People are willing to watch a story that, perhaps while not the best scripted,
has cool fights. This is not an issue on illustrated pages, but animation has problems with this. There are two ways to handle this: Pour most of your budget into the fight scenes or use lots and lots of tricks. These tricks include tight first-person perspectives, eliminating backgrounds, and making sure there's as little actual contact as possible. There may also be a censorship aspect to it, if the fight
would otherwise look brutal.
Especially common with
Shonen series adapted from comics that are serialized in a weekly manga anthology like
Weekly Jump. They have lots and lots of episodes, so their budget for animation gets spread thin.
Especially noticeable, as
The Movie will ditch these gimmicks entirely due to the amount of money that inevitably gets put into it.
Compare
Relax O Vision,
Missed Moment Of Awesome,
Coconut Superpowers, and
The Hit Flash. See also
Bolivian Army Ending and
Take Our Word For It. Has nothing to do with
Player Punch.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- The trick of "moving so fast the audience can't see" is taken literally in animation so we can have some split-second scenes on otherwise static backgrounds. These split-second shots also tend to be clearly looped sequences.
- Played with in the Hiei-vs.-Seiryu fight in Yu Yu Hakusho. Hiei blurs around Seiryu a few times, and he falls apart. Then the rest of the team compares notes on how much of the fight each managed to see - he was moving too fast for them, too.
- Dragon Ball Z got a lot of flak when it started introducing more and more long-range energy attacks as it went further from its fanciful martial arts roots, especially because they're easier to animate than moving the characters themselves.
- Additionally, plenty of battles among the highest-ranking fighters sometimes are "too fast for the eye to see" —that is, the camera pans over the static background at high speed, while the soundtrack sprinkles impacts and whooshes here and there. Sometimes, spherical shockwaves (presumably from attacks connecting) flash on-screen for half a second.
- Probably the most egregious example, however, was probably Goku vs Jeice and Burter. Five minutes of Jeice and Burter attacking a Goku who appears to be standing completely still.
- Earlier martial arts fights weren't better. Mostly they'd consist of looping shots of a single character punching the air.
- Air Master was notable among fans who otherwise didn't always like the art style of the series because it played its fight sequences fairly straight.
- Avoided in the Ghost In The Shell movie, which looks as if it's going to lead into one of these, with Kusanagi being invisible during a fight sequence. What transpires is a thing of absolute beauty, with her presence only being displayed by splashes in puddles and the brutal beatdown her victim receives.
- In Black Lagoon most of the firefight between Revy and the Cuban ex-assassin Roberta, arguably the deadliest opponent Revy faced in single combat during the series, was mainly observed from the other side of a stack of shipping crates. Presumably the battle was just too amazing to animate.
- The battle between the fully grown Koganei Tenka and his pre-teen brother in Sumomo Mo Momo Mo was so fast that only "martial artist vision" could see it. Certainly censors couldn't, and maybe that's the point.
- One exceptionally frustrating exception to the rule that "The Movie is more explicit": In the Fist Of The North Star movie, Raoh confronts Shin in Southern Cross. We cut away, and then when Kenshiro faces Shin later, their fight consists of one punch before Shin dies from an attack inflicted by Raoh earlier. For those keeping score, that's two fights the audience is cheated out of.
- Bleach. That is all.
Webcomics
