Okay, so I'm doing it now. I said over a year ago that I was planning on doing something related to Berserk but had to finish the anime series first. And while I haven't seen the 2017 season yet, as it doesn't have a dub, a lot of what I have to say here seems to be largely applicable.
Now, before I get into this, I want to ask a very fundamental question, one that many people do not get right: what is animation? Most people will likely answer that animation is how good looking a series is while animated. And, that answer is fundamentally wrong. The correct answer is that animation is the act of motion within an entity, object, or piece of art.
These two answers may sound very similar initially but if you compare what they're referring to, the difference is night and day. For the first answer, good animation is how good the art is. A single screenshot from an animated work will represent to a lot of people what good animation is. Actual animation, however, requires movement before it can be discerned. What the first answer is referring to is art-style. The art-style and how good it is can be discerned from a screenshot or single image but animation cannot be determined until something is moving.
And herein lies the issue with the complaints of animation in Berserk. Note, when I say Berserk, I will be referring specifically to the 2016 anime as these complaints are never levied at the 1997 anime, though I promise I will talk about that today.
The primary complaint about the Berserk anime is that it has terrible animation. Here, I want to illustrate some hypocrisy in these statements because, some specific people have called out the problems they have with it and these problems do not align with other series that are more poorly animated.
Initially, I thought the problem was the way most 3D engines tend to handle animation and framerate. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, a lot of anime, particularly action anime, tend to be animated at very low framerates. These anime will usually have a very small number of inbetween frames on keys before going to the next position, then played at the proper framerate to give the illusion of speed and impact. Animating at higher framerates usually results in more fluid animation in general but the low framerate animation is done to increase the impact of action sequences while reducing budget cost and the amount of work that needs to be done.
3D engines work very differently, however. 3D engines tend to have jittering and playing problems at low framerates, which means that the animation has to be played at the standard framerate at the very least in order for it to look right. This ultimately means that these cheats that 2D can get away with are nearly impossible in 3D engines.
That was initially going to be the subject of this post when I planned to do it. But, as I watched the series and got a better feel for what the complaints are, I can count at least 2 reasons everybody has a problem with this animation: the first is nostalgia for the 1997 anime, which I will get into, and the other reason is because the CGI doesn't imitate the manga's art all that well.
After having watched the entire series, both 1997 and 2016 back-to-back, I can safely say that I can understand the latter but not the former. In the latter case, Berserk's model quality is not the best and its engine seems to handle perspective a bit differently from the manga. This means that any given frame of the 2016 anime is not going to look quite right when compared side-by-side with its corresponding manga image. However, my problem with this line of thinking is that this rarely matters while stuff is actually happening.
In manga, every individual image needs to be good because that's what everyone's going to be looking at. However, in animation, the movements needs to look right but the art itself can suffer a bit sometimes without notice because bad in-between frames are harder to notice or care about while the work is actually moving.
The other reason, I cannot agree with in any capacity. Everybody who looks down on the animation of the 2016 adaptation tends to evangelize the 1997 adaptation without really remembering or conveniently forgetting that the Berserk 1997 anime wasn't the pinnacle of animation, even for its time. The action scenes often lacked motion, usually doing a side-scrolling still of the killing blow for a lot of the attacks, with only some of the actual actions being animated during the fights. The transition from the real world to the demon world during the eclipse uses a fade-in effect with the background rather than an actual transformation, and I noticed sometimes some details weren't present when they should've been, like when Guts had sewn up injuries in two different shots that were sandwiching one shot where those stitches were completely absent for some reason.
This angers me greatly. Because, this problem I see with recognizing the animation quality of the two shows represents a problem within anime fandom and art as a whole: there seems to be a preference of 2D art and a demonization of 3D art within anime. As Gigguk puts it himself "Any 3D animation is bad 3D animation." Now, even ignoring the fact that Ufotable has been using 3D animation in pretty much everything they've done from Garden of Sinners onward, this problem shows hypocrisy on the part of many anime fans and anime youtubers in particular.
To go off of Berserk for a moment, one show that is often either thought to have good animation when it doesn't or excused for having bad animation is Kill la Kill. Now, Kill la Kill is not exactly considered to be on the same level as Berserk in terms of storytelling and characterization but, one thing I've noticed from Gigguk in particular is that he excuses Kill la Kill without end, he defends it forever, even though everything about it is garbage save for some notable exceptions in certain areas but when it comes to Berserk 2016 and 2017, he flat out tells you to read the manga and skip the anime entirely.
This highlights a bias that I absolutely refuse to allow exist. I'm not saying you can't have a preference for 2D animation but I want to make some things clear. First of all, just because something is 3D doesn't automatically make it bad, I don't care where you come from or what your perspective is, hating 3D animation may be the popular thing to do but that doesn't mean it's right or justified. And secondly, if you're someone who can't even tell the difference between art-style and animation, you are not in a position to be discussing what comprises good animation to start with.
Have a nice night.
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