Didn't Dragon Ball Super have a compositing department?

[taikufuru]

Dragon Ball Super had a complicated production and its eventual improvement only came halfway through the series. But one thing still confuses me: why did it look so dull visually? Yes, we've already talked about animation, storyboarding and character design. If this were a live-action series, the point would be the series' cinematography. I chose a random frame to illustrate my question:





So, the series, up until the Tournament of Power, had a compositing department?

[JulieYBM]

I'm sure that Ajay has a better answer, but logically, there's two possible explanations:

1. They didn't have the time for compositing.
2. It was a creative decision not to do a ton of compositing.

Older Toei Animation series in general didn't use a ton of compositing, so it might have been a general studio rule to avoid doing a lot of compositing work. If memory serves, it wasn't until Tiger Mask W (2016.10.02) premiered that there was a greater emphasis on using compositing to make a series look more eye-catching.

[taikufuru]

I understood. I think that more detailed backgrounds masked some of the lack of compositing work in most anime. In the case of Dragon Ball Super, the backgrounds looked very amateurish due to the time constraints imposed.

[Vegeta th3 4th]

They just didn't have time to do anything, be it in terms of art and animation or writing. Super had roughly 3 months of pre-production. To give you an idea how bad that is, Daima was in production for around a year and a half before it was even announced. After it was announced, it got another year and a half of production time. When Daima's first episode aired, all 20 had all been completed. When Super aired its first episode, only the next two were complete.