3nvy said:demonkurama said: I view it as a unique story telling style. Don't remember ever seeing it in any other anime. It's not a stylistic preference. It's their budget.
Both, Chibi Italia :)
Stills are present since episode 1. The reason why they are there, is because SnK actually tells an epic kind of fantasy - as if the reader/viewer opens a book (from the past), reads and sees drawn pictures and graveurs of said events. It makes full circle with Armin reading such a book in the anime and the anime itself becomes a history by adding such "stills" further into the same story. Also, nods to the choice of keeping the thick outline of the main characters (humans and titans).
I believe this is the major reason why people didn't complain earlier or still accept stills as a valid and consistent means of telling this particular story.
Those who complain, me included, are those who notice the studio replacing (for budget or other reasons) or disrupting the consistency in animation.
For example, nobody complained about the amounts of stills in Mikasa's episode (6, iirc), because (1) it was a major flashback about two of the MCs, (2) it was also in line with describing a set of memory images, which most of us naturally can accept as 'real' experience. The episode however has two islands of actual animation where obviously all the efforts went. It is still fine (budget and all, later DVDs/BDs), but it's noticeable, especially when you rewatch the episodes.
In episode 8, they pulled they same trick, making the first and the last part animated good-to-great (based on another natural memory effects :D ), but that remarkably made the middle of the episode a sequence of too many stills, following one after another. Additionally, they scraped a very nice scene by choosing to "announce" its importance, than to take full advantage of its humor - all and all, there are humans in the anime, they are to be shown as different characters and yet at that moment they formed as a group in action. I think the right choice was either to animate it all the way (instead of doing it half-way by adding more stills to recreate its meaning) or keep it as scarce as possible (the manga dedicates only two panels to this scene), in case the choice weights on in being an unimportant scene.
To make things worse, they also added stills before Marco and Jean's conversation, when it was already clear what's going on. I don't remember exactly how long was the pan-shot before that, but it was enough to make sense, while the still broke the flow of the animation (<- literally).
As a rule of thumb, one should have a very good reason to scrap action scenes - the risk is higher regardless how meaningfully good it might turn out and that refers to the dramatic count of soldiers coming through the windows - how many of them survived the run to the HQ. If things are to improve, Jean's face, parts of it, and a still of the entry aren't enough for the tragedy.
That being said, I absolutely adore what the anime guys do in depicting the titans. It may be because of Isayama's influence on the subject, but when you think about it ... humans are the cats in the story (if all of you remember the topic of "pretending to be a titan" :)). The smallest of the bastards are approximately twice the average human height, they are shocking and voracious - I did see and understand it because of the quality put into the animation (along with the original idea from the manga). See - here -
,
compared to that moment in the anime.
This is what I wanted to say about the stills in SnK (so far). |