BlazingFiddlesticks wrote:The problem is cheap digital animation, say what you see with recent arcs of Pokemon. It's a lot of shine and bright, solid colors with very little shading or detail behind it- and shine with no shadow or lighting looks static and lifeless. Most of the new Dragon Ball stuff has suffered the same in one way or another; Battle of Gods (and the more recent Pokemon movies, to keep the analogy going) just throw in a little lighting, shadows and shading to cover it up. Generalizations, sure.
Pocket Monster the Series XY has looked incredible so far. There's a lot of effort placed into the timing of the drawings and the backgrounds. The first
Pocket Monster TV series (Kantou and Jouto) had next to no budget or talent. Barring the awful writing of
Best Wishes the Satoshi TV shows have been on the up-and-up since
Diamond & Pearl, which had both awesome fights and writing. Fun fact: Studio Cockpit, which worked on
Dragon Ball Z, works on
Pocket Monster.
Iwane Masa'aki, who worked on Studio Cockpit episodes of Dragon Ball Z, is an animation supervisor and key animator for Pocket Monster. These days he provides the best fight scenes in each new series. He also primarily provides the key animation for an entire episode himself.
The problem is cheap practices, though. Toei floats little to none of their talent towards their recent
Dragon Ball projects, save for the occasional unchaining of Shida Naotoshi from the dungeon walls to let him work on
Dragon Ball. Hosoda Masahiro's poor directing of
Battle of Gods hasn't helped the perception from a few members about modern animation, but it's certainly possible to create incredible things.
Toei can and has done it.