The animation in this season is incredible. Incredibly bad. Like, it's actually impressive how bad it is. I can't believe that a show went to air in this condition. You've probably seen shows with bad animation before, but this is on another level. I don't remember the first season being especially well animated or anything, but it was nothing like this. This is like the show was given to people who tried to cover up the fact that they didn't even know HOW to animate. I didn't notice it as much in the first couple episodes, but once you start to notice it, it's impossible tostop noticing. Shots will linger for 30 seconds or more on static shots of random things so they didn't have to worry about animating the characters. It happens VERY frequently. As a result, if you aren't very familiar with the voice actors, it's hard to tell who's even speaking sometimes. They often neglect establishing shots, so you won't even know who's in a scene until you hear them speak from somewhere out of frame. There are also a lot of very bizarre shot choices which all seem to be done strategically so that they won't have to animate anything, like only showing a character's head from their eyes up. Imagining what the storyboards looked like is depressing since all of their choices seem to have been based around doing as little animation as possible.

The artwork is terrible. Backgrounds look blurry and gross. Characters are often drawn off-model. Sometimes they look like they were drawn by people who don't know how to draw humans at all. It's weird.

The animation is at its "best" when they have performances with 3D models. You've definitely seen better 3D animation, so don't get me wrong. But at least the characters are moving. I can see how going full 3D could make production cheaper, since they wouldn't need to manually draw and color each frame. If that's the case, it makes me wish the entire season had been in 3D. Bang Dream switched from 2D to 3D and I don't think it suffered terribly for it.

It's hard to comment on the story because the animation is just that distracting. However, I can say that it feels like it has its eggs in too many baskets. One of its plots focuses on a virtual idol called Machina X. (It seems like it's supposed to be a synthesized voice like Hatsune Miku rather than a character voiced by a real singer, but that isn't made clear.) I think the show is trying to suggest that this virtual idol is a threat to the jobs of real idols. As someone who's been religiously keeping up with Hatsune Miku since 2008, I know that this wasn't true and especially wasn't a real concern in 2017 when this show came out, so it feels like this particular plot was written by someone who wasn't very familiar with virtual idols and/or saw them as an easy topic to fearmonger about.

I felt like the first season of Wake Up Girls was a hidden gem among idol anime. It was very, very good and deserved better than this. I'm shocked that anyone gave this higher than a 5/10 because it's THAT bad. I definitely wouldn't recommend this to people who liked the first season, but I might recommend it to anyone who wants to see just how amateurish a supposedly "finished anime" can look.