Excellent news that they finally have a release date, (even if it's still a ways out). Hopefully that gap makes it easier for the overall process for all of the animators & everyone – because I think that the core of the issues with the films' development is a complicated one, which that article actually does a good job of unpacking, and which I want to speculate on a bit.
One of the things that I'm often reminded of is that the same things that drive passion projects for smaller-scale studio development are IDENTICAL to things that are deeply detrimental when you scale up production to a much bigger company. There's a level of responsiveness & agility to creating things that exists when you can iterate into final versions super quickly that allow you to take a look at things and decide to keep, edit, or scrap them in a way where the end result of that effort is often phenomenal and carefully curated to every degree that you could possibly hope. Learning to work that way gives a level of control and excellence where those results being in demand are what get you bigger & bigger projects, but that scale shifts into direct conflict with the amount of process that each step begins to take.
Looking at things like some of their early work on
Clone High (which I watched when it came out in the early 2000s), it's easy to get a sense of that style & workflow being rooted in how they did that sort of animation, where the difference between edits for something like that would be less of a grueling undertaking. Visually, the next closest thing to
Spider-Verse would be
Arcane –
literally the most expensive animated show ever produced – which underscores the VAST difference between those two things and how processes that helped them to make the end products that are as good as what they're known for are also largely incompatible with the industrial processes that are happening for each little piece of the process for an animation undertaking like that.
This is a big part of struggles for any start-up software company, which is where most of my own direct experience with those issues comes from, and why it's really easy for me to see things like how "crunch" seeps in to the games industry so easily when you start at smaller studios that are driven by passion, and why the workflows, investments, & efforts to make a big game like
Baldur's Gate 3 require being utterly antithetical to how most of the entire rest of the industry operates. This same thing comes into play with animation, because the industrialization of animation & series creates timelines and other processes that are extremely difficult to contend with when you're trying to craft each part of the process – because the end result matters more than any individual contribution, but the larger the production the smaller everyone's individual contribution feels, and the more difficult it is to deal with being forced to change things that you poured your passion into.
Working with designers specifically, it's always challenging to get them to shift on something if they don't see eye-to-eye with why those changes are happening, and in animation that's gotta be an issue that's exacerbated multiple times over where the time constraints and demands don't always have reasons or conversations around them, and just come down as arbitrary requirements to scrap work and redo things. This gap in alignment between the people working & the people controlling the work is what creates the core stress dynamic that leads to feelings of moral injury, stress, & burnout.
It's that those processes and the scale at which they're being done are fundamentally at odds with one another, because of the time constraints, and the impossibility for someone in charge to directly interact with all of the various parts of the process with something that large. About the only thing that you can do with that is give the production more time & budget to operate "inefficiently" because it's not a streamlined production, it's an iterative one that carries more risk but has a much higher potential for the end result (
much like how the anime film Paprika was made) – something that we're getting less & less of, and something that's more and more difficult to justify as the speed of the animation industry itself pushes harder around people who come to the table knowing exactly what they want from the start, rather than discovering it within the process of creating it.
The more of this sort of thing that I see, the more I can't help but wonder how much the whole of the industry itself is at the core of those issues. Because at the end of the day there's also the driving factor that Lord & Miller have their name directly attached to those projects, and their ability to keep doing things lives or dies on maintaining that success, so that stress doesn't happen in a vacuum, because they're beholden to deadlines and release schedules that are often in a complicated place removing control even from people who seem like they're the one in charge of everything.
Suffice to say – Summer 2027 feels like it's got
PLENTY of time to keep going, so that hopefully everyone involved is able to work together in an environment that's better for everyone involved.
X 
. I think the moral of the story that is being set up is to not accept your fate also, rather than the opposite.
