This story is already close to a week old, but I felt compelled to circle back to it after reading about the true incompetency and entitlement once again displayed by Twitter users. Let’s explain. For those not watching Jujutsu Kaisen, episode 13 was a ridiculous triumph of animation. You see in anime, action is often composed of two of the three following attributes: smooth animation, stylish choreography, and good length. Putting a scene together that checks two of those boxes is hard enough in the medium, but finding something with all three is like winning the jackpot. Episode 13 hit this jackpot and displayed one of the finest fights I’ve seen in anime in a few years. Fans were raving about the near dreamlike levels of quality. That was, until next week.

Now growing up in my day, it was pretty understood how hard it was to create action in the 2D format. There’s a reason why almost every fight in Naruto (and hell, most shounen) contains a ton of talking and ability explaining. Action is often the most costly type of animation to produce for obvious reasons. Therefore, it used to be that fans understood when a fight happened to savor that shit, because it’s likely you won’t be seeing something of that level again for a while. Somewhere over the years that sentiment seems to have been left by the wayside as fans seemingly expected episode 14 to be the same level or even better quality. In other words, they expected a positive linear slope of animation quality. Unfortunately that is about the most unrealistic thing I’ve ever heard, and thus as one could predict, their expectations were let down when episode 14 was not as good. Even though to me and my friends’ eyes it was completely serviceable. 

Maybe they meant the fish were ugly.

Serviceable didn’t stop the angry “fans” on Twitter from finding out that animator Hokuto Sadamoto worked on episode 14 though he initially wanted to be uncredited, and within a few days of release he had received several angry messages attacking him for the animation quality. Sadamoto proceeded to apologize for his poor contributions, almost profusely enough to the point of having what some consider to be a meltdown. Through much apologizing and negative self-talk, he also stated that he had only two weeks to do 250 animation cuts for the episode. That’s a huge amount of work for one guy and this revelation made many involved in the backlash instead turn their attention to MAPPA’s history of poor working conditions. The studio thus received a good portion of negative criticism for its practices but probably not enough to hurt their cashflow at all so I surmise they don’t give a fuck.

Nothing like some good foreshadowing.

There’s so much wrong with this entire story. “Fans” shouldn’t be so quick to attack creators after witnessing a masterpiece and being so entitled to want another one immediately, Sadamoto shouldn’t have to apologize or feel bad for making the best he could out of a bad situation, and MAPPA shouldn’t be able to once again work on some of the biggest franchises in the entire anime industry without establishing a production line that’s more fair to the animators and people in the studio doing the heavy lifting. Hopefully this situation serves as a wake-up call to literally any of the bad actors in this story, but my hopes are low. Are you watching Jujutsu Kaisen? Are anime fans becoming more entitled? Will this controversy have any effect on MAPPA whatsoever? Get low pay, receive hate mail from viewers, but at least be proud you’re an animator in the comments below!