K-ON! 02: Failure art and some strange clothes
Posted: April 10, 2009 Filed under: Uncategorized 26 Comments »
FAIL-O-METER
The fail here is quite large… larger than a regular car, but smaller than a Hummer. Oh, and let me make this clear beforehand: I love K-ON!, but there’s just some things that are just begging to be bashed.
Instead of bashing episode 2 for its horrific display of fetus hands, joined fingers, lack of noses, spear-shaped legs, and general horrible art quality (why, KyoAni, why?), I’ve decided to comment on the fashion in K-ON! …and bash the crapart.
I just can’t pass up an opportunity to bash some bad art, so this first page will be all about the crapart in this episode.
If you don’t want to hear about K-ON! art, scroll down and go to page 2 and live your naive, sheltered “KyoAni is eternally awesome” lives in ignorance.
First, let’s take a look at the animation of one particular scene…
Besides Mio’s weird eyes and the enormous dent in her skull… or tumor in her cheek, depending on how you view it (it’s like the young woman/old woman optical illusion) and the fact that Mio’s garments have rode up mysteriously and the fact that Mio’s hair is as thin as paper, this is quite your normal scene.
Okay, so Ritsu’s neck grew a little longer. Just some standard frame-by-frame animation of a person moving her head.
Okay, it got a little longer. Now she’s preparing to look forward a little…
HOLY SHI-
What happened with her neck!? Suddenly, a random chin line appears!
What’s up with her eyes? One frame passes by, and BAM, they’ve moved halfway across her face!
Well, not only that… her entire face flies a few inches in a single frame.
Of course, these aren’t as noticeable when it’s animated, but the chin line stands out like a sore thumb.
Well, at least now Ritsu matches Mio in terms of artistic fail in this scene…
And moving on to the general art fail…
Something is horribly wrong with Mio’s hair/head/face here. Either her face needs to move forward, or her hair needs to move back. They’re not matching up.
Indeed. This is the infamous fetus hand that K-ON! is promoting.
If you take a closer look…
- Yui’s pinky is thicker than all of her other fingers.
- Yui’s index finger is pointing to her right. This is not physically possible.
- Her “lifeline” is a dash, showing that she won’t have a long life. What a misfortunate girl she is…
SPEARLEG! It’s not your average leg. It’s incredibly thin, and the leg is attached to the foot. The foot doesn’t bulge out like a normal foot should (obviously, some parts of a foot are wider than the ankle…), and the entire limb tapers down to nothing.
Yui’s leg/feet are the same. In fact, her legs are so thin that I thought they were the limbs of the chair when this scene flew by.
There are quite a few scenes in this episode in which the characters lose their noses, and not on purpose (as a part of a style), either.
Somebody’s eyes are misaligned!
I’ll list off the fail here:
- No nose.
- Hair looks like shit.
- Yui doesn’t fit into her uberCG (or some insane art) room.
- Stubs for feet
- Yui is standing facing toward the camera, but her hips are faced to the left. Her feet should thus be pointing to the left, too. Instead, her right foot is pointed to the right… a very painful, if not impossible, position to be in.
- The ceiling is incredibly low.
- There is a picture of a soccer ball on the right wall.
- It is not 10:50!
Humans do not have muzzles!
Yui does not look right at all.
Mio is daydreaming.
Ritsu’s hands disappear into the folds of her ponchosweater.
Akikan! quality. Sorry for the color clash with the text.
Either the mouth is too high up, or the nose is too far to the right. Ugh.
The contrast…. !!!!1
MOAR ON PAGE TWO
Page: 1 2
god why??? why cant you let me have my fun?? omg you suck. you promised me reviews on page 2! not more art badgering!! from now on everytime i see an art breakdown page, im going to post one thing, yes you guessed it….
RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE
HAHAHA!
But Page 2 is more of a “why are they wearing this…?” deal. It’s not art, it’s clothing design! ＼(゜□゜)／
you want something to tear apart? go watch eden of the east ep1 and explain to me how a buck naked foreigner waving a gun in front of the white house doesnt get shot or arrested..go!
Hahah, I’ve seen the screenshots!
It’s quite late now, so I’ll try and get to it tomorrow… 😀
QUALITY animation? In my KyoAni anime?
INORITE?
Still, this is leagues better than… *shudder* Munto…
i think you’re being a bit too harsh on some of those shots… especially when the characters are drawn from a distance. you’re not going to see perfect form and painstaking detail when the entire person is only 3 inches tall.
also re: yui’s denim dress: it’s called a jumper. it’s supposed to look like that.
Hahah, that’s true! Still, many of them can be done better, and I expected something such from KyoAni…
There’s no excuse for the art in the close-up scenes, though!
LOL KyoAni has outsourced their animation team to Zimbabwe.
Tru.dat!
Whoa…. Never thought they would slip sum of teh bad art to it’s final form.
I’m sure the folks at KyoAni would get sum responses from K-On! fans, so maybe a proper art re-edited version be on BS-i channel (gotta luv the widescreen), or perhaps on a DVD release?
I’m not so sure about a re-edited version (though I’m with ya’ on the possibility of a re-edited version for DVD), but the widescreen version should look better anyway :p
You can blame the economy for the lack of anatomy. Did you know how much a nose job costs nowadays?! Multiple that by four. XD
Dang, I can’t argue with that! (Not that I’d want to, haha)
>>>“Hey main character, come over here so we can get some screentime!”<<<
Yes, non-title characters suck.
Damn it, you got me there.
…
Shit.
Hmm,
Well I think some of what you report is clearly just a case of point-of view distortion.
K-On!’s style seems to primarily be one where the outline of the characters becomes “dashed” or vanishes when a part of their body overlaps itself, explaining the phoetus hands (if you were to imagine them having an outline, with the fingers curled forward, and the entire hand pointing towards the camera, I’m sure you’ll get what I mean).
As for faces, the problem with them primarily seems to be the angle of the face doesn’t look “right” versus the angle of the entire head, probably a result of them trying to stay away from using many lines.
I am very impressed with the instruments in the series, even if it is all product placement advertising!
That could be true, but I’d have to disagree on the fetus hands thing. It’s happened much more than once (I’m pretty sure I got the term “fetus hand” from another aniblogger), so it can’t be just this scene!
I think you’re mistaking a style thing — which appears repeatedly and looks intentional to me — for a failure thing.
K-ON’s not Haruhi, it looks (for lack of a better word) cartoony. It’s an extension of the simplified and stylized look of Lucky Star. It allows them to convey realistic body language etc. without spending a boatload of money and time to do detailed art in each frame.
Feel free to talk about how much you dislike the stylized look of K-ON (I can easily see how you wouldn’t), but don’t confuse it with blunders.
That said, I do have to give you a couple of those screencaps, though (Mio’s neck, for instance). And of course the magical brand name change on the guitar…
I can see how many of the things I pointed out could be considered an overall style issue (the hands and the muzzle are the most obvious pieces of evidence here), and I can’t argue with that.
Still, I can’t see art style being used to justify some scenes like Yui’s stubleg scene (looking awfully like a Nendoroid there…).
I didn’t notice the brand name change on the guitar, but that sounds like (quoth Artefact) “an egregious error!”
The failures here seem pretty consistent with what you’d find in any other Kyoto Animation show. Why the indignation? Has your adulation of KyoAni obscured your memory of KyoAni?
Perhaps my overly romanticized view (not to mention fuzzy memories) of KyoAni has set my standards too high, I’m not sure. But I can’t remember anything of this sort from TMoHS or Lucky Star (though I’d have to say that CLANNAD and Munto had about the same quality as this episode).
Haruhi was less toony, but yes, it and Lucky Star had the exact same failures in spades. As did AIR, as did Fumoffu, as did TSR, as did Kanon 2006.
Ah, then it must be me. D: (On another note, I’m ashamed to admit that I had to think for a minute or so before I realized what “TSR” stood for.)
This anime isn’t that bad… I know I couldn’t do any better lol
This is the biggest load of crap I’ve ever seen! All these things aren’t fails at all! You don’t know sh*t about style!