I didn’t expect to write another one of these posts, because the novelty of the EX-Arm anime being unbelievable crap wore off and i just got accostumed to its foul, robotic and uncanny fare. Oh well, it will avoid me having to note down another batch of odd fuck up, animation errors, bad camera angles and stuff.
Or so i thought.
(Gif taken from Twitter, from a fellow stunned viewer)
Then episode 5 released 2 days ago, and i must say, i really underestimated the level of incompetence of the team behind this adaptation. I though the peak had already been reached, but clearly i was mistaken, at this episode not only manages to showcase (or make more noticeable than before) how awful the 3D CG models are, even when standing completely still the hand gestures are absurd, the hands themselves oddly angled, to say nothing how they are bigger than they should.
I don’t know exactly if this is just lazyness, incompetence, or both mixed with a touch of newborne sentience from Visual Flight’s staff and what they accomplished, but regardless, they wrote in a plot point that involves a truck almost hitting the main character, Akira, only to be vanished from existence by another character before Akira gets run over. Nothing wrong with this.
Problem is, they either couldn’t or wouldn’t animate the truck, so you literally don’t see it, aside from its shadow as its zooms offscreen for 2 seconds top, making it pretty much invisible… because you get no chance of actually seeing the fuckin thing even so much exist in the frame as Akira. Yeah, even watching the entire clip in context doesn’t add anything, that is literally what you see of “Truck-kun”.
I’m not sure what the reason was , as they did animate other vehicles moving in the episode, which actually makes the decision to NOT animate an important plot point… even odder in hindsight, but this is a new zenith of absolute incompetence.
Look, if you suddendly can’t even be bothered to animate CG cars/vehicles in a 3D CG anime show… don’t even bother, at all. Then again, this show can’t even make a character wake up in bed seem believable, as the character and the bed (with its PS1/Saturn graphics) seem to belong to different dimensions, so….
Imagine then the brass balls this anime has to call the monsters designs “videogame-ass looking” or criticizing anything else, period.
If anything, i thank you, Visual Flight, as this has become a goldmine of absolute animation disasters, the review basically writes itself (almost insultingly so, it will just be hard to edit it down to a reasonable lenght), and i look forward to following this dumpster fire of a show till the end, as it looks like they will find new and exciting ways to shock the viewer for the worse.
I really hope this is the last of these i feel compelled to write, because i feel kinda bad “joining the dogpile” on this series, clearly these people don’t know what they are doing and it’s not just the animators’ fault…. but then again, i find it impossible not to when EX-ARM manages to shock even seasoned fans that have seen plenty of anime adaptations turning out too ridiculous or shoddy NOT to laugh about and point at.
I’ve heard Gibiate was also a “great contender” for the dung scepter, i wouldn’t know, but this one is gonna go down in anime history as one of the biggest dumpster fires ever, ending up in hundreds of “WORST ANIME OF 2021” lists and as a perfect subject for video thesis unpacking how the hell did this happen, how and why.
It’s just going to, let’s be frank.
If you want to watch a great 3D CG anime, Land Of The Lustrous still exists, please watch that instead of this, seriously, do watch that, it’s great!
Or give the EX-ARM manga a shot, it’s not that bad.
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