There's so much they could do to flesh things out but they just want to make earth but redder and more deviantArt looking.
The redone color palette for the main characters is kind of irritating to me, because it mostly just makes them all fucking red, with only their silhouettes to distinguish them. Charlie's coral-colored jacket and black pants from the pilot made her stick out; not just a softie in her behavior, but in her Neapolitan ice cream color scheme, as well. Vaggie's old design was almost uniformly monochromatic grays and whites with pink accents, which gave her a faded ghost girl vibe, but now, she also has a red jacket and fuckhuge red tails on her red hairbow. As a result, Alastor's redness no longer stands out. Charlie and Vaggie have gone from being their own thing, to being, visually,
extensions of Alastor.
The entire aesthetic of Hazbin Hotel/Helluva Boss is just dripping and oozing with that Tim Burton and Jhonen Vasquez shit that 2000s goth girls could never get enough of. If you're old enough to remember Myspace and LiveJournal, then you're also old enough to remember all those retarded teenagers on DeviantArt who posted Invader Zim, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, and Sweeney Todd fanart (with descriptions like OMG JOHNNY DEPP, SO DREAMY,
I WANT HIS SPERM) nonstop. Vivienne Medrano is what happens when one of those exact same retards grows up and goes pro. All the characters in this show have spidery limbs and look like walking collections of kitchen knives. Pretty much the only time the character art is even vaguely interesting is when it diverges from that basis. The background art is extremely over-detailed, especially considering that we only get split-second glimpses of it due to the series' liberal use of distracting quick cuts, zooms, and pans for visual emphasis, like an old Vine clip. You practically have to freeze-frame it to take in the details.
The reason why the trailer looks like shit is not because it's badly animated. On the contrary, the character animations look fantastic. Their movements are dynamic and fun. The real problem here is all the
goddamn strobing all over the place because of all the panning shots and the fact that the pans are on ones and the characters are animated on twos. Rapid 24fps pan + fast-moving 12fps character = strobing all over the place. You can easily confirm this by loading it into VLC and doing a frame-by-frame and seeing what's actually happening from frame to frame.
Here are a couple more examples of what I mean. This is what the trailer looks like completely locked to 12fps (I tossed it in Premiere and locked it to 11.988 and re-exported the whole thing in like three seconds).
The pans are now occurring at the same rate as the character animation, so they look a lot jerkier, but the strobing is mostly gone. There are five ways around this problem, and all of them have their own drawbacks.
- Avoid panning and zooming so much, keep the camera fixed when characters are moving, and move the camera when characters are fixed. This is basically the standard way to avoid strobing in (cheap) traditional animation, but it limits the camera quite a bit. Genndy Tartakovsky favored this approach a lot in Samurai Jack, for instance. Dramatic Slow Pan! Mexican Standoff! Wait, everyone is standing still, maybe glancing at each other like some old Chanbara film. No strobing here, no sir.
- Lock the whole thing to 12fps, which makes the pans look awful, like in my example above.
- Animate on ones, which means a much bigger budget and more time spent animating.
- Animate on ones, but only when the camera is moving, which, in this case, is basically all the time because the camera is schizophrenic, so it's not much cheaper than just animating the whole thing on ones, which isn't feasible.
- Use AI frame interpolation to artificially tween the frames, which is of the devil, and something that all true animators despise.
Here's an example of that last one
, in the typical "Look ma, I made it 60fps!" YouTube fashion:
Whee! Visual glitches galore! Everyone is now made of rubber and their expressions eerily crawl around their faces.
One of the most eye-popping things I can think of in anime, in recent memory, was the Saitama versus Boros fight in One Punch Man. There is crazy panning all over the place, and it looks amazingly smooth and doesn't strobe like shit because they're cautious with the panning and some of the shots switch from twos to ones while incidentally employing rotoscoping over 3D reference models for the backgrounds. Look at the part from 5:48 to 5:53 to see what I mean by this:
During the rapid side-to-side motion across the screen, Boros' glowing orb of a body is occasionally animated on ones. As a result, the whole thing looks really smooth. No strobing or anything.
