Over the past several weeks, the Maruyama Animation Produce Project Association studios, which have been in charge of animation for the new Attack on Titan season, have received backlash from fans. After the last couple of episodes, viewers stormed Twitter to express their concerns of the new season even going as far as to send death threats to some of the animators. These fans are mostly upset by the use of computer generated elements instead of hand drawn animation. Not taking their hard work into account within just 10 months time, these fans have gone too far.

For the first three seasons of the show, WIT studios— a renowned Japanese production company— was in charge of animation for the show. WIT studios did an excellent job with the animation in the first three seasons but unfortunately could not continue animating the show due to the heavy workload it put on the animators. The show earned about $45 million worldwide after the first three seasons and became one of the most popular anime series known to date. After the creator of the show reached out to many studios, MAPPA was the only studio willing to take on this large project. The creator of the show, Hajime Isayama, has already thanked MAPPA for taking on this project and is so far pleased with the show’s adaptation of the manga. Although they had much less time to work on the show than WIT, they have produced some quality episodes.

While the animation by WIT was incredibly detail-oriented, it did take a lot of time for them to release episodes. The time period between season one and two is almost five years which upset many of the fans who were waiting patiently for these new episodes. It was surprising any studio took up this project because of the little time that was given to complete the animation. Yet, MAPPA took on the job regardless, so wouldn’t the fans be glad their beloved series came out a lot sooner?

Due to time constraints, the animators had to use CG elements for all of the fight scenes which came as a shock to much of the audience who had been accustomed to the hand drawn style of the first three seasons. The animators at MAPPA are overworked and underpaid, but they still created the episodes to be released with great graphics. In Japan, on average, an animator who works 260 days for eight hours each day in a year will make close to $14,000 a year. Even with all these factors, fans did not care about the people behind the scenes and solely thought about the show. On top of complaining about the animation style of the show, people even went as far as attacking the song choices in these episodes.

“I love the show but at some points I did feel like the animation was rushed. I would’ve liked to see WIT produce the season but I’m okay with MAPPA animating this season,” junior Nicholas Calindro said.

While the animation that WIT produced was spectacular, MAPPA is doing a great job for 10 months. WIT had 2 years to produce the third and still had to resort to using CG in some instances. Fans should be grateful that MAPPA even took up the project seeing that they are currently working on two other popular animes. Despite all the backlash it received, MAPPA will continue to animate and produce more episodes. The CG titans may be a different look from the usual titan look in seasons one through three, but it honestly does not look bad. So far, they are adapting the manga to perfection and fans should be excited for what is to come.