The anime Blue Lock is currently adapting chapters 109 – 151 (the matches between Blue Lock and Japan’s U-20 team) and is set to conclude the selection phase of the previous season. After making viewers wait a whole year for the second season, fans have expressed their disappointment.
Indeed, among the most anticipated anime, Blue Lock season 2 has caused significant disappointment due to the poor quality of its visuals and animation.
The original manga is highly popular, so it is quite surprising that the anime adaptation has turned out this way. While the anime still has some stunning frames, certain scenes feel like “manga panels brought to life.” Clearly, the use of CGI has not been handled well, causing the scenes to appear “lifeless” compared to modern anime standards.
Martin Reyes, one of the animators for episode 2 of season 2, has publicly discussed the challenges faced at Studio 8bit. He emphasized that the studio has scrapped all dynamic movements and animations, describing it as a “disaster.”
According to Reyes’s comments on Reddit and TikTok, he stated: “I worked on the second season of Blue Lock, and I will let you know why its animation has degraded. A few months ago, I began my work on the second season, a season where I not only worked on an episode… but the entire season.”
“I started working on episode 2, where I had to handle 20 cuts, and the base was to animate scenes from 0… however, unfortunately, the issues had not begun to appear at this point. I’m sure it wasn’t just me; all the animators working on this episode were also affected, resulting in the final product being released with so many flaws.”
“Despite the low budget and tight schedule, we did our best to… regarding the basics, we barely maintained the animation quality in some frames or only resorted to using CGI where it was necessary.”
“However, the problems did not end there for me, as there were challenges with time constraints that we faced. Similar issues occurred in Jujutsu Kaisen previously or in many recent anime, as production companies seem to no longer care about artistic quality and only focus on revenue.”
“And because I was not involved in any other episodes of Blue Lock, after completing episode 2, I decided to quit, and as I thought, the final result turned out to be a disaster. This made me feel that this was a project I was not proud to have worked on. I was allowed to leave a mark on 22 cuts of my own.”
Blue Lock season 2 will feature 14 episodes, with some episodes already released (as of November 1, 2024).
Therefore, it is very unlikely that the production team will improve the animation quality in the middle of the season. From the pre-production stage to the final stages, every aspect is influenced by budget constraints and limited resources.
