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Honestly guys for a 3DCG animation the visuals really arent that bad this is honestly pretty good visuals for a show using 3DCG. We have seen WAY WAY WAY WORSE. The story is honestly pretty fun it's just a buddy cop show.

Lord Vaultman wrote:

Honestly guys for a 3DCG animation the visuals really arent that bad this is honestly pretty good visuals for a show using 3DCG. We have seen WAY WAY WAY WORSE. The story is honestly pretty fun it's just a buddy cop show.

That's not really praise given it's by most of the same team that also did the eye-insulting Berserk series from a few years back. Only reason it's not as much of an insult is that it's mostly the cars that use CGI and the more insulting animation and direction choices are reserved for the 2D sequences.

It's amazing how low this past episode dipped in quality. I mean outsourcing usually entails episodes that aren't to snuff to the ones that aren't (which is also not really praise given the industry isn't accomadating to any studio these days), but they sure did try their hardest to use as many porn magazines, freeze frames and awkwardly framed close up shots as possible.

Philmister978 wrote:

Lord Vaultman wrote:

Honestly guys for a 3DCG animation the visuals really arent that bad this is honestly pretty good visuals for a show using 3DCG. We have seen WAY WAY WAY WORSE. The story is honestly pretty fun it's just a buddy cop show.

That's not really praise given it's by most of the same team that also did the eye-insulting Berserk series from a few years back. Only reason it's not as much of an insult is that it's mostly the cars that use CGI and the more insulting animation and direction choices are reserved for the 2D sequences.

It's amazing how low this past episode dipped in quality. I mean outsourcing usually entails episodes that aren't to snuff to the ones that aren't (which is also not really praise given the industry isn't accomadating to any studio these days), but they sure did try their hardest to use as many porn magazines, freeze frames and awkwardly framed close up shots as possible.

Let me be clearer then. I'm not really seeing these dips in quality you guys are seeing. And this is coming from someone watching the same episodes twice 2 weeks apart (sub and dub)

This show went from highly anticipating the building of the show's buddiness to highly anticipating the building of the show's shoddiness.

I kinda liked some of episode 6. It made me laugh when all the other people in the office wheeled into the aisle when the subject of the porn mags came up, and then you could see them slide back into their cubicles once she gave them the reaction they were waiting for.

But I'm watching Ace of Diamond this season, and by comparison, Cop Craft is absolutely replete with animation! At least they don't frame 80% of the shots with speed lines going in one direction or another.

Lord Vaultman wrote:

Let me be clearer then. I'm not really seeing these dips in quality you guys are seeing. And this is coming from someone watching the same episodes twice 2 weeks apart (sub and dub)

The stills of the show look fine. Character animation and general scene-to-scene shots have looked above average for CG animation too, which is why I was pretty on-board with the show for the first few eps (then they just stopped animating characters at all for 50% of the last episode, but I'm getting ahead of myself).

But the fight scenes are garbage, and it's honestly not the fault of the animators. The animation is...probably fine? It's hard to tell sometimes, that subway fight scene was all but impossible to watch. The problem is the direction.

I challenge you to watch that subway fight scene, or the gunfight before it, or the chase scene in ep 6, and to describe what is happening moment to moment AT ALL. It's impossible, because the camera is pointing away from the action a good 50% of the time, and timing and spatial awareness is completely obliterated by terrible pacing and shot composition. You can kind of reconstruct the events AFTER the fact based on the outcome, like when Kei and Tilarna look at the chunked up vampire on the train tracks and you have to assume that they somehow got out of the way of the train and she didn't. But during the fight scene? It's just incomprehensible.

I don't watch every anime so I can't comment that it's the worst this season or this year or whatever, but I can say that I can't remember watching a show with fight scene direction and choreography this bad since Hand Shakers. This show is a lot better than that show was (I watched like 2.5 episodes of that show to be fair), but it's fight scenes are maybe worse, which is pretty dire.

steelmirror wrote:

Lord Vaultman wrote:

Let me be clearer then. I'm not really seeing these dips in quality you guys are seeing. And this is coming from someone watching the same episodes twice 2 weeks apart (sub and dub)

The stills of the show look fine. Character animation and general scene-to-scene shots have looked above average for CG animation too, which is why I was pretty on-board with the show for the first few eps (then they just stopped animating characters at all for 50% of the last episode, but I'm getting ahead of myself).

But the fight scenes are garbage, and it's honestly not the fault of the animators. The animation is...probably fine? It's hard to tell sometimes, that subway fight scene was all but impossible to watch. The problem is the direction.

I challenge you to watch that subway fight scene, or the gunfight before it, or the chase scene in ep 6, and to describe what is happening moment to moment AT ALL. It's impossible, because the camera is pointing away from the action a good 50% of the time, and timing and spatial awareness is completely obliterated by terrible pacing and shot composition. You can kind of reconstruct the events AFTER the fact based on the outcome, like when Kei and Tilarna look at the chunked up vampire on the train tracks and you have to assume that they somehow got out of the way of the train and she didn't. But during the fight scene? It's just incomprehensible.

I don't watch every anime so I can't comment that it's the worst this season or this year or whatever, but I can say that I can't remember watching a show with fight scene direction and choreography this bad since Hand Shakers. This show is a lot better than that show was (I watched like 2.5 episodes of that show to be fair), but it's fight scenes are maybe worse, which is pretty dire.

That's the real issue I got with the show's animation- It's not that the drawings and movements are awful (they're about no different than most anime that's released these days) it's the direction, scene composition and how everything is framed in shots. Last couple episodes are the worst at this between 5's consistant darkness and 6's abuse of hiding the action and mouth flaps as much as possible.

I'd argue 6 is the worst of the two because there's so many shots in the episode that are just so blatently cheat-y, show horrible sense of perspective or are just plain claustrphobic. And like I said in my last post, I don't expect episodes that are outsourced to other studios to have great quality, but that already low bar is lowered even further by all these poor directorial choices and storyboard decisions.

I don't know how much of the problem can be attributed to direction over resource. I think they know they don't have the resources to properly do action sequence and that's why the direction is so strange. By putting everything in the dark they can be sloppy on detail and use less frame per second. Similarly by pointing the camera away from the action they don't have to animate as much.

meiam wrote:

I don't know how much of the problem can be attributed to direction over resource. I think they know they don't have the resources to properly do action sequence and that's why the direction is so strange. By putting everything in the dark they can be sloppy on detail and use less frame per second. Similarly by pointing the camera away from the action they don't have to animate as much.

There's probably some overlap there, but either way the direction is just plain bad in the fight scenes we are talking about. A good director can at least make a cheap production easy to follow and baseline sensical, even if the budget prevents it from looking really great or exciting. Simple things like the 180 degree rule, timing and spatial awareness (take a look at the ambiguously approaching train that somehow spends an unreasonable amount of time getting closer and then weightlessly poofs by) which are really obvious when they are used poorly, and which take zero resources to do properly but undermine a scene when they are done poorly.

At the end of the day I'm no expert on action choreography or direction, which is why when EVEN I can tell the obvious mistakes a show is making in its fight scene direction, something has clearly gone terribly wrong.

EDIT: Or to put it another way, compare that big fight scene in...I want to say episode 3, where Tilarna fought the bad guy with the sword. It was hideous, but in a way that you could clearly lay at the feet of a lack of time and resources to fully realize. The scene looked bad, but you could at least follow along with the basics of what was happening, so I forgave the show because it was just too ambitious for its own good.

The subway fight scene was also a clearly rushed scene in an episode filled to bursting with expensive and hard to animate scenes, but it is even worse because the direction is just awful. Watch it again, this time imagining that every scene was composed and timed the same way, but with gorgeous, fluid animation of whatever is on the screen. It would hardly make any difference at all, because the fundamental direction of what they DID animate is so baffling and floaty that there was no saving it. That's a direction issue.

meiam wrote:

I don't know how much of the problem can be attributed to direction over resource. I think they know they don't have the resources to properly do action sequence and that's why the direction is so strange. By putting everything in the dark they can be sloppy on detail and use less frame per second. Similarly by pointing the camera away from the action they don't have to animate as much.

Not entirely true, yes the artwork can be sloppy at times (as episode 5 was primarily shipped off to Korea, I'm not surprised it wound up that way), but the main issue here is Itagaki himself. His directoral efforts in the CG Berserk series were already pretty substandard, and his works before that, despite having resources were just as muddled in direction.

Here, he's not only directing, but has storyboarded every episode and done animation work on the two worst looking ones of the series thus far. It seems clear that there's a lot more than just "a lack of resources" at play here, it comes off more as "Itagaki can't do an action series to save his life". He can't seem to grasp a lot of the basics of filmmaking, let alone animation just based of of how the last several episodes have turned out. Resources, even a small amount of them, mean nothing if you have someone who doesn't know how to stage action scenes and resorts to still frames every other moment in order to convey those scenes. Osamu Dezeki managed to pull it off decades ago and it still looks fine for what it is. All Itagaki's got to show for his attempts are laughably bad car chases and a neigh-visible subway fight.

steelmirror wrote:

Lord Vaultman wrote:

Let me be clearer then. I'm not really seeing these dips in quality you guys are seeing. And this is coming from someone watching the same episodes twice 2 weeks apart (sub and dub)

The stills of the show look fine. Character animation and general scene-to-scene shots have looked above average for CG animation too, which is why I was pretty on-board with the show for the first few eps (then they just stopped animating characters at all for 50% of the last episode, but I'm getting ahead of myself).

But the fight scenes are garbage, and it's honestly not the fault of the animators. The animation is...probably fine? It's hard to tell sometimes, that subway fight scene was all but impossible to watch. The problem is the direction.

I challenge you to watch that subway fight scene, or the gunfight before it, or the chase scene in ep 6, and to describe what is happening moment to moment AT ALL. It's impossible, because the camera is pointing away from the action a good 50% of the time, and timing and spatial awareness is completely obliterated by terrible pacing and shot composition. You can kind of reconstruct the events AFTER the fact based on the outcome, like when Kei and Tilarna look at the chunked up vampire on the train tracks and you have to assume that they somehow got out of the way of the train and she didn't. But during the fight scene? It's just incomprehensible.

I don't watch every anime so I can't comment that it's the worst this season or this year or whatever, but I can say that I can't remember watching a show with fight scene direction and choreography this bad since Hand Shakers. This show is a lot better than that show was (I watched like 2.5 episodes of that show to be fair), but it's fight scenes are maybe worse, which is pretty dire.

Some of what you mentioned is there but not that often or prevalent enough to harshly condone the show like yall are doing in my mind. If anything as much as I like fire force as an example it honestly isnt getting enough criticism for its wonky musical score or lack of it in certain scenes that's a bigger travesty this season than what's going on with this show.

Lord Vaultman wrote:

steelmirror wrote:

Lord Vaultman wrote:

Let me be clearer then. I'm not really seeing these dips in quality you guys are seeing. And this is coming from someone watching the same episodes twice 2 weeks apart (sub and dub)

The stills of the show look fine. Character animation and general scene-to-scene shots have looked above average for CG animation too, which is why I was pretty on-board with the show for the first few eps (then they just stopped animating characters at all for 50% of the last episode, but I'm getting ahead of myself).

But the fight scenes are garbage, and it's honestly not the fault of the animators. The animation is...probably fine? It's hard to tell sometimes, that subway fight scene was all but impossible to watch. The problem is the direction.

I challenge you to watch that subway fight scene, or the gunfight before it, or the chase scene in ep 6, and to describe what is happening moment to moment AT ALL. It's impossible, because the camera is pointing away from the action a good 50% of the time, and timing and spatial awareness is completely obliterated by terrible pacing and shot composition. You can kind of reconstruct the events AFTER the fact based on the outcome, like when Kei and Tilarna look at the chunked up vampire on the train tracks and you have to assume that they somehow got out of the way of the train and she didn't. But during the fight scene? It's just incomprehensible.

I don't watch every anime so I can't comment that it's the worst this season or this year or whatever, but I can say that I can't remember watching a show with fight scene direction and choreography this bad since Hand Shakers. This show is a lot better than that show was (I watched like 2.5 episodes of that show to be fair), but it's fight scenes are maybe worse, which is pretty dire.

Some of what you mentioned is there but not that often or prevalent enough to harshly condone the show like yall are doing in my mind. If anything as much as I like fire force as an example it honestly isnt getting enough criticism for its wonky musical score or lack of it in certain scenes that's a bigger travesty this season than what's going on with this show.

Fire Force’s sound choices may be silly but they’re definitely a stylistic choice. Nothing about Cop Craft’s issues has anything to do with style, they’re all clear issues that are well known with troubled productions and the way they’re being dealt with for the show are glaringly apparent. Other shows have had these problems and dealt with them in far far better ways than it has. As for somehow not seeing them, especially in comparison to any single action scene in Fire Force since you’re apparently watching that, I simply don’t know how you have that level of dissonance. I don’t know if there’s a worse example for this season as it’s the worst thing I’m watching by a production standpoint, but I’m 1000% sure that if there is it sure ain’t Fire Force.

Lord Vaultman wrote:

Some of what you mentioned is there but not that often or prevalent enough to harshly condone the show like yall are doing in my mind. If anything as much as I like fire force as an example it honestly isnt getting enough criticism for its wonky musical score or lack of it in certain scenes that's a bigger travesty this season than what's going on with this show.

See now, the difference is that Fire Force knows what it's doing, it's had a very healthy production schedule (the Kyoto Animation fire aside) and is being co-funded by two of its licencers. The sound design being what it is is purely intentional.

Nothing about Cop Craft's production screams intentional in any capacity. While I'm not convinced it's all production issues that are causing these problems, it's probably one of many factors that's dragging the show down as far as it is.

The reviewer seems more concerned about looking for what this show isn't than for what it is.
Production is a mess and that isn't going to go away (for one, I'm impressed they chose to go for prettier stillshots instead of the usual melting animation) so why focus every episode review on that?
I mean, the things this Alarm für Cobra episode DID do are briefly listed later... as an interlude before poking into the crevices of the writing.

The review for episode 7 will be... curious.

Yuvelir wrote:

The reviewer seems more concerned about looking for what this show isn't than for what it is.

Thank you. Guys just enjoy the show it's really not that bad.

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EP. REVIEW: Cop Craft

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EP. REVIEW: Cop Craft