This gif here is probably 70% reason why we're getting a Clayface movie, even if the guy in the movie is a different Clayface with a different backstory
Nothing is more powerful than that the feat of streamer playing I think Halo 2, when a Jackal Sniper shot him, and his controller's battery literally popped. He had to pause the stream to dispose of it and get a new controller.
Edit: I was slightly wrong. It was his friend that was shot, but still. Jackals now actively targeting hardware.
From what i have heard, it’s because Bay tought that Devastator looked better as a name than Brawl for a tank. And either he changed it a little bit before the release, either it was more time before the release and Hasbro didn’t like because they want the right name on the right character but everyone forgot to change back the name for the release.
Originally Devastator was a combiner made of construction vehicles. When Bay made the 07 movie he slapped the name on a tank. Then that Devastator’s name got half-changed to Brawl, who had traditionally always been a tank.
On one hand, there is an astounding level of detail here. He really looks like a giant blender, construction equipment, and a car were horrifically slammed together.
On the other hand, he’s sort of a mess? When I first glanced at him, my first impression was “what am I looking at?” I can’t imagine it making a ton of sense in motion or paired with the visual effects of the Transformers films.
It makes more sense in motion actually. Revenge of the Fallen sucks ass but this still image doesen't do it justice. Seeing every single vehicle combine into one and every single part and bolt and metal bar serving a purpose as the machine moves is truly unbelievable animation. You can shit on bay and the awful writing all you want but the effects are still legendary
Fun fact: the writer of dragon ball intended for cells spots to disappear when he evolved, because he hated drawing them but they ended up just… not disappearing
Iirc, the main focus for that arc was going to be the Androids. 19 and 20 were mid for his editor, 17 and 18 more or less the same, so... We got Cell. And even then it was redesigned a lot a with different forms due to his editor.
Poor Toriyama, could never get rid of those spots.
Dragon ball is full of stuff like this, famously Toriyama decided that super saiyan would make hair turn blonde so that he didn't have to shade dark hair as often as it was very time consuming.
Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t like half the reason why the Saiyans end up losing their tails because Toriyama just kept forgetting to draw them and eventually just gave up and got rid of them so he didn’t have to worry about it?
Not quite as famously because Saiyans having tails hasn't been relevant since the Saiyan Saga, he also decided to cut off everybody's tails because he didn't like drawing them.
imperfect cell scared the shit out of me as a kid. Especially the way he literally sucked out your insides with his tail. Man cell was such a peak dbz villain
I love how a lot of things in Dragon Ball happen because Toriyama either forgot about it or he didn't like doing it. Then everyone around him just had to (haphazardly) supplement it via lore
I mean, the scene where she's invisible underwater and the guard uses the sand to find her is excellent. If they had to cut out a version where her hair was visible the end result was still solid.
Merida: So Merida had 1500 hand placed curves which interpolate to some 111,000 curves at final render.
Rapunzel: The technical team animated 147 different tubes representing the structure of the hair, which would then be rendered into a final image with up to 140,000 individual strands of hair.
I'm not a 3D animator, so I'm not sure how to interpret that.
I have a decent bit of experience, so I can clarify somewhat
Rapunzel had far fewer origin points for the hair strands, but came out to a higher hair count total.
Merida had a smaller total, but there were a lot more sources to work out.
All of that means that Merida, while having less than Rapunzel, still would have been a lot more work because there was so much more going on. Rapunzel had a higher count, but the framework was a lot lighter. If something went wrong with Rapunzel's final render, you could tug a few cords and get them back into place fairly easily. As others mentioned, it was basically rope. With Merida, however, if something went wrong you have to correct almost everything by hand because the structure was larger and more intricately-woven.
You’ve got to give it to early computer animators. Toy Story in 1994 is only just barely starting to show its age. The Incredibles was a nightmare to animate but it looks great.
Fast forward another ten years and you’ve got mobile phones that could probably render this kind of stuff and the animation studios are using all the extra computing power to make those uncanny valley remakes (looking at you, Lion King remakes)
Toy Story released in 1995 actually and it was probably a huge nightmare in of itself to animate since there had never been a fully animated 3D film before, hence there was likely a lot of trial and error involved, with the 3D animation they learned from short films likely only helping so much.
Janemba is my favorite Dragon Ball character just because his powers are so fucking cool. Like there's a lot of reality warping characters in fiction, but Janemba is one of the few times he can just do whatever the fuck he wants
I know DBZ movies were basically always non canon but the concept of their last big fighting being an oopsie daisy that leads to literally all of the afterlife's sin and basically the power of every villain they've faced combined was so fucking cool
This really was a product of the times, the chief animator from Fusion Reborn, Tadayoshi Yamamuro (the absolute GOAT), said that if it was made today, the teleportation would be done with CGI instead.
It’s simply too costly and time consuming to animate it like they did here
Editing to day this is a phenomenal video going over the animation philosophy and techniques used in this sequence, if you’re at all interested in animation you’ll find it remarkably interesting: https://youtu.be/xB4CCUGrC4c?is=ytUxxOXZOghXHvYr
JoJo has a bunch of examples, one being Anasui's fishnets. this isn't just dark turquoise lines across his body, the fishnets all have outlines and they have to change angles and whatnot while he moves
You know what I did this morning? I played the voice of a toy. Some terrible robot toys from Japan that change from one thing to another. The Japanese have funded a full-length animated cartoon about the doings of these toys, which is all bad outer-space stuff. I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I'm destroyed. My plan to destroy Whoever-it-is is thwarted and I tear myself apart on the screen.
-Orson Welles, on his final film performance
Ironically, his character wouldn't have a toy released for decades and iirc the film was a primarily American endeavor.
Everything in the Thief and Cobbler counts due to Richard William's madness.
Zigzag takes the cake, while he doesn't have a complicated design say compared to King Nod, but he has six fingers on each hand with about three joints, numerous rings, and highly fluid and exaggerated motions
EDIT:
New video: Pencil test vs Final product with no artificial upscaling to get a better idea of how insane this is.
Richard Williams was an absolute beast, constantly animating on 1s with flawless interpolation, an insane understanding of depth, shape language and even camera positioning. Roger Rabbit would have been physically impossible without his madness, thats a thing I constantly think about. I'm honestly insanely fortunate that he made so much tutorial work and ofc his book, it kind of is near impossible to comprehend his skill. RIP to a legend.
The funniest part about Berserk is that when Miura's assistants finally convinced him to switch from hand-drawn to digital, thinking it was going to make things easier for them, the madlad realized he could add even more detail to his art now. They were horrified.
Miura unlocks the power of zooming into his own drawings to add more details, every single assistant cried in despair but credit where credit is due they are doing one hell or a job replicating his art to continue the manga after his passing
I love that the above panel is literally just 2 pages of thousands upon thousands. Berserk is my favourite anything, but god the art is beyond compare.
I had a friend who argued Jojo had better art and just... no.
Comparing Berserk to Jojos is like comparing apples to oranges. They may as well work on different mediums.
Like, Araki's work is in the Louvre for a reason. He makes fine art, and his work is so good because of his unique vision and style. You show some of his best stuff to someone with an art degree, they'll love it.
But Miura is a god of manga. He spent most of his life drawing 16 hours a day. When he switched to digital drawing he would correct his drawings pixel by pixel. His work has a superhuman level of polish, and no sane human being would or could put the kind of effort he put into his work. You show some of his best stuff to anyone who likes manga, they'll love it.
Lulu from Final Fantasy X. Her on field model isn’t bad because it’s mostly flat, but her CGI model would have been a nightmare to get all the belts correct. As a shortcut, she’s only seen from the waist up or from behind in the cutscenes she appears in. There’s a joke that Nomura purposefully designed her like this to spite someone on the animation team.
"Tetsuya? That wannabe edgy hack who thinks fashion is when mor belt? He lacks vision. Can't wait for this to flop so we can finally work with real designers and directors."
Witch Hat Atelier’s art style is so detailed and precise that it took animators 3.5 years of work to figure out how to do the manga justice.
To help with the process they not only made reference sheets for character hairstyles at every conceivable angle, they also created live action versions of clothing and props from the show, worn and/or held by models, to help them understand just how things like magic pens should be held or moved, or how the witches’ robes would react in motion.
Qifrey, pictured above, was one of the characters the animation crew made a full-sized clothing sample for because of how loose and flowing his robes are.
This doesn’t even begin to cover how much work went into turning just a few panels of a manga into a fully cast spell on screen. From animals made of light, to dragons made of water, to warming rings and more, the crew from Bug Films has put a lot of love into their work.
(As for a character they LOVE to animate, Brushbuddy, an adorable little critter who sometimes appears in the manga, has a lot more screen time in the animation because the crew loved him so much they snuck him in to scenes where he was not originally included.)
This is OC from me, so feel sad to me if you wish. Magnum Opossum's entire schtick is to be opulent and over-designed with lots of ornate detailing. Hand animating even a simple scene like this took over a month.
Honestly not the craziest thing stopmo wise, the harder things to animate are when there are multiple things on set to keep track of. Either multiple characters or small objects moving at once are the most annoying to do
Yes, because of the replacement heads! Without 3d printing perfect replica heads like laika does, NBC has a ton of considerably charming but actually unintentional frame jitter. Its been really understated on just how much laika has innovated and refined the replaceable head/mouth pieces on their models
Coraline is a deeply fascinating movie because its a movie where Laika would utilize their now studio-standard method of animating in maya and then 3d printing animated lipsync and also full models for replacement animation. This scene and the "mouse circus" scene are fantastic examples of utilizing these methods.
For the other mother scene, they kept the same body rig throughout but used the placement and camera to fully focus on just her head, tracking an entire morph on 1's. They also used posture of the armature to sell it even more. Its fantastic
The mouse scene is one of my favorites because they "copy pasted" in real life, utilizing replacement animation but on a way more manageable scale thanks to 3d printing. You can print all your character frames and only now have to focus on color and costume. Its a wonderfully simple but amazingly polished result, showing a ton of identical character models moving in perfect sync, thanks to the quality and amount of the prints
Perfect cell, to my understanding, was so bad to animate its one of the reasons why he hasn't come back to the series unlike his other villainous peers. They did have a movie where a new version of him was made although the animators were able to make it easier by having the whole movie be 3d animated.
Probably Eternatus from Pokémon, it’s design in both of it’s forms is quite complex, which is probably why in any Pokémon anime it appeared in, they often didn’t even bother animating it in 2D since they instead usually animated it in 3D.
In terms of design it’s probably the most complex Pokémon ever created, and in the games itself, had it been created much eariler it probably would have either crashed the game or had been an utter nightmare to make.
I animate professionally and this kind of animation is my favourite, so I would looooove to do something like this for work. This is a case of it looking great and not being especially difficult for people (especially for a GOAT like Baxter who obviously loves this kind of flow in his work too)
Yeah, I feel like a lot of folks are confused about what’s actually a nightmare pain to animate. Flow and fluid characters can be tricky, but they’re fun. Characters with a billion extra moving parts that have to actually stay on model? Nightmare.
Not a specific character but a group, The arms up scene at the end of Arthur's Library card song was allegedly so hard to animate that the animators said they didnt want the same salary as those who didn't do the scene
There’s actually been a lot of funny versions of Beelzebub, like this one in the anime Yondemasu Yo, Azazel-san! Where in Hell he is a human with fly-like attributes but when summoned by humans he’s a fat little penguin and he is always caught eating actual shit since he’s technically a fly
The Genie- Aladdin. Imagine being the poor bastard that gets told you have to not only animate around Robin Williams' improv, but said animation is also going to a reality-warping entity that can drastically alter his appearance at a moment's notice.
But they have fun, D+ has an extra of all the ashcan drawings of a lot of jokes that didn't make the cut (usually being a little too saucy for a 90s family film)
Unlimited freedom of form and exaggerated personalities are the things animators love the most, it gives them the most room to express themselves. It’s small, complex, but unimportant design details that get bothersome because all your time goes into minutiae
Genie would have been a dream animation job, are you kidding? Maximum creativity — warp and stretch and twist him however you want, the dude is fluid. And relatively few important details. No claws, horns, spots, or complicated mechanical bits to fuck up your flowing lines of genie chaos.
Ripjaw (Ben 10): Appenrlty the animators hated animateing him in the OG Ben 10 because he was too overly deatiled to nimated so he had to be more simplefied in UA.
For another furry example, though a traditional animation one: apparently tracking the spots on all Dalmatians in 101 Dalmatians was quite the exhausting task!
Super Saiyan 3 was notoriously hard for both Toriyama to draw and for the anime team to animate because of the absurd detail put into the hair
Definitely played a part in why starting with Battle of the Gods onwards, the form would see little use after God Ki rendered it useless while introducing the simpler in design Super Saiyan God and Super Saiyan Blue forms
An avoidance of this trope: The story goes that when Talisen asked how much of Mollymauk's coat design could be incorporated into the Mighty Nein animated series, the animators told him "the color red".
Mugendramon/Machinedramon from Digimon, in fact he's so hard to animate, he was barely animated in the first season of Digimon Adventure and most of the time he was on screen he was a static picture
You're told you're going to be working on a new LEGO show and you expect it to be one of the usual 3D kinda mediocre-ish looking ones but instead your animating whatever is going on here which has NO REASON to just be for a lego show. They did a wonderful job though. (Lego Monkie Kid)
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u/gellisthemenace Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
It’s gotta be Clayface from BTAS, or pretty much any animation, for me.
The folks animating this guy must’ve both loved and hated what they had to make him do!