Kuragehime
One fine example of why noitaminA's 11 episode series scheduling sucks. This show was going along swimmingly until the producers realised they were running out of episodes. Rather than fall to pieces like the makers of Eden of the East, they just rammed the plot home like driving into a brick wall in the final episode. So many plot threads and relationship drama left dangling like nerves and blood vessels from a severed arm.... Otherwise, this series was a perfect fit for noitaminA's concentration on the josei demographic. Except with fujoshi, which means viewers who were vaguely normal tuned out as soon as they started being retardedly self-absorbed. The Shiki/Kuragehime combination was noitaminA's second-lowest rating season on record. Well, the lowest at the time, but that has since been eclisped by the following....

Fractale
Another fine example of why noitaminA's 11 episode series scheduling sucks. This series took forever to get going, and by the time it did, it was over. That long lead-in would've been fine in Fractale had been 26 episodes long. But if Fractale had been 26 episodes long, it would've been Bounen no Xamdou Mark II, and I'm not sure we need that again. What's more, the characterisation makes almost no sense. It's like Yamakan, Azuma and Okada had this vague idea of where the characters should be in their personal stories, at a given time, and shoehorned that in wherever the plot required, regardless of whether that made any sense in reference to what had gone before it. But then, I should learn not to expect much from A1 Pictures. They've now given me, for the second year running, the series that has left me most disappointed and underwhelmed (last year was Senkou no Night Raid). You get the impression that Fractale was meant to be Anime no Chikara's fourth series, because it would've fitted right in, especially as it would have had at least two more episodes to flesh itself out. But hey, A1 did enough damage to AnC.... They probably thought it would be worth spreading the love to noitaminA with the most un-noitaminA series that Fuji has ever aired. Along with Wandering Son, they've managed to drive the ratings down to a third of those for Nodame Cantabile Finale, which aired at the same time last year. Good f.ucking job, people.

K-ON!!
Having finally gotten round to actually watching the second season, it is easy to see just how thinly KyoAni managed to spread the threadbare concept over the space of 24 episodes (plus whatever extra episodes they have deigned to give us). Need we be reminded that the first two of HTT's three years of highschool was (mostly) covered in the first season. The first 12 episode season (plus whatever extras yadda yadda yadda....) This meant t h i n g s s t a r t e d t o g e t j u s t a l i t t l e d r a w n o u t. Which is fine, as long as they were covering the girls doing random zurückgeblieben slice of life shite. As soon as things started to get all maudlin and sadpanda, I started banging my head against the desk. That final concert episode is like 20 minutes of mindless self-congratulatory wank. Wank to the sound of cash registers as the BD's flew out the door. It got better after that, but the damage was done. No, K-ON does not give you blowjobs, like the batshite insane fanbois think, nor does it give you AIDS, like the haters want you to believe. This series is just utterly, inoffensively average. There just wasn't a lot else of value going about to challenge it, unfortunately.

Katanagatari
Nisioisin, or however he wants to be described, is a hack. All of his light novels tend to be dialogue-driven blandfests, almost completely devoid of substance. For reference, see Bakemonogatari. Or better still, don't. Katanagatari is, thusly, a fairly shallow tale of two idiots with verbal diarrhea on a quest, with lots of useless support characters who don't last very long and an overly-dramatic, oddly thought out tragic end that could only be the result of someone making shi.t up as he goes along. However, the 50 minute episode a month production schedule (something that I can only think of one other series, Figure 17, using) certainly helped White Fox iron out a number of those issues, and allowed them to spend a little more time on the animation side.... Which is my saying that, if you're going to use modern animation methods, at least make things as heavily stylised as possible and instantly recognisable as not being any other show. Or, as I've seen someone else describe it, "a Shaft anime with actual animation". It's a pity Shaft didn't do the same with the other, aforementioned Nisioisin series. Or any of their series, to be precise. Except SZS and Hidamari. It worked there. Mostly. Ahem....

And as a short follow-up, I don't hate any of these shows. They're all underperformers in their own way, but I don't hate any of them. I do hate that they underperformed.

Heh, nice save there Mappy :p

I agree with you for the most part especially regarding Kuragehime, no need to repaeat myself or what you have already said but it could have been way waaay better had it been scheduled to have atleast 2 more episodes.

Fractale was from the begining exactly what I expected it to be. I think most people had their expecatations in the clouds. Look at this way, if it was more than 1i eps we would have a ton of Nessa is playing hide and seek episodes. Hehe now I personally like that kind of stuff but looking back what a waste of precious time.

Regarding K-On!! Its no secret that I lovers this show and I can be a little bit of a fanboy sometimes but im also aware of its flaws. The whole season 1 taking up 2 years messed with the viewers heads making season 2 seem even loooonger than it should. Everyone has their own reasons for watching this and mine certainly wasnt "the plot" mind you there was one kinda. I loved it because it reminded me of the bond i have with my friends. There isnt any other series,movie or book ive ever come across that potrays friendhip as well as K-On!! did and if you have ever had very close freinds before you know exactly what I mean.

What I was hoping for more of in the middle of Fractale were episodes like 6 and 7, where there was some exploration of the world and the effects of making humanity so dependent on a system that they lose the ability to survive without it (and what happens when that system starts to collapse), as well as the self-absorption and narcissism that living in such a "paradise" can create. This, unfortunately, followed the Nessa hide n' seek / Clain underwear episode, which had bits that really should have been absorbed into episodes 4 and 6 for continuity's sake, but was a huge waste of time, otherwise, and was followed by episodes 8-11, where the whole thing turned into a seinen action show. It is like Sora no Woto, where A1 had also created this awesome world and setting, but ultimately did little with it. Only in Fractale the sense of disappointment over unfulfilled expectations was much higher, because, you know, once you saw those K-On-ish character designs for Sora no Woto, you knew it was just going to be post-apocalyptic cute girls doing cute things.

Also, much of K-On!! was copypasta of Azumanga Daioh, only AD's producers remembered this concept called "pacing". I rewatched it just recently, and apart from the dodgy first episode or two, it manages to encompass most of the themes that K-On covered in a shorter space of time, whilst using pretty much all of the same character archetypes: Yui/Osaka, Mio/Yomi, Ritsu/Tomo, Mugi/Chiyo, Azusa/Kaorin, Ui/Chihiro and Jun/Kagura. Sawa-chan was also a combination of Yukari and Nyamo. And bits of Kimura-sensei, but we won't go into that.... Al K-On needed was an imaginary character played by Wakamoto, and everything would tie together....

The whole light music thing was just window dressing. Angel Beats wasn't about music and it did that better. About the only thing it did do better, but that's beside the point....

The one aspect that is getting rather irritating is the sudden increasing frequency of shows being utterly mismanaged in how their development adheres to the episodes allowed. It's a basic mistake. It wasn't that long ago that the majority of shows had a proper beginning, middle and end. Now you're lucky if a few a season do. It's rather bewildering. Consequence of trying to make too many series or the talent pool regressing when it comes to scriptwriting and storyboarding?

A lot of studios are often fishing for second seasons, these days, which is why you get shows where the main crux of the plot finishes in episode 11 and they have a fanservice or joke episode for 12. Ookami-san and Kampfer are (relatively) recent examples. Kore wa Zombie Desu ka an even more recent one. When this fishing expedition fails, it tends to leave the show looking a bit half-arsed and stupid a few years down the line. Then again, some of them are just half-arsed and stupid to begin with. Kampfer*coughcough*

Mappy wrote:What I was hoping for more of in the middle of Fractale were episodes like 6 and 7, where there was some exploration of the world and the effects of making humanity so dependent on a system that they lose the ability to survive without it (and what happens when that system starts to collapse), as well as the self-absorption and narcissism that living in such a "paradise" can create.

"Don't tell me you think the Shizuma Drive is a wonderful invention..."

Last Exile wrote:The one aspect that is getting rather irritating is the sudden increasing frequency of shows being utterly mismanaged in how their development adheres to the episodes allowed. It's a basic mistake. It wasn't that long ago that the majority of shows had a proper beginning, middle and end. Now you're lucky if a few a season do. It's rather bewildering. Consequence of trying to make too many series or the talent pool regressing when it comes to scriptwriting and storyboarding?

I just quickly punched in a random year from the last decade for the month we're currently in. I got April 2005. This month included such trainwrecks as Sousei no Aquarion, Futakoi Alternative, Speed Grapher, He Is My Master and Pierrot's attempt at adapting Emma. Oh, and Dark Love if you want to talk about the truly worst animation director still getting employment: Teruaki Murakami. So yeah, plenty of poorly planned efforts about.

The reason we're seeing more is because more and more companies are shifting to 13 episode adaptations of serialised novel series. A great deal of these things are:
1) Shoddy works in the first place. Stop comparing them to literary works for older audiences and start comparing them to Scholastic series.
2) Works in progress with no truly complete central story arc. A lot of these works have a similar model to serialised action comics in places like Jump. They're not supposed to end yet - they're supposed to drag in viewers.

So, we're seeing lots of adaptations of crappy series that have no decent arc getting given a small amount of time and overworked/insufficiently trained/tested/proven staff put in charge. And expected to make one of these for every season of every year in the hopes of milking cash from the same small customer base. Of course things are going to go sour.