‘Blue Lock’ Animator Reveals The Truth Behind Season 2’s Controversial Animation Downgrade
Like the recently-concluded anime adaptation of Junji Ito’s Uzumaki, the second season of Studio 8bit’s animated adaptation of Kaneshiro Muneyuki and Nomura Yuusuke’s Blue Lock has fallen victim to the ‘second episode slide show animation curse’.
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Following a great first season and a promising second season premiere, fans were shocked when the animation for the next episode of the Blue Lock vs. U-20 Japan season, The Assassin and the Ninja, looked like it was produced in Microsoft PowerPoint, with characters shown simply ‘sliding’ around instead of displaying any sense of actual movement.
Following the episode’s premiere, it’s subpar animation proceeded to go viral on social media, with audiences expressing varying amounts of absolute disbelief and mockery towards the visual downgrade.
Eventually taking notice of this backlash, Chilean Blue Lock animator Martin Reyes, also known online by the handle MartinKiings, shared a video to his TikTok account in which he revealed the truth behind what fans have since coined as the series’ ‘slide show animation’.
According to Reyes, as translated via u/CordobezEverdeen on the /r/BlueLock Subreddit, the episode’s animation issues were allegedly due to the production committee cutting resources.
“I worked on the second episode of Blue Lock and I’ll tell you why it’s animation was so bad,” he stated. “Months ago I started working on the second season of Blue Lock. One in which I would work not only on one episode, nor two, or three, but rather five episodes. I started working on the second episode in which I had to take care of 20 cuts, basically animating the scenes from zero layout.”
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“But curiously the problems hadn’t started at this point,” he noted. “I’m sure that not only I, but rather all the animators that worked on this episode, didn’t do the job that ended up being published. Despite the low pay and negligible time, we did the best we could.”
Revealing the fate of his work, Reyes noted, “There were many of my animations that were capped in their final version. Basically they eliminated all the movement, some frames or they just made them differently. But the fault doesn’t lie in the one that came after me, since they probably did all they could with the little time they had.”
To this end, the animator then revealed that, like Blue Lock, such production woes have been affecting the entire industry, and that the blame for these continued issues lay primarily on “the production committees of certain animes that take projects simply thinking about the money and not the condition of it’s workers.”
“And it’s because of this that I didn’t worked on any other episode of Blue Lock,” he concluded. “Once I finished working on the second episode I decided to get out and just like I thought the final result ended up being a disaster. This made me feel like this is a job that I’m not proud to upload. I got permission to publish one of my 22 cuts.”
As of writing, it’s unknown if Blue Lock‘s ‘lowered animation quality’ was merely a one-episode stumble or the new status quo going forward.
Ultimately, the truth will reveal itself when the series’ next match drops on Crunchyroll on October 26th.
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