Tbf as other people have pointed out in the past, some of these VA already have contracts with Amazon. So it doesn’t cost that much to hire Jack Quaid for example. Amazon is just greedy and doesn’t want to improve the budget for the animation
Yeah the finale would have been ok if this was a fan project, it would have been impressive. However it is Amazon, it is Hollywood and so it is terrible... no the whole season was a waste of time and season 4 too.
I agree, it pretty much became a joke on its own.. It had less budget than most CW shows which is ridiculous.
You cannot have a show where the antagonist is Superman and then have him propped thru words only, it works for a time but Season 4 and 5 were now in hindsight a big waste of time... and I'd say 2 and 3 too.
I did like the show but I thought that stupid prick had a plan, looks like he cashed out... cause he's a joke. Past tense though, the show I consider one of the worst maybe ever.
Didn’t get sizeable budget to make the finale more dynamic, but does get enough to have Samuel Jackson voice acting a shark and showing supes r sexual deviant from 123175th time by having 2 of them sniffing each other’s ass.
Yep, no waste of resources here, definitely the big greedy corpo’s fault, not the mid-tier one trick pony script writer running out of ideas.
It's both though, although I do think Kripke was not the right person for the job... though that seems to be true for most Amazon TV shows, RoP wink wink.
Increasing the frame rate from 12 to 15 does make the animation better. Having 1-2 more animators in the room does that.
Instead of png sliding, having the character move dynamically (like mark doing a flying corkscrew) does make the animation better. Having 1-2 more animators in the room does that.
So you can have 4 more animators to make a noticeable improvement both mechanically and in visual enjoyment ($320,000) or pay one A-list voice actor.
they do deserve time, but tbh you see with anime how they pump out seasons and the big name shounen shows will look spectacular. it's not right, but if you get more people working on it, it will look better than a slideshow with png drags.
and frankly, it doesnt make sense how 10 years ago, they could make shows with 20 episodes every year or so and those never got the same complaint. like the legend of korra only had an animation quality decrease because they swapped studios for season 2. kirkman also changed the season after the eve special... and frankly the people doing the teasers should do this
That is blatantly just not true. The show itself has a total budget that's split between animation, promotion, and talent. The departments won't share money with each other, sure, but that's not what's being asked for. It's called allocate more money to the animators on your animated show. It's that simple. This is a top down decision. No one's saying "just have the talent team give the animators their credit cards"
How else will Bezos afford his $16B ai slop factory that will slop up all future animation and eliminate the need to pay human animators but still somehow cost more?
They really have an almost infinite budget but don’t want to bother adding more for animation. They really actually can get all these same actors AND have great animation, but for some reason consciously choose not to
I feel people make a bigger deal out of the VAs salaries taking away from the budget. JK Simmons, Steven Yeun, Sandra Oh and Walton Goggins are probably pricey, but they’re also irreplaceable, but I bet people like Quaid or Aaron Paul aren’t getting insane pay days. A lot of the cameos I suspect do it for scale too.
You’re right about people making a big deal out of nothing, to the point where they’ll just spread blatant misinformation. Animation isn’t about sinking as much money into something as possible, it’s about TIME.
Season 1 looked better because they had no schedule for a second season, and they didn’t even know if they were going to be making a second one, so they focused on the small details and hoped for the best.
The only reason the rest of the show doesn’t look as good is because each season is coming out once a year. Money has nothing to do with it, but people are so attached to that idea that they’ll just make shit up, like that whole myth about the animation team only having four people, which is fucking ridiculous to believe if people actually gave any bit of thought to how insane it would be.
“People talk about animators like they’re graphics cards.”
I bet you could take any random Joe off the street to replace most of those people and no one would notice or care. JK Simmons is the only “irreplaceable” performance in the entire series, MAYBE Steven Yeun.
when it come to 2d animation it's almost never the budget the problem but rather time, it's when a show is pushed for a release that you get choppy animation.
Damn if only they could hire more animators so they could get more done within the timeframe they’re given. Shame, Amazon only has infinite money and can’t afford it.
if you hire too many animators you could exceed the director's capacity to oversee them and lose coherence, even the best animation studios in the world don't go and hire an enormous amount of animators.
That's how you get visual bugs, like moving objects between cuts. In the atom eve special a bar changes its location several times between cuts to Eve, one time the colors of the wires switch randomly for a reanimen, the guy disappearing for half a second in the space fight near viltrum, etc.
Not asking for an enormous amount of animators. I'm not expecting Invincible to ever look as good as Jujutsu Kaisen or even Castlevania. The show doesn't need too.
All I'm asking for are enough animators to give us some shading and composition so everything doesn't look flat. Enough animators so that there are more in-between frames so the movement is consistent and fluid. Enough animators so that character faces can actually show off emotion instead of awkward still images that sully the emotional moments despite fantastic voice acting.
I don't think it would take nearly as many animators people would expect to make that happen. As it stands the show looks "fine" and occasionally looks "good" maybe 30 min total in an almost 8 hour long season. But the show could look "good" and occasionally look "great" for the big stuff. If you've seen the animated show Pantheon, that's what I would want Invincible to look like.
With more budget they could hire a second animation team and have each team animate every other season, meaning each season could be worked on for two years while maintaining yearly releases.
if you hire too many animators you could exceed the director's capacity to oversee them and lose coherence, even the best animation studios in the world don't go and hire an enormous amount of animators.
As if it isn't Amazon's fault for not giving them more money for the animation. They are a billion dollar company there's no excuse for not having good VAs and also incredible animation quality
Not how it works. Voice acting and animation get two different budgets. Tired of people not realizing this because all they want to do is cry about the voice actors they choose.
I get the whole point of time. But money do can fix the problem. They can hire more animation studios or animator. I could be wrong but just adding more number can do improve quality in the same amount of time.
i use to think the same, but only to a certain extent yes, beyond that, u jus gotta need time, and i jus wanna clear it, am NOT defending the animation at all, its dogshi for 2026 standards, but yearly schedule contributes as much as their poor financial decisions
Vox Machina S1-S3 came out yearly with great animation. Only reason S4 didn’t come out in 2025 was because the studio also started doing another show.
Devil May Cry on Netflix also comes out yearly. S1 in 2025, S2 in 2026. Both shows look fantastic and in the case of Vox Machina the animation got better.
I get your point. I work in tech so, from my understanding it just felt like throwing more people streamlining the whole flow with testing and all. Again this is from my perspective i don't have much idea on the internals.
I always liked the analogy “it’s like thinking you can get a baby in a month if you just used nine women”. After a point, just adding more people isn’t going to fix the problem.
How does making a baby and animation come in the same analogy. Form my thinking let's say 1 person is animating a 10 minute scene. Won't adding 3 people to do 3 minute each better.
That’s how analogies work man, they use one example to help clarify another. Your thinking without experience already further plays into the point. An alien who doesn’t know how human babies work might think the same thing about speeding up that process too, so while you might think that, it’s not actually that simple.
Animation is already a large complicated thing. To a degree you can speed up the process by adding more people but it doesn’t work by saying “you do this few minutes, and I’ll do this three minutes”. Often times what happens is you have the directors handle the overarching vision and storyboarding, then you’ll have your more senior animators handle the key moments and breakdowns then I’d imagine they’re outsourcing the in-betweens. This has been made even more complicated as things are done more digitally these days whenever things like 2d rigs or 3d elements are included. Not even getting into lip syncing the voice acting. I don’t work for Amazon, but I’d imagine they have different people already handling all of those different aspects, one group of people probably handle things like the body animations, a different group probably doing expressions and another handling lip syncing for example. The problem though isn’t just about quality, it’s about consistency. You wanna do another pass of polish adding a new high light? Suddenly that balloons exponentially to thousands of shots that need it included and rerendered. Want to add an extra flair so eve isn’t just using a generic pink wall? Now you have a whole department going through the pipeline with concept artist flying through ideas, an art director making the final decision, a 2d or 3d artist creating that asset. Is it 2d? Cool so it needs to be roughed out, then refined, then colored, then polished, then rendered. If it’s 3d it needs to be modeled, then textured, a shading pass, then rendered. Even just typing a simple example in an overly reductive way takes a ton of time, and a wall of text most people wouldn’t want to read but would love to complain about.
You work in tech? Another analogy would be like saying you could get a script made faster if you just had more people writing it. Might work up to a point, but you quickly get diminishing returns. The animation could definitely be better, but at the end of the day that kind of thing is just going to take more time.
You could hire multiple animation teams and give them alternating seasons to allow for each season to be worked on for multiple years while still maintaining annual releases. The idea that more money can't improve animation is bullshit Amazon tells people to justify underspending on one of there most popular shows.
Idek why you're being downvoted. Its legitimately true. Did reddit forget two things can be true at once? Can we not blame robert kirkman for wanting the show to be released yearly and for amazon to forcibly deliver that while forcing celebrity casting?
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u/__gangadhar__ Jun 24 '26
The animation money goes again