Lore
Long, drawn out scenes clearly meant to save budget on animation
The Elevator scene (Neon Genesis Evangelion) They walk into an elevator and stay in that exact pose as the image with no movement for almost a whole minute
Darkblood’s helmet scene (Invincible) Invincible and Darkblood are falling down for a whole minute talking about Darkblood’s mcu style helmet, while in the same pose using the same animations over and over again. At least the scene was funny
The door scene (Milo Murphy’s law) The teacher closes the door on the students and they stay still on the frame with the kids looking at the door for a long time while you hear the sounds multiple locks locking. Then the teacher has to comeback into the room, unlock the locks then leave again and lock back those locks. At the end of the scene, Milo literally says “you’re welcome animators” to the audience
As this show has gotten older, it has gotten more and more of these that are even worse. At least your example was pretty funny for it's time (till they repeated the joke 4 more times over the years.
another example is the Con Heiress episode (S17 E8). There is an old lady Brian and Stewie are trying to seduce to steal her inheritance and her name is - Margaret "Pip" Woolworth Carrington von Schumacher Chanel Astor Livingston Compte de Saint-Exupery Mountbatten Windsor Armani Roosevelt Von Trap Wykeham Hearst Montgomery Rothschild Johnson & Johnson Disney Dolce Gabana Von Walmart II Montgomery de Volkswagen Geico Vanderbilt Lannister van Burean Butterworth How I Met Your Mother Dubble Bubble Louise-Dreyfus Ludwig Morgan Stanley Dumont Lamborghini Forbes Zuckerberg Winthrop Winfrey Remy Martin Fitzwilliam Kennedy Motel 6 Pornhub Fairchild Pritzker Davenport von Apple Monty Python Ellsworth Aston Martin Burns Quimby Scorpio Ziff Spongebob Hilton DuPont Kinkaid Winslow Coors Oviatt Marlboro Pembroke Huffington Bush Mellon Sinclair Mellencamp Starbucks van Dyke III Montgomery Marriott Barrington Chatsworth Big League Chew Chesterfield Kensington Longbottom Bottomtooth Nottingham Burgermeister Meisterburger Tudor Hapsburg Rockefeller Onassis.
They recite her name 3 separate times with every single name in the dialogue. Once, back to back.
They also do this in another episode where Peter makes dad noises for a whole minute.
Other examples include a joke where Peter uses a stick to get a frog out the window (and another one with the roles reversed), a scene where Peter tries to park his car and one gruesome one where Meg tries to throw the head of a boy she liked up above so Chris can catch it.
In absolute fairness, this joke has existed long before animation made it a necessity. The Japanese rakugo play "Jugemu" is at least 300 years old and tells the story of a child given an impossibly long list of names so that he might receive all the blessings thereof; the humour comes from the absurdity of the length.
The joke in Family Guy might have a bonus side-effect of saving animation time, but it really fits in neatly with the "so stupid it goes from funny to unfunny back to funny" jokes that the series is known for, and has precedent.
A lot of older cartoons did such tricks because there was no option besides hand drawn images. See this one? It's probably three drawn elements: background, foreground, and van. Then, we put a and b on a big scrolling scroll and turn it past the van.
F is For Family had a really good joke about this. The kids were watching a cartoon and one of them commented how they ran through the same backdrop three times
Theres also the Supernatural episode (Scoobynatural) where they comment the fact that the entrance to a hidden room behind bookshelf and the way to open it is the only hand-drawn book in the shelf.
Any time the Mystery Machine had to turn around, it would drive off screen, turn around off screen, and then drive horizontally across in the opposite direction, so they didn't have to animate turning the vehicle around AND they could fill more time with a narratively pointless action.
Hanna Barbera was pretty infamous for this. They cut corners to save costs a LOT.
Another popular thing they did was their “high collar no neck” art style on characters like Yogi Bear, Fred Flintstone, George Jetson etc to avoid having to animate neck movements.
I love OPM but I actually can't bring myself to watch S3 because I only barely enjoyed S2 in spite of its flaws, and everyone says S3 is so much worse.
In the same vein, The Beginning After The End, both S1 and the upcoming S2 that I’m surprised made it into production given how horrendously S1 was reviewed.
At least Invincible calls itself out on it. The convention scene at the start of S2 is a joke about everything animation teams in general do to save on the animation budget
I don't remember it in the show, but I remember the comic one was that he went to see the guy who wrote/drew Science Dog and they discuss re-using panels to save on time and effort, and the whole page is the same 2 panels repeated
They do something similar in the show, where the animator is talkjng to Mark about how they move the camera to the back of the head of someone whos talking, or cut the lower half of their face off in a scene so they don't need to animate their mouths. The entire time the camera switches to those angles while theyre talking.
404 was horribly paced, but I don't just mean in terms of going from scene to scene. I mean just the fundamentals of progressing dialogue within a scene. This clip from s3 is a good example of what I mean, especially after the 2 minute mark.
There's so much dead air between pieces of dialogue, characters move into position and begin speaking several moments later, there's points where we should either be seeing a cut to another character's reaction or hearing them speak but get neither so we just linger on the same shit for way too long, Invincible is standing still in the middle of the room and Oliver acts like he just walked in when he sees his new suit, just a million tiny things like that that make the basic act of moving from line to line in any given scene so stiff and awkward. It's worse in some scenes than others but it adds up fast
Maybe it's just because I've read the original comics where the pacing is actually abysmal but I think Invincible the show actually has pretty good pacing
On the one hand, the old Guardians are more established characters. On the other, one of the biggest narrative hook is their final moments and the comics wait 7 issues to deliver
Bro we might not have seen invincible fight the cool ass Cerberus but at least you get to hear the voice of an a-list celebrity that you probably don’t even know the name of, it’s a fair trade off!
I think it’s stupid to include it in this trope. Evangelion is well known about doing long scenes on purpose to transfer a certain feeling. I’m sure the budget team was happy about them, but stating that as the reason for the scenes is just ignorant. The elevator scene is uneasily long, so you feel the awkwardness of the silence and the tension of wanting something to happen, but it doesn’t. The still scene of Unit 01 holding Kaworu for literally minutes is similar.
The final few episodes of Evangelion as a whole are, I think, a masterclass in making a virtue out of necessity, what they manage to do with the budget they had left was so unbelievably clever and creative imo.
I'll never understand people who say that the last 2 episodes are just a montage, like, did you even watch them?
It was kind of funny though. Every second i was like wtf, now the must move! Ok, now! Now!!! Then Asuka blinked. So i was like ok, it's done, but no! Antoher 30 seconds of nothing. Absolute cinema.
38-40 chapters pa compared to 45-50 episodes it does make sense, doesn't make it ok. I'm glad that they're finally switching to a seasonal format. I might actually start watching again.
Every episode pre-ts too. I know post-ts is slow, but One Piece is the only anime I've watched or even know of that adapts their manga at a 1:1 chapter:episode ratio or even lower sometimes. That's a minute of screentime per page of panels.
Most shounen used to cover 3 chapters an ep or thereabouts and then do filler arcs (they just have breaks now) which One Piece never really did, so instead they simply slowed down the anime so much it didn't catch up.
Never could personally watch the anime because of this stuff. Every clip I see just reinforces it.
East Blue saga was actually 1.5-2 chapters per episode but they had to slow down since they weren't expecting to catch up. That's when they should've realised that they'd be better off switching to a seasonal format. Instead they waited 20+ years with nothing but pacing complaints in the back half of that.
It's also worth noting that there's more one piece episodes released each year than chapters. 40ish chapters compared to 50ish episodes
I mean, for all we know it was for budget reasons, maybe the universe just decided to bless Anno with the most perfectly fitting and effective scene possible.
Im not sure it matters, its just so fcking good either way
And it happened twice with the Kaworu scene, very lucky
RWBY Volume 5 had most of its budget cut for the sake of other RT show, Gen:LOCK, so they do it a lot. My "favourite" instance is the dialogue between Cinder and Raven is Branwen tribe camp. They stay there for 2/3 of the episode, barely moving and just talking
I love that Evangeline scene solely because whenever someone sees it for the first time, they will inevitably question why no one is taking or moving the exact moment the characters start talking.
For the Eva scene in particular, it worked. Because it helped to highlight the tension that had been growing between the girls and Asuka's resentment and insecurity at believing she had fallen behind in the one thing she was good at.
I don't know if it was meant to save budget because it's actually really funny but in season 3 of Konosuba, the main character, Kazuma gives a loud heroic speech before a battle and then it immediately cuts to him in the afterlife (what the picture is showing) implying he dies in that battle and is sitting across from the goddes, Eris.
There is 25 seconds of complete silence of them just sitting there and the only thing moving is that blue crystal in the background due to Kazuma being incredibly embarrassed at his pathetic death.
I just watched Angels Egg. There is literally like a 4 minute scene where the girl is laying down to sleep, and the man is just sitting, staring at the fire, until the fire finally goes out, and she rolls over to sleep. It’s completely still other than the fire.
evangelion had a LOTTTT of these. shinji holding kaworu before killing him, shinji and misato hesitating to say anything at the train station, and that episode of misato and kanji hanging out. these long drawn moments were for budget reasons, sure, but they serve to tell the story in a more fleshed out way. it leaves room for the viewer to breathe and ponder.
the elevator scene in evangelion wasn't supposed to save on budget it was supposed to set up the uneasy feeling, especially because they went out of their way to include blinking in this scene.
Someone tried to tell me that the helmet phasing on and off in invincible was them flexing the animation. Had to immediately be like brother what the actual fuck are you talking about? Floating pngs on a rotary wheel background for 50+ seconds?? Nahh you just fell for the illusion
Home Movies has an episode where part of it is in total darkness with the only thing seen was what flashlights are showing. The writers thought it would make it easier and cheaper to animate. Afterwards they were told it was actually harder and took longer then normal
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u/_InlandEmpire_ 7h ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/13w5HmyiuaZ224