Yesterday, a new trailer for the third season of One Punch Man was released in the wee hours of the night. Like its contentious second season, the trailer has anime fans mourning what the show used to look like in its first season.
The 40-second preview trailer shows the anime’s legion of heroes, including its titular hero, Saitama, gearing up for an all-out battle with big bad Garou. During Saitama’s monologue hyping up his inevitable clash with Garou, the trailer shows off snippets of action before closing on its October release date. As far as preview trailers for anime fans have been waiting six years to see go, One Punch Man is pretty efficient. The only problem is folks aren’t jiving with its animation.
To explain why fans are disappointed in the new One Punch Man trailer, we’ll have to dive into the sweaty online conversation about sakuga. Sakuga, which translates to “drawing pictures,” is a term used in the anime community to highlight exceptional-quality moments in a show’s action—be it character gestures or fight scenes. Shonen anime fans covet good sakura; there’s an entire online database called Sakugabooru dedicated to archiving eye-catching bits of animation from shows old and new, crediting the artists behind them and tagging the varying techniques on display in a single clip.
It should go without saying that not every show needs to have superior sakuga to make it worth watching. However, One Punch Man‘s first season caused a paradigm shift, with every inch of the show flourishing its animation quality out of the box. One Punch Man’s perceived drop-off in quality is worth muddling over for anime fans since crazy, eye-popping action sequences were once the anime’s whole selling point. Much of One Punch Man‘s anime acclaim comes thanks to key animators behind the show, like Yoshimichi Kameda, Arifumi Imai, and Hidehiko Sawada, who worked on creating sequences with season one studio Madhouse. When season two of the anime was released by J.C. Staff in 2019, fans were disappointed the show didn’t display the same level of animation quality it did in 2015.
When a poster for the third season of One Punch Man was released in 2022, rumors went wild. Fans hoped the visual of Garou and Saitama would indicate a different studio was handling the season. More specifically, fans were jockeying for Mappa, the studio behind Jujutsu Kaisen and Chainsaw Man, to work on One Punch Man season three and were disappointed to hear it would be J.C. Staff again.
In short, this phenomenon is similar to how viewers can love a show as a whole while not loving episodes directed by a specific creative. Only, stretch that feeling across an entire season and have a very vocal group of fans point to the source material in paragraph-long social media posts lambasting the anime’s moving images for not matching up to the manga’s panels. This same bone to pick is plaguing online conversations with the anime adaptation of Sakamoto Days, a similar shonen manga darling adored for its fluid action paneling and disliked for how studio TMS Entertainment’s paper-like compositing filter limits how bombastic its action can be.
Will One Punch Man season three disappoint fans once more? Maybe. Is getting upset over a shonen anime’s lack of sakuga worth it? Not really. Will the manga still be available to read and enjoy regardless of whether the show lands is “good” or “mid”? Yes, and manga readers will continue to be hard at work writing PSAs for folks just to read One Punch Man and avoid sakuga discourse like the plague. There’s also the matter of Justin Lin’s live-action One Punch Man adaptation, which is being rewritten by Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon and screenwriter Heather Anne Campbell.
One Punch Man season three will premiere in October, though it has not been confirmed what streaming platform it will be available on.
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