What do you look for in animated fight scenes

[Fox12]

I like fluidity of movement, and a sense of weight. I also prefer the fight not to be interrupted by long speeches, as shonen is want to do

 

[Thunderous Cacophony]

Generally I like some decent choreography and fluidity to the animation, otherwise I'm pretty easy to please so long as the end result looks cool.

This. So long as it all looks nice, I can watch a pair of dudes have a fistfight or Team RWBY fly around and fight a dozen monsters.

 

[JUMBO PALACE]

As others have said, a sense of weight for sure. Make me believe these characters are really hitting each other.

 

[Palindromemordnilap_v1legacy]

Movement. I like fights frenetic and kinetic, with plenty of using the environment

 

[McElroy]

Context and after that, execution. Choreography at least has to exist. Also preferably not anime for obvious reasons.

 

[laggyteabag]

2 things:

1) Using the Environment
2) Fluidity and weight behind the strikes

The Avatar franchise is great at this, because two of the four forms of bending involve the use scenery quite heavily.

Here is one fight between two earth and metal benders from Season 4 of The Legend of Korra

Look at how much of their environment they use, not only that, but the show is animated beautifully, fluidly, and with a lot of weight behind each action.

Damn, earthbending is cool.

An example of a terrible is this one from Halo 5.

Its slow, the punches have no weight, there is no use of the environment (or the other 6 characters in the scene, for that matter) and in the end, what should have been a rapid, high-stakes fight between two super soldiers, at the top of their game, with years of extensive training and combat experience, turns into what looks like a bar fight between two pensioners fighting over a bottle of beer.

At 15:00 mins in, here is a great breakdown of this entire sequence, and why it is so dumb.

EDIT: Also, anything this film does is 10/10