Tag: off-model animation

Anime shows tend to most often run on an already tight budget; some have even tighter ones. Thus, over the years it became a norm to invest more time and money into the first and last episode, leaving many episodes in the middle to stand severe budget restrictions. This sometimes results in episodes which particularly stand out due to the drop in artwork or animation quality; bar some basic framework, they often have little in common with the rest of the series.

One clue to upcoming off-model animation is the noticeable addition of many Korean names in the production credits, as farming out more animation to Korean artists is a nearly universal indicator of a production company trying to save money in all possible ways.

This effect is often called yashigani, after the infamous fourth episode of Lost Universe, Yashigani Hoburu. Another prominent term describing the same effect is "QUALITY animation", with capital letters meant to show contrast to actual quality. Yoake Mae yori Ruriiro na: Crescent Love is another legendarily terrible offender: the TV airing of its third episode had a perfectly spherical ball in place of what should be a cabbage; the "cabbage" was so egregious that it became closely associated with the anime itself, to a point the show would henceforth be nicknamed "Cabbage Love" among Western viewers.

One should not confuse the yashigani effect with art shifts that stem from guest staff, changes in main staff, intentional art shifts, and similar effects. Another effect one shouldn't confuse this one with is the so-called DVD/BD enhancement, which is when a studio scrambles to meet the deadline for a TV airing and airs a half-finished episode but eventually fixes it for a disk release; for example, Shaft is particularly infamous for its disk enhancements, to a point it has become known as "Shafting", and they prominently feature intentionally weird character models, but they don't often leave bad artwork on the disk release. Additionally, it should also not be confused with intentional lack of detail on background plane characters; this effect is instead when even the foreground has art quality shifting over time due to the aforementioned budget restrictions.