The Decline of My Hero Academy Part 2: Two Heroes
Before I move on to season 4, I wanted to talk about the first MHA movie. You'd probably think I wouldn't talk about it since battle shounen movies are always shit and why bother, but I think it’s interesting to talk about from a production standpoint.
Like I said before, MHA's first 2 seasons look pretty alright. I can tell they're trying to keep it visually engaging and you can feel some of the animator's personality from certain shots and animations. That stops with season 3, and I think that's because of rushed production. After all, the same team works on the series and the movies. C team. And look at this production schedule.
Brutal.
And before we go further; I want to make this abundantly clear: MHA looking like shit is not the animators or background artists' fault. It never is. If you have someone who is good enough to get hired by Studio Bones, they will produce something excellent if given enough time. And that's where I think the problem lies. Now, I'm not really willing to say Bones is overworking its employees or rushing production without any proof other than the way the show looks. I'm just saying, when you look at this movie and season 4...and then look at other recent productions from Bones, it’s hard not to wonder what went wrong; because a series this big should really look better.
Anyways, it’s Interesting how the visuals take a dive when the movies come into play.
Movie 1 is, to put it bluntly, an ugly piece of shit. I expected the movie to at least look better than the low bar the series is setting at this point, but somehow it looks ten times worse! The backgrounds everywhere are HIDEOUS, and why the fuck are the establishing shots ugly?
You might not think this is a big deal, but Two Heroes is a movie that's based around its setting. These wides and establishing shots should be beautiful, yet they look like sloppily thrown-together dogwater. And if you're think I'm being too harsh, here's what the second MHA movie looks like:
So yeah. It looks like shit.
The entire movie looks like this until the ending fight, which looks great. But it’s supposed to. Of course it was going to, that's the scene they spent all their time on. Like I'm not gonna complain that it looks good. It does, and it was clearly always the plan to make this scene look great no matter what the rest of the movie looks like. Plus, seeing Deku and All Might completely cutting loose side by side is the sort of non-canon action that battle shounen movies are made for. I just wish that much effort could have also been put into the backgrounds and establishing shots.
As for the story, there's nothing really to note. It’s your generic battle shounen movie plot. The only things I found to be noteworthy were the Uno product placement, and All Might swears a couple of times.
The only way this movie works is if they make the setting feel real, and alive. But the backgrounds and establishing shots are so bad it all just falls flat.
And the backgrounds being shit isn't that big a deal. Like, you get sick of the shit backgrounds after a while but you can't have bad establishing shots in a movie that's based around the setting. It deflates everything when it always looks like shit!
Overall, this movie just lacks energy, and it feels like the people that made it didn't care. It has no soul. Two Heroes' biggest crime is that it’s boring. A plot with nothing interesting going on, a setting that has no effort put into bringing it to life, and it all adds up to an experience that just feels soulless.
Skip to the ending fight, and then go watch Heroes Rising instead.