DP in regards to direction is a total mess. The Ash v Paul match is fabulous narrative wise. But holy f*ck, animation and direction wise? It's godawful. I don't know how people can watch them again and not ask yourself, did this really need to be that long? Did they really need to cut back to Dawn and Brock for more than 10 seconds? How many more panning shots?
Some of what I saw in DP's battles trying to look back at them
1. The incredible amounts of stock footage/lack of sakuga animation
2. One Piece pacing at times between moves
3. Direction of scenes in question are just
And SM has a different problem. The allocation of animation, is just
bad. And this is my opinion by the way and what I come to watch Pokemon for will be drastically different from people who prefer SM and I 100% get that.
But this is what is discernible. The following aren't really unpopular by the way, just noting why I feel this way
Iwane's philosophy has always been to conserve animation in dialogue scenes to instead use for the big emotional moments/battles. In Alola, this hasn't been the case as a whole. Instead, what they've done and you can see this if you go to animation collection sites like sakugabooru, is that they've upped the animation in those mundane moments that aesthetically look great, but for me, don't amount to much in the overall grand scheme of the episode.
Like I said, if you prefer this SoL type of story, this might just actually be a good thing for you since on a episode by episode basis, SM is visually appealing in those exact moments.
In XY, Iwane's philosophy is in full play and I totally get the criticism for the stiff animation in most of the fillers, but coupled with Yajima's direction, the moments they wanted to hit well that fit XY's narrative? They hit them damn well and this is not just Iwane and battles by the way, looking at how well Serena's showcases were animated with people like Shingo Fui I think was his name, there's that underlying philosophy that you see permeate the show and the people who animate it
People really don't give Yajima the credit he deserves for XY and I've seen some people downplay his work. In BW, you can see the experimentation of the camera, but it just wasn't done well in my opinion and the stock footage for battles? Still there and it was still so bad. That didn't decline at all. It was so hard to watch Pokemon like Oshawott and Pignite battle with the sh*t load of stock footage used for them.
XY comes along and you've got Yajima pushing for total elimination of all stock footage. That's radical change. Iwane stated that each episode of XY, starting in XY, had 20% to 30% more drawings than ever before. That stiff animation in XY's fillers? It was much worse in DP, BW, and other previous series. As I stated before, SM uses these extra drawings + looser designs to create a well-animated SoL series
SM's battles are really missed the Yajima direction and the design goals of SM just make it worse. This last league battle, the stock footage
That, and the pacing.
There's about two well-animated, well paced, and well directed battles in SM I can think of.
