Impossible to have a nuanced discussion about the HeroAca layout nerf situation when the discourse is driven by people with no understanding of anime production (neither the technical causes nor the fact that this is a common issue) and no willingness to listen to industry folks
Frustration over overly conservative corrections of the animation are as old as the role itself becoming part of the pipeline. Key animations and supervisors/directors will never fully see eye to eye, that's inevitable. But this is obviously not what's happening here
That inherent friction to creating animation professionally as a group gets exacerbated to an insane degree when there's no proper communication between both parties because of the language barrier, distance, and a simple lack of time preventing real briefing & instructions
Leaving aside the incoherent screaming, right now there are also multiple anime veterans talking about experiences with fancier-looking foreign animated layouts that misread the SB intent or had technical problems that aren't apparent to most fans. This has been a recurring thing
In this specific case (and not necessarily all the HeroAca ones that were brought to the spotlight), the layouts feel like they get the tone right, and technically they don't have any glaring issues - just look how light the chara art corrections are compared to the big retakes
So what's the deal? Again, commercial animation is a group effort, and one's ambition has consequences. Deviating from the plans to animate an even cooler setpiece is great from a creative point of view, but that also needs to be cleaned up, painted, and composited by others
(Even overdoing the number of layers, something that 99% of fans will never even consider as a factor, can earn you a severe scorning. Just as a certain very popular and well-regarded foreign animator, yoyoyo!)
From the studio's point of view, the lesser evil in these situations is to pretty much fully redo these sequences reduced to a scope they can manage - or rather, even less ambitious than they'd have done themselves since the start, because it becomes an unplanned major retake
That sucks for the original artist, it sucks for the management staff, and it absolutely sucks for the animator who happened to "clean up" that HeroAca scene and is now the target of the internet's rage despite having dealt with a nightmare job very well. Of course he's pissed!
What I really want people to understand is that the cause of these problems is a failure of communication. You can't hire animators used to other pipelines & sets of expectations, or even not used to pro animation work at all, and expect them to instinctively understand their job
*This* is what you can criticize studios for, and it's not an issue exclusive to BONES. Hiring young artists overseas has become a common practice, but any mentoring they receive comes from individuals going out of their way because there is no coordinated effort to ease them in
As a result, the last few years have been a continuous disaster. Artists who didn't get the nuance of their role getting their job wasted, bad blood both ways, people breaking NDA to publicly ask what they're supposed to draw since most studios don't have proper translators...
The solution to address the industry's workload being way too much for Japanese studios ultimately ends up giving them more work, while frustrating artists elsewhere in the process. This is not the way to go at all
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