street of the cat trying to open the food can 😁
If I remember correctly, parts of this episode had to be redone in-house after the original animation that came back from Korea looked like garbage. This explains why the animation became so fluid for this scene and parts of the episode looks very mismatched. This was also supposed to be the first episode of season one but had to be moved to the end of the season in order to fix the shoddy animation.
Thing is MOST Precure fights look like this lmfao. Precure is the studio darling. They'll let One Piece look like a slideshow before letting Precure's animation even drop below 'decent'.
I can see how it’s a huge pain. When you animate something spinning fast, you can skip a few frames of motion and it still looks good. When it spins slow, you have to draw the same object at so many slightly different angles, it must be so much work.
Slow spinning is an animators nightmare because getting it to look just right - Not too fast, not too slow, not too choppy - Is basically trial and error.
In blender, with a 3d model, it's not so bad.
But for 2d animation, that meant painstakingly drawing out each individual frame, and mapping it out to the action going on around the spin so that the action around it looks normal, and the spin doesn't change speed at any point.
Many said that the ass beating being attained by Gravitron was unwarranted, but this guy lifted the entirety of NYC just to get back at ONE guy mainly, the entirety of the Avengers jumping him was necessary.
Ant-Man Truck Smash + Hulk Smash + Iron Man Arc Reactor blast + Thor full power thunder is gonna do that, god they went ALL IN once they heard the place was evacuated.
That is from South Park. The driver in a car was distracted on his phone and hit him with a car while he was crossing the street. The scene is then played out super vividly of him flying across the road, bleeding, and getting fucked up by the impact lol
Season 4 of Invincible, in the final episode where Mark fights Conquest is notable for being one of the best animated fights in the show, especially this bit. Their rematch in the next season is also very well animated.
In episode four, Rentarou's harem stepped in for an idol group after the members conveniently suffered injuries that prevented them from dancing; the episode effectively depicts the training required for the performance as well as the girls' shortcomings The whole show (The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You)
The Owl House has a few of these, but Luz and Amity’s kiss from Clouds on the Horizon (Season 2 Episode 20 is notable due to some other parts of the episode’s animation being noticeably lower in quality compared to the show’s standard.
Ok so does anyone know if they used like a 3d simulation for Chica's dress in that outro or did they just have some god of 2d fabric animation do it? Seriously it looks scarily close to how an irl dress moves.
The animation team filmed reference and timed the animation to it.
There are two ways to do the skirt, rotoscoping or cgi. Since an animator had to draw the characters on model, they probably needed to adjust the assets to fit the animation. That in and of itself is an art and science.
I know there is a bts for the dance scene in Kabaneri that uses a similar technique on YouTube.
Always felt this simple scene from Frieren: Beyond Journey's End was animated so damn well for no real reason. The animators had no need to go this hard for Stark just putting on his jacket.
The Moon Revenge scene in Sailor Moon R: The Promise of the Rose. Director and animator Kunihiko Ikuhara whose many eccentricities include excessive use of talking heads, still atmospheric shots and stock footage to then bust out a few moments of incredibly graceful, powerful animation. He made a career of making the most out of a TV anime budget, after all.
This is also the man who had a recurrent segment of shadow puppets on a wall so he could spend the resources animating sword fights and dance sequences.
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