>>21642
The scene in question is the explosion in the warehouse. As a preface, I should state throughout all the series they had serious sense of missing "beats" for dramatic moments and even for basic combat things. Not everywhere, in fact they had some really good scenes near the end proving that at least
someone on staff knew how to time things correctly, and make a fight not look like a chaotic mess.
My primary concern with the magical explosion scene is thus: there was no god damn reason to keep going back to the fucking monkey clicking and then exploding. It absolutely disrupts the rhythm and gets confusing really fast. This is especially true when "magic" has already been introduced to the plot. With the first shot of the monkey exploding we see only one set of action, Jynx getting blown off the edge. We then go back, and not only reply the explosion, not only the little
tick right before the explosion, but we use the exact same fucking shot from the first go around. This is confusing as fuck. When watching this blind for the first time, I assumed some sort of time bullshit was at work because I thought what was being communicated was that a literal second explosion occurred, no, what the animators
actually wanted to impart to me was that this was the same explosion.This is a super basic filming technique, what you do when you have an explosion montage is when you want to "rewind time" and switch to another viewing angle, you start
immediately after the thing that exploded exploded, i.e. mid-fireball. No, three times, THREE FUCKING TIMES, my sense of time and flow gets destroyed by the animators using the exact same shot to set up the explosion when that makes whatever the fuck you're trying to communicate
even more confusing.
To be fair, on rewatching the scene to make this post to bitch about it, they seemed to have really wanted to communicate that there were two smaller explosions along with the first one. I can,
just barely, understand their reasoning for the first and second reuse, if they wanted to make sure the audience understood where the smaller explosions came from. Problem: the same rules still reuse of the shots should have had the smaller magic stones only start being shown
immediately after the monkey explodes, not reusing the shot, right before the monkey explodes. If they absolutely had to keep the moment before the monkey explodes,
for some reason, they should at least have the fucking decency to use different angles, at least if it's a different angle it can be communicated to me that while this is the same moment of time, we are now going to show the exact moment of time from a different perspective.
This doesn't fix that last one though. The most insulting one was the fourth one, which is only done so that the policemen can notice that there was a giant explosion in a warehouse. This is borderline retarded. Out of the three reuses, this is the most insulting to me. They reuse the shot, have the policemen notice the explosion sound, then look. If you absolutely just positively loved the stupid shot of the monkey exploding, just use that, don't have the policemen noticing the sound, and just have a shot of him looking at the warehouse. Ideally though, just don't reuse the fucking shot, and do the literal exact same scene, just without the third reuse. Policemen hears the explosion moments after it happened (because that's literally how explosions work and I don't think a single person has ever failed to understand this), then looks. The third reuse is not only completely and utterly useless and extraneous information, not only did it actively made the read and timing
worse, the animators didn't even fucking commit to it and did the scene the same as the old fashioned way instead immediately afterwards.
I could get extremely nitpicky here, I could go full youtube movie reviewer "Why does the torture chamber lock from the inside? What retard designed this?" "Why was the outer wall of this building one brick layer thick? How was it that easy to break out?" "If the explosion is strong enough to vaporize Silco's attendants arm off from what appears to be 20 meters away, how the fuck is the shimmer fueled gangster not obliterated? Is he literally that indestructible?" "Where the fuck does the explosion coming from inside the door come from? What caused that explosion?" I can only assume the answer to the last question is "from the magic gem launched into the torture room", but this would imply that everyone in the torture room should
definitely be dead. Everyone, because if you use that explanation, the inside of the torture room was a rifle chamber, and that means the explosion would do even more damage.
I'll also say immediately after this shimmer gangster picks up vander and throws him and it's the most weightless shitty animation I've ever seen of someone lifting and dumping a body. Looks like shit.
Bonus points: Jynx is later on shown to have traumatic flashbacks to killing her friends. Why? She didn't see them dead. All she saw was a dead Vander. Vi didn't tell her the other two died, she just punched her in the god damn face. Did Silco tell her the other two die? Why? Why the fuck would he do that? Yes she saw the blood-stained goggles, but at best she could only know they were injured, because you know
Vi fucking survived or she can jump to the worst conclusion that she killed them, but she is never explicitly shown them being killed. Which makes it even dumber when she has constant flashbacks to them being killed, from camera angles she never ever saw. Her only personal memories of the explosion is her looking at a concrete room, getting blown off a ledge, seeing a dead Vander, and getting decked by Vi. Literally nothing else. I can understand how killing all of your friends would be traumatic, but who fucking told Jynx she did that? Because she, very explicitly, did not fucking see it herself.