Seriously i went manga in the first place because the animation was so shit and the pacing was so bad, and i hear it's getting worse by the week.
Even though I haven't seen every single One Piece episode, my impression is that everything started to go downhill pace-wise right after the timeskip.
As we all know, One Piece has been a weekly (mostly) anime release, and over the years we saw the art being improved and different styles being used because, obviously, animation teams and directors rotate every now and then. That's how the industry goes.
Personally, I always loved and will always prefer pre-timeskip One Piece, even the very first arcs of them all. I dig that kind of animation.
Art-wise, I also really liked the animation in Thriller Bark and in Sabaody (pre-timeskip), it was all extremely fluid, which is the best kind of animation, when you can actually SEE and TELL that there's a ton of drawn frames.
Now i understand that you can't have the godly animation quality of say HxH and expect OP to come out weekly, but i rather a well done yearly 12 ep arc by arc seasonal anime than something borderline unwatchable.
Unfortunately the 12 episode seasonal thing just isn't feasible. Even if the animation sucks, the truth is that more people will still watch OP week after week, drawing the audiences in. That's what matters.
Only releasing 12 episodes wouldn't do the studio any good. For starters, it would be impossible to cram a whole arc into just 12 episodes. I mean, OP arcs usually run for 3-4 years. It's not like Boku no Hero Academia where Arcs are extremely short (compared to One Piece), or like Onepunch Man where the bigger, over-arching plot takes a while to show itself.
Episodes would need to be 2h-3h long or something for that to work, and that's yet another thing; week after week, a lot of people can afford to watch a 20min episode (which nowadays is more like 10-13mins worth of actual episode but whatever...), something that they just wouldn't be able to do for a 60mins+ episode.
That would require a bigger attention span, people would tune out and get distracted by something else, not bothering to watch the whole thing, no matter how epic the animation might be.
I mean, who would want to wait 2-3 years to get 12 episodes every time to cover the entirety of Dressrosa? It would be close to the actual weekly release schedule... even if they tried to cram it all.
That's why every year we get One Piece specials, which slightly better animation. Just take the Luffy vs. Hody fight for example, the finisher is simply amazing.
One Piece is an enormous anime, the budget should be enormous as well, so they shouldn't have the excuse of 'short of time' excuse.
But it's One Piece.
Whether it's turd-level animation, or "feature-length movie released across the nation"-level animation, One Piece will still make money. People will always tune in and watch.
It's been going strong for 20 years. At this stage, it seems almost impossible for One Piece to make a big mistake and cause everyone to hate it. That's just not going to happen.
Most people who are bothered by the anime and who also dropped it (like I did) are manga readers.
Do you think Toei and TV executives are concerned with manga readers?
Fuck no, they only care about the
anime watchers.
Anime watchers (most of them) don't read the manga, their only "fix" of new OP content that they know of is by watching the anime.
They can't see the "bad" in it because they have nothing to compare it to. The anime is all there is to them, and that's all they need.
Why do you think that a while ago they made like 44 filler episodes for Naruto
in a single year, and only 4 canon episodes?
Because Naruto kept making them money. It didn't matter if the animation was shit, it didn't matter if the story was shit at that point, and it certainly didn't matter that it was all fillers.
People were still eating it all up.
Why invest even more money into something that'll keep making the same amount of money? It wouldn't change a thing.
Anime like Naruto and One Piece are pretty much as big as they can get nowadays. They're known worldwide.
Giving it a higher budget/better animation/less filler would only appeal to manga readers for the most part, and the executives certainly don't care about that.
It's sad but that's just how it is.
For One Piece to have been running for almost 20 years on TV is a pretty big accomplishment.
Like I said, I dropped the anime, only watch the "cool scenes" every other week, but it's as good as it's gonna get.
It's been running for way too long for others to want to change anything about their business model.
if OP was failing and the anime's future was uncertain? Sure, but that's never been the case.
The anime has its moments. For instance it does really well at things like introducing Yonko.
Here is the Big Mom introduction:
Honestly though the BM introduction one was awful.
Like, you can clearly tell that everything that's moving only has a few frames, which keep on repeating, like an awful sprite animation.
They draw like a few frames and then repeat the whole thing like 10-20 times.
