What exactly is “Sakuga” and how it pertains to the animation quality?

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2021-06-13 00:30:04

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Sakuga written as '作画' in Japanese has a literal meaning of 'working drawing' but generally is used to mean just 'animation'

However, it takes on a slightly different meaning in context of anime where it refers to exceptionally animated scenes as 'good sakuga'.

What I want to know is how is sakuga described as good or bad? Is it a subjective scale referring to the mix of factors such as direction, frames per second, cost of animation per second etc. Historical context would be a bonus for an answer!

Sakuga is basically where animators go from using cheats like only animating the mouth or skipping frames to animating every frame with fluid movement.