Toei doesn't do the series justice at all.

[Doctor.]

I re-watched the Goku vs Freeza fight in F.

Turns out that only 124 seconds of it is actual fighting. The rest of the 13 minute "fight" is CGI, Beerus & Whis having conversations, Freeza waiting for Goku to come out of the rubble and vice-versa, Freeza and Goku engaging in a not-so-friendly chat, or nothing is happening. You have 46 seconds of Goku's Kamehameha too, if you want to add that to the "fighting", but I was more-so talking about fighting choreography. How much CGI does the movie have? 57 seconds. That's roughly 46% of the animated fight. This means that Toei barely animated double the amount than the CGI they used in the fight.

[B]

You don't want Dragon Ball to be done by another studio; you either A) want it to be less mainstream so there's a targeted reason to invest in its animation, or B) that people with talent actively wanted to involve themselves with drawing Dragon Ball. Super is a Sunday morning show meant to be consumed the day of by children and never remembered again. We may not like that that is the case, or find it baffling Toei seemingly hasn't seen a possible bigger picture, but that's the fact we're facing down.

Resurrection F has made over ten times its reported budget. This will never stop.

[funrush]

I'm not one of the people that think the CGI in the movies ruined them, but I do think it definitely looked jarring, and if they did that to save money then that's kind of ridiculous considering how those movies made like 10x more than budget.

Also, unless you place occasional hiatuses, the animation in Super is never gonna be mega amazing. That's just what happens with weekly series in the anime industry, budgets are low. As for episode 5, I can bet they rushed it out because airing a subpar/shitty episode is better than not airing anything. If the home release contains no changes I'll take back that statement.

[ThunderPX]

I'm not 100% convinced the home release for Super will fix all the problems. I mean, Sailor Moon Crystal still had plenty of problems and sometimes the home release even made things worse, like switching Usagi and Minako's hairstyles.

[Hellspawn28]

CG is going to be bad anyways since it's from Japan. Japan rarely does good looking CG and the ones that looks good in Japan is still a step down compare to Hollywood CG.

[RedRibbonSoldier#42]

Am I the only one that really liked the CGI in Ressurection"F"? I thought it made the fight seem modern and dynamic

[Zenkai]

They ruin everything

<sarcasm> True that! Remember that terrible anime they made called "Dragon Ball Z" or some garbage like that? </sarcasm>

[Baggie_Saiyan]

They ruin everything

Even something as simple as Kai 2.0 is completely butchered by them

To be fair Kai 2.0 was only originally meant for international audience so I can understand why they didn't put much effort into that.

[Doctor.]

They ruin everything

<sarcasm> True that! Remember that terrible anime they made called "Dragon Ball Z" or some garbage like that? </sarcasm>

It was also ruined. The anime adaptations do not do the manga justice at all.

[Lord Beerus]

Here's something that may interest you guys. A French article about the production of DB Super. Here's the info I got from the article via google translate. I've interpreted a some of the information in the article a bit differently only because the translation wasn't the best. The stuff in bold is info I consider very enlightening:

- There are 7 animation teams working on Dragon Ball Super. In comparison, Studio Pierrot has 11 animation teams working on Naruto.
- Naoki Tate's role in the episode 5 Super Dragon Ball was not to animate or draw scenes but to correct the drawings of other animators.
- Tôei Animation studio is known for having very few animators to work on an episode. In the 80s and 90s, they employed 4 or 5 more rarely. Usually these days, they do not exceed 10 animators unlike other studios.
- Episode 3 of Super Dragon Ball was animated by a single person, as was Episode 24 of Go! Princess Precure. In comparison, Episode 27 Go! Precure Princess had only three key animators. Which is still not a lot.
- Episode 5 of Super had over 18 key animators. With this many key animators, this means there was clearly a very tight schedule and the budget was a non factor. There was good animators in this episode, though. Examples include the Kamehameha that was launched by Goku Super Saiyan 3 which was drawn by Ken Ôtsuka.
- Because of lack of time and tight schedule, Naoki Tate had to make a choice of whether he should give priority to second half of the episode where there is more action, specifically where Goku was a Super Saiyan 3, and then abandon plans where Goku was in different scenes and not in action. The second half of the episode had almost no reproach unlike the first half. Naoki Tate had done just that 3/4 of his job for that episode, and he ultimate chose the easy way out, and provided more animators to scenes where there is less action to correct the most possible scenes.
- The animation in the strict sense, where the images were moving, was not so bad. What was ugly, however, was the lack of uniformity during the fighting scenes and in the background.
- It is also important to note, that the animation director must wait until the animators finish the drawing, as the animation director is the person who works last.
- The pace of production has changed since the day that Toei animation painted cels, as with the arrival of colorization using computers, delays in the process of animation were reduced.
- Many people like the anime producers, directors or designers and production assistants are paid during the manufacturing process, planning is very punctuated to limit the overall cost of production. However, the majority of employees in the animation are freelance, as he cost to internalize facilitators and animators would be too unbearable. The only studio that could afford to do such a thing is Studio Ghibli. But the problem is not the fact that the studios are stingy. Japanese animation studios are small companies which still struggling with the budget allocated by customers. They do not have rights. In general, they do not make big profits and are not in a position to invest their own profits in an original license.
- Japanese animation in budgets are extremely low. In the 60s, to be successful producing weekly episodes was seen a crazy idea but a necessary one. Osamu Tezuka asked the animators to make many sacrifices: work very hard to pay a pittance. The standard period is always the same 50 years later.
- On a series of television production, a animator is usually paid around ¥5,000 to animate a cut (from the layout to the animated key).
- The people responsible for in-between animation are paid around ¥250 per drawing. To live survive by this standard wage, the animation leaders must work fast and can not afford to work exclusively on a single animated cut. Many animators are therefore freelancers working for several studios simultaneously.
- The problem is still the same today, as Japan's animation industry produces too many projects at a rate of an indecent speed. There are not enough talented and experienced animators to oversee production and train new young animators. The studios have no alternative but to work with animators from a low level, sometimes even amateurs who do it as a hobby. They also have no choice but to outsource certain functions in other countries, not only to contain costs but also to deliver the episode in time. In this industry, everybody is all the time is extremely busy, but also especially talented. But even the most mediocre animators, however, are solicited to regular intervals.
- It is fairly common that nobody starts work on an episode until the very last moment because they are already struggling on their deadline on another production. In this situation, it is quite common to hear about "miracle" when an episode airing in time. Sometimes the animation for an episode can begin only two weeks before the broadcast and the episode is finalized a mere few hours before before it has to air TV. The quality may be rotten, but what counts most is to have something on the screen.

[jjgp1112]

They ruin everything

<sarcasm> True that! Remember that terrible anime they made called "Dragon Ball Z" or some garbage like that? </sarcasm>

And Dragon Ball Z was plagued by the exact same problems that people are elevating to catastrophic levels with Super because of one of the first 5 episodes looked bad.

[DBZMerciter2005]

Here's something that may interest you guys. A French article about the production of DB Super. Here's the info I got from the article via google translate. I've interpreted a some of the information in the article a bit differently only because the translation wasn't the best. The stuff in bold is info I consider very enlightening:

- There are 7 animation teams working on Dragon Ball Super. In comparison, Studio Pierrot has 11 animation teams working on Naruto.
- Naoki Tate's role in the episode 5 Super Dragon Ball was not to animate or draw scenes but to correct the drawings of other animators.
- Tôei Animation studio is known for having very few animators to work on an episode. In the 80s and 90s, they employed 4 or 5 more rarely. Usually these days, they do not exceed 10 animators unlike other studios.
- Episode 3 of Super Dragon Ball was animated by a single person, as was Episode 24 of Go! Princess Precure. In comparison, Episode 27 Go! Precure Princess had only three key animators. Which is still not a lot.
- Episode 5 of Super had over 18 key animators. With this many key animators, this means there was clearly a very tight schedule and the budget was a non factor. There was good animators in this episode, though. Examples include the Kamehameha that was launched by Goku Super Saiyan 3 which was drawn by Ken Ôtsuka.
- Because of lack of time and tight schedule, Naoki Tate had to make a choice of whether he should give priority to second half of the episode where there is more action, specifically where Goku was a Super Saiyan 3, and then abandon plans where Goku was in different scenes and not in action. The second half of the episode had almost no reproach unlike the first half. Naoki Tate had done just that 3/4 of his job for that episode, and he ultimate chose the easy way out, and provided more animators to scenes where there is less action to correct the most possible scenes.
- The animation in the strict sense, where the images were moving, was not so bad. What was ugly, however, was the lack of uniformity during the fighting scenes and in the background.
- It is also important to note, that the animation director must wait until the animators finish the drawing, as the animation director is the person who works last.
- The pace of production has changed since the day that Toei animation painted cels, as with the arrival of colorization using computers, delays in the process of animation were reduced.
- Many people like the anime producers, directors or designers and production assistants are paid during the manufacturing process, planning is very punctuated to limit the overall cost of production. However, the majority of employees in the animation are freelance, as he cost to internalize facilitators and animators would be too unbearable. The only studio that could afford to do such a thing is Studio Ghibli. But the problem is not the fact that the studios are stingy. Japanese animation studios are small companies which still struggling with the budget allocated by customers. They do not have rights. In general, they do not make big profits and are not in a position to invest their own profits in an original license.
- Japanese animation in budgets are extremely low. In the 60s, to be successful producing weekly episodes was seen a crazy idea but a necessary one. Osamu Tezuka asked the animators to make many sacrifices: work very hard to pay a pittance. The standard period is always the same 50 years later.
- On a series of television production, a animator is usually paid around ¥5,000 to animate a cut (from the layout to the animated key).
- The people responsible for in-between animation are paid around ¥250 per drawing. To live survive by this standard wage, the animation leaders must work fast and can not afford to work exclusively on a single animated cut. Many animators are therefore freelancers working for several studios simultaneously.
- The problem is still the same today, as Japan's animation industry produces too many projects at a rate of an indecent speed. There are not enough talented and experienced animators to oversee production and train new young animators. The studios have no alternative but to work with animators from a low level, sometimes even amateurs who do it as a hobby. They also have no choice but to outsource certain functions in other countries, not only to contain costs but also to deliver the episode in time. In this industry, everybody is all the time is extremely busy, but also especially talented. But even the most mediocre animators, however, are solicited to regular intervals.
- It is fairly common that nobody starts work on an episode until the very last moment because they are already struggling on their deadline on another production. In this situation, it is quite common to hear about "miracle" when an episode airing in time. Sometimes the animation for an episode can begin only two weeks before the broadcast and the episode is finalized a mere few hours before before it has to air TV. The quality may be rotten, but what counts most is to have something on the screen.

That's really interesting. I thought being an animator in Japan was a high level gig that paid well. Perhaps the whole industry needs an overhaul. The probability of that happening, however, is quite low.

[Mystic Tien]

There's hope for Toei. They edit their shows a lot when they put them on bluray:

Spoiler:

My god, Usagi looks bad, and that's saying something considering how awkward Takeuchi's style looks animated. Her face is skewered like she's an alien or something.

Well, to be fair she is an alien Doesn't excuse how ugly she looks in Crystal though.

About the upper picture, not all of fixes in Blu-Ray were so much better than the stuff from original web-release. Some is arguably even worse -

Spoiler:

They also didn't fix some kind of major errors. Like the ones where Usagi used the wrong attack -

Spoiler:

This wasn't fixed in Blu-Ray.

This became this

Spoiler:

Which I guess is slightly better after all. In overall, Crystal's Blu-ray version still has a lot of problems, so I am not sure if they fix much at all in Super, considering that we already have Blu-Ray version which is Battle of Gods, and Revival of F (when it is released) for the second arc of Super.

They ruin everything

<sarcasm> True that! Remember that terrible anime they made called "Dragon Ball Z" or some garbage like that? </sarcasm>

To be fair this was a long time ago, Toei is not the same studio it was before. It has different staff now. Some people which stayed there became worse, some became better.

[Yuli Ban]

Quick question: When you guys watched Dragon Ball for the first time and were automatically in loved with it, did you care about the animation that much? I mean, really? Can't you just enjoy the ride and stop looking at it just to find flaws on whatever little thing? Kaio's voice is still off and the animation style seems to vary on each new episode but Hey, cut me some slack here, You want to talk about bad animation? This is probably not it.

The only thing that I regret is knowing what is going to happen next because of BOG and Fukkatsu, but eventually we are going to get something new, Champa is coming...eventually...right?

When I first watched Dragon Ball, I was 7 or 8. Of course I didn't care much; Saturday Morning Anime and Who Framed Roger Rabbit might as well have been the same thing to me, animation-quality wise. When I got older, then I started to notice. I used to be a big fan of Sonic X, for example. Then I turned 16 and started noticing 2-frame animations for entire scenes. Nowadays, when watching 'toons, if the animation is bad it definitely detracts from the experience. I can't excuse bad animation (unless it's a specific design choice; even then, it'd better be arty and not bad just for the sake of being bad). It would be like excusing spelling and grammatical errors in a novel, or terrible camera and sound design in a movie.

Imagine watching a movie that is well acted and well scripted, but the camerawork is completely wonky, the lighting is horrible, there's jittercam during just about every moment, and there are random bits of lag. Or reading a book with a fantastic plot, but reads like it was written by a middle schooler who's new to FanFiction.Net and hasn't yet discovered beta readers or the basics of the written English language (despite being a native speaker). It doesn't matter if the plot is awesome— I don't wanna read it if I have to use ancient astrological runes to decipher my own language just to understand where a sentence begins and its overarching paragraph ends.

[SaintEvolution]

Toei is doing everything of them bad since a few years ago. One Piece, Sailor Moon, Saint Seiya and others...all of them since 2012 to now are having some bad animation or similar problems.


Dragon Ball Super was even better than Sailor Moon Crystal of Saint Seiya Soul of Gold. For Super we only had a crappy animated episode in the 5th for an anime that has a new episode for week. Sailor Moon was an ONA and after the 3rd or 4th episode was already that crappy. The same for Saint Seiya: Soul of Gold.

At least, One Piece is starting to have a good animation again.

[Mystic Tien]

Toei is doing everything of them bad since a few years ago. One Piece, Sailor Moon, Saint Seiya and others...all of them since 2012 to now are having some bad animation or similar problems.


Dragon Ball Super was even better than Sailor Moon Crystal of Saint Seiya Soul of Gold. For Super we only had a crappy animated episode in the 5th for an anime that has a new episode for week. Sailor Moon was an ONA and after the 3rd or 4th episode was already that crappy. The same for Saint Seiya: Soul of Gold.

At least, One Piece is starting to have a good animation again.

Yeah, it is pretty sad that all this old franchises get this kind of treatment from Toei. I would expect Soul of Gold to have quiality of Hades Sanctuary... But of course, it was produced in the form of ONA, because no one from Toei was sure in it, so it got the least amount of budget. Well, it is always like that, I guess. With Toei not having any faith in Crystal since the very beginning as well. At the very least Super was not released in the form of ONA, rather than as TV-series... Meh.

[DBZ_Lee]

Toei will improve the animation quality a great deal for the Blu-Ray release, as they have done for Sailor Moon Crystal. The Dragon Ball fanbase have been highly vocal since the weekend, and I'm sure I've seen posts from the Japanese audience complaining about Episode 5, too.

As I've stated in the Episode 5 thread for Super, Toei don't seem to care a great deal for the TV broadcasts nowadays, it's all about working to a schedule, and staying ahead.
The top animators aren't able to work on everything at the same time, so they simply focus on getting the episodes out, and ready to air on schedule.
What they most likely do, is get the key animators to work on the worst looking episodes, shortly prior to the home video release.

They have Saint Seiya, One Piece, Pretty Cure & Sailor Moon Crystal just to name a few of the licenses they have to work on almost weekly/fortnightly.
As bad as Super #5 was at times, and I say at times, because not all of it was bad, there were some nice looking scenes in there.
I have no doubt at all that they will fix the glaring issues in time for the home video release.

Episodes 1-4 of Super looked really nice actually, it's just unfortunate that it's happened during a major fight scene.

[Mystic Tien]

Toei will improve the animation quality a great deal for the Blu-Ray release, as they have done for Sailor Moon Crystal. The Dragon Ball fanbase have been highly vocal since the weekend, and I'm sure I've seen posts from the Japanese audience complaining about Episode 5, too.

As I've stated in the Episode 5 thread for Super, Toei don't seem to care a great deal for the TV broadcasts nowadays, it's all about working to a schedule, and staying ahead.
The top animators aren't able to work on everything at the same time, so they simply focus on getting the episodes out, and ready to air on schedule.
What they most likely do, is get the key animators to work on the worst looking episodes, shortly prior to the home video release.

They have Saint Seiya, One Piece, Pretty Cure & Sailor Moon Crystal just to name a few of the licenses they have to work on almost weekly/fortnightly.
As bad as Super #5 was at times, and I say at times, because not all of it was bad, there were some nice looking scenes in there.
I have no doubt at all that they will fix the glaring issues in time for the home video release.

Episodes 1-4 of Super looked really nice actually, it's just unfortunate that it's happened during a major fight scene.

Crystal finished airing,though. They'll replace it soon, I guess, if not already did. I just don't understand why they are trying to make as many titles as possible. Isn't it better to focus on one or two?

[TripleRach]

Crystal finished airing,though. They'll replace it soon, I guess, if not already did. I just don't understand why they are trying to make as many titles as possible. Isn't it better to focus on one or two?

Toei's management seems to think they have the manpower and resources to do all these shows, and technically they are able to complete episodes and submit them to the TV networks every week. So why have only one or two successful projects when you could have six or seven?

They value quantity over quality, and they're probably right to do so from a business standpoint. Better animation won't increase profitability for individual shows as much as doing another successful show would.

[Mystic Tien]

Crystal finished airing,though. They'll replace it soon, I guess, if not already did. I just don't understand why they are trying to make as many titles as possible. Isn't it better to focus on one or two?

Toei's management seems to think they have the manpower and resources to do all these shows, and technically they are able to complete episodes and submit them to the TV networks every week. So why have only one or two successful projects when you could have six or seven?

They value quantity over quality, and they're probably right to do so from a business standpoint. Better animation won't increase profitability for individual shows as much as doing another successful show would.

To put more hard work in the few certain series, rather than do a bad work with most of them Really, I am very disappointed in a quality of Toei's projects as for now. And all of this could be decided quite easily. No Sailor Moon Crystal, no Soul of Gold, no Dragon Ball Super, at least not all of them at once. First airing Crystal till the very end, then starting with Soul of Gold, and go with it till the end, and finally finish all of it with Super, no problems, and more resources. Why releasing all of it at once? This I don't understand. There is also Kai, they could wait for it to end, until releasing anything, just like they actually did with Super. We waited for Crystal for 2 years, could wait 1 more. And Dragon Ball Super would have just got positives from it with Toei and Toriyama having more time to create good plots, decide where the whole thing goes, and put more hard work in art, animation and character designs.

This, I understand, and this I don't like. I think the quality suffers from it very much. We could get so much more from it, if Toei really changed their policy, or heck... Spent more time on planning. I don't think that anyone (besides probably little kids) except fans will be interested in shows like Saint Seiya: Soul of Gold, Dragon Ball Super and Sailor Moon Crystal without watching the original series, or reading the manga.