I saw a video from someone explaining how clunky animation might be “better”, and that’s why so many studios go for it, even as smoother may actually be just as easy/cheap.

His point was that for particularly fast action scenes, the clunkiness serves as a way to punctuate, so that an image is visible long enough to be processed, yet still let the scene play out at a quick pace. That the animator can select the moments and decide how long a frame gets to “land”, and the animation rate and each individual frame and how it lands are very deliberate choices. He cites that in the old days of manual animation, it was a given that each frame was a manual decision with intent, and that “smooth” aided animation just presents filler the mind would have come up with anyway.

However the missing part seems to be that instead of the “every frame should be deliberate” mindset, instead it’s “just set the computer to render at arbitrary clunky steps” for a lot of the animation out there. So we get the clunkiness with none of the intent, and it bugs me too. I think they can use smooth animation for the casual scenes, and while a more frantic scene might do well with rougher animation, it needs some intent to really make the most of it. This is why I suspect the action parts seem closer to fine while the non-action stuff is more jarring.

To me even the web-slinging looks weird.