Anime Blue Lock season 2 is adapting chapters 109 – 151 (match between Blue Lock and Japan U-20) and will also conclude the Third Choice arc from last season. After making fans wait a year for the second season, audiences were left disappointed.
Yes, one of the most anticipated anime series, Blue Lock season 2 anime was a big disappointment when it encountered heavy criticism for its image and animation quality.
The original manga itself is very popular, so it's surprising that the anime turned out like this. While the anime still has some great-looking frames, others look as motionless “like colored manga pages”. Obviously, the use of rudimentary CGI, without careful care, makes the scenes “lifeless” compared to modern anime standards.
Martin Reyes, one of the show's animators who worked on season 2 episode 2, opened up about the unfair treatment at Studio 8bit. He also claimed that the studio deleted all the movements and described the animation as a “disaster”.
According to a Reddit translation of Reyes' TikTok, he said: “I worked on the second episode of Blue Lock and I'll tell you why its animation is so bad. A few months ago, I started working on the second season of Blue Lock. A season that I didn't just work on one episode… but five episodes.
I started working on the second episode, where I had to deal with 20 cuts, essentially animating scenes from zero… but, strangely enough, the problems hadn't started at this point. I'm sure that not only me, but all the animators who worked on this volume, did not do the work that was eventually published.
Even though the pay was low and the hours were negligible, we did the best we could… basically, they removed all the movement in some frames or they just used sketchy CGI.
But the fault does not lie with the person who came after me, because they probably did everything they could with the little time they had. These problems, like in the past Jujutsu Kaisen or in most anime series, today's production companies do not value the artists' efforts and only focus on revenue.
And that's why I don't accept any more episodes of Blue Lock. After completing the second episode, I decided to give up and as I thought, the end result was a disaster. This makes me feel like this is a piece of work I'm not proud to post. I was given permission to publish one of my 22 cuts.”
Anime Blue Lock season 2 will air 14 episodes, of which four have already been released (as of November 1, 2024).
So it's highly unlikely that the studio will improve the animation mid-season. Because from production to finishing, everything is affected by overloaded schedules and limited resources.
