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Off-Model

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Makie's finger-counting skills go up to eleven as she magically grows an extra finger.
"I wish the art was good throughout the whole series, not just in the final episode."
"These days, anime has good art in the first and last episodes, never in the middle."
"That's not something you can just fix for DVD release."
A bunch of ninjas being aware of their medium in the final episode of Ninja Nonsense

Off Model refers to animation errors that can accumulate due to a wide number of factors, typically budget issues but may also come from variations due to a variety of different people working on the project. It typically doesn't refer to stylistic choices (such as Not Drawn to Scale) but it can be difficult to parse out what was intentional. These errors may include:

  • Faulty proportions and inconsistent character designs, such as elongated limbs or violating what is normally a Cheated Angle.
  • Sizing and layering issues, a character is supposed to be in the background but is layered overtop a closer character or feature that makes them appear absurdly small.
  • Coloring and shading choices are irregular from the norm, with such things as purple tints in the skin tone because of rendering accidents.
  • Continuity mistakes, as dirt, Clothing Damage or the environment itself doesn't stay the same from shot to shot.

A troubled production schedule will start resorting to Limited Animation or thinly-veiled camera tricks. The movement and even design of characters will start to slip, especially if the show is bothering to animate heavy action scenes. When they are animated, fight scenes will become Fight Unscenes. When a production company decides that the important episodes (i.e. pilots, whams, and finales) of a show get priority, other episodes (like filler) will, to conserve production costs, be drawn with only the bare minimum of framework that they absolutely must have. The prevalence of computer-inked animation merely assures that colors stay consistent. Off model refers to the character model (on a model sheet), which is what the animators are supposed to base their drawings on. This is another important step in animation checking, which may be skimped on when time or money (or even both) are short.

The primary reason this happens is that animation can be expensive, really expensive, and also very time consuming. An average 30-minute episode of an anime costs around $171,500 and popular shows in America cost between $350,000 to $6,000,000 in USD (as of 2020) depending on how popular and how long the show was going on.

In American cartoons of the mid-'70s to early '90s, it was the norm to send animation overseas to studios in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia and other countries to cut costs even further. The quality problems caused by budget constraints were thus exacerbated by language and cultural barriers. Japanese studios came to be seen by American studios as the "top of the line" of overseas studios because of their consistent aversion of this trope.note 

Fans are typically not pleased, and it is very common for companies to announce they're fixing up things for the inevitable DVD release.

Some artists willingly invoke this trope and do not follow model sheets, such as John Kricfalusi's Ren and Stimpy and the entire "Kanada School" of Japanese animation, seen most aggressively with Studio TRIGGER. Following models too closely can lead to feeling too rigid, lifeless and uniform, whereas playing fast and loose with the designs can allow for more expressive and fluid animation. This does not mean that such creators "draw badly"; they still follow the basic rules of animation, and work to avoid outright errors. Similarly, animation principles such as smear frames and squash and stretch could be thought of as temporary and more subtle variations on that technique, where models are briefly disregarded in order to make a particular shot look more lively and less stiff — these moments often look perfectly on-model when played at normal speed, but look bizarre if the viewer pauses on one of the deliberately distorted frames.

See also Special Effect Failure, which is a similar trope, but for live action and animation. Contrast Animation Bump where the animation suddenly becomes smoother and cleaner, and Body Horror where an off model appearance is done intentionally and for horror. For animation studios who are notorious for this, see AKOM, Toei Animation, GONZO, Studio Shaft, Sunrise, Studio DEEN, Actas, Wang Film Productions, Diomedea, and Saerom. For a studio whose supporters and critics often argue about whether their animation is this, see Kennedy Cartoons.

Anime fans from Japan have their own phrase for this trope, 作画崩壊 (sakuga hōkai), literally "drawing collapse". Elsewhere on the internet it is also known as QUALITY.note 

For visual examples, you can visit this LURKMORE article, or this Know Your Meme page.

Please do not add examples to work pages, this merely defines the term. Put applicable examples in the following tropes instead:



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Pain's Great Pain

The fluid style of animation used in this shot of Pain highlights how off model he gets.

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