Summary
Warning: The following contains minor spoilers for Blue Lock, Season 2, Episode 2, “The Assassin and the Ninja", now streaming onCrunchyroll.
Seven Deadly Sins,Uzumaki, and nowBlue Lockhave fallen victim to a sudden drop in animation quality. Season 1 was critically acclaimed, with many fans believingBlue Lockcould take on the other big names in the genre, likeHaikyu!!orKuroko’s Basketballblow for blow. However, the first season’s massive success just makes the fall of season 2 an even bigger mystery.
The signs first started to show when theBlue Lockseason 2 trailerdropped and was littered with still frames. A marketing team would usually want to include high-octane, fast-paced scenes in a sports anime trailer to attract viewers, so it’s worrying when some of the scenes shown were just of the soccer ball moving while the characters were frozen in place. Eventually, the first episode of season 2, “Tryouts” came out, and it wasn’t so bad, though there weren’t a lot of action scenes in it. . The most action shown in the first episode was from a flashback scene of Rin Itoshi in a 1v1 with his older brother Sae. The match was surprisingly well-animated, but it makes you wonder if they blew the entire animation budget on it.
The Issues with Blue Lock Season 2’s Animation
Still Frames and an Overuse of CGI and Special Effects
Episode 2, “The Assassin and the Ninja"featured the first tryout match and is where it all fell apart. During the game, the characters barely moved, their movements replaced by still frames and flashy special effects. On the rare occasion that theydidmove, it was either just them slightly shifting a limb or done through CGI. Characters seemed to be switching poses and positions through magic since the show just moved from one still shot to another. Some viewers have started calling the show a glorified PowerPoint presentation, and a couple of the scene transitions weren’t doing it any favors.
The animation is a far cry from the dynamic movements in season 1, which is a shame because, apart from the animation,Blue Lockseason 2 does everything else exceptionally well. The plot, the conflict between players, Isagi’s problem-solving, and the art style are all good. If you take screenshots of the still frames and show them to someone who’s never watchedBlue Lock, they would never think the show looks bad. The opening and ending songs are also great, but it’s jarring when the opening song visuals are animated better than the episodes.
An Overworked and Underpaid Animation Team
A Blue Lock Animator Reveals Pulls Back the Curtains
Fans aren’t the only ones criticizing the second season’s animation; a Chilean animators who worked on the episodes, Martin Reyes, acknowledged the poor quality too. He did work on the first few episodesof Blue Lockseason 2, and, as seen in his TikTok profile “MartinKiings”, he’s worked on other anime projects, like episode 12 ofNier Automata, and episodes 1 and 2 ofDandadanas well, proving he can produce good animations.Martin made a TikTokthat revealed the main causes of the animation problems, which was latertranslated into English on Reddit.
As a lot of people were already suspecting, the main issue was that the animation team was under a serious time crunch from the production higher-ups and was also not getting paid very well. Because of the tight deadlines, a lot of the animation that the team had already worked on was either removed, cut short, or replaced. In that same TikTok post, Martin showed a layout of Isagi running that ended up being a still frame in the anime. According to Martin, the working conditions were so awful that he left after finishing his work on episode 2, even though he was supposed to work on five episodes for season 2. He was fully expecting the end result of the quality ofanimation to come out bad, and he sadly wasn’t wrong.
Will the Animation Get Better?
Miracles Can Happen, but Don’t Get Your Hopes Up
Unfortunately, it’s not looking good forBlue Lock, at least for season 2. The likelihood of the animation becoming good for the rest of the season is pretty low. If the animation team was rushed for the first part, their workload likely wouldn’t have lightened up mid-way. And if some animators just up and left like Martin, that means the producers had to scramble and find replacements, making the animation process even more rushed and pressured. That being said, season 2,episode 4, “Chameleon” had slightly better animationthan the previous episodes, but only marginally.
Some fans have theorized that maybe they saved the best parts of the animation forthe big U-20 game, but there’s no concrete evidence to suggest that. After all, if thatwasthe case, the marketers would’ve likely used some of the well-animated scenes for theBlue Lockseason 2 trailer. Unfortunately,Blue Lockfans might have to wait for season 3 before they can expect a return to form. Hopefully, by then, the show will get a better production committee, or the old one will have learned from their mistakes and give the animation team better pay and more room to breathe.
Blue Lock is now available to stream onCrunchyroll,Netflix,Ani-One Asia, and several other streaming platforms. The release date for the next episode of Blue Lock, season 2, episode 6, is set to be July 21, 2025, at 9:00 AM PT.
