If you ever wondered why very few animated movies look as good as Across the Spider-Verse…
From the article:
According to people who worked on the sequel, Across the Spider-Verse, it’s because the working conditions required to produce such artistry are not sustainable. Multiple Across the Spider-Verse crew members — ranging from artists to production executives who have worked anywhere from five to a dozen years in the animation business — describe the process of making the the $150 million Sony project as uniquely arduous, involving a relentless kind of revisionism that compelled approximately 100 artists to flee the movie before its completion. Four of these crew members agreed to speak pseudonymously about the sprint to finish the movie three years into the sequel’s development and production, a period whose franticness they attribute to Lord’s management style — in particular, his seeming inability to conceptualize 3-D animation during the early planning stages and his preference to edit fully rendered work instead.
It was an amazing film, so the methods worked.
Results dont make it right. Also while I do agree that the throwing a bunch of different styles together was uniquely fitting for the style of this movie and made for a visually striking film, this is something that could have been handled in a less destructive way during the planning and storyboarding phases of the movie. It really is bad for your workers and long term product if you’re making them animate entire scenes only to throw it in the trash and have someone else redo it.
There’s a fallacy from implication there: just because the film ended up being really good does not mean these methods were the only way the film could have been good. It’s not a zero sum game, you can make excellent movies and also not exploit your workers to do it. You just have to be humble enough to take another few months to finish it, a relatively small price to pay for treating your employees with decency.