The website for upcoming Summer anime Ranpo Kitan: Game of Laplace recently uploaded a pair of brief comments from the team talking about the show. They were interesting (dealt with the production schedule and the Ranpo stories Uezu plans to integrate) and short, so I translated them. My Japanese is pretty rusty, so apologies in advance for any mistakes. Continue reading
Classical music is appreciated and drama is appraised in the newest Unstoppable Hype Machine!
One of the fruits of digging into the adaptations of manga produced in 2011 has been a treasure trove of TV anime ratings data. Which, in turn, holds heaping helpings of unrelated but utterly fascinating information.
My favorite tidbit so far? Timeslots that get designated to run a certain kind of show are much more prevalent than I, at least, had thought. People may deify noitaminA for its stellar pre-Fractale record, but if you want to talk anime-focused timeslots with godly 7-year runs, there’s at least one very prominent contender. The Nihon TV 24:50 timeslot (plus/minus 10 minutes, depending on the quarter) hosted the following shows from 2000 to 2011:
Show Title (Airdates) (Ratings for First Episode)
Hidamari no Ki (2000-04) (3.2)
Hajime no Ippo (2000-10) (4.8)
Tenchi Muyo GXP (2002-04) (4.3)
Hanada Shounen-shi (2002-10) (3.1)
Air Master (2003-04) (4.4)
Captain Harlock [TV Airing of Endless Odyssey OVA] (2003-10) (3.4)
Gokusen (2004-01) (3.8)
Monster (2004-04) (3.2)
Akagi (2005-10) (2.4)
Ouran High School Host Club (2006-04) (2.1)
Death Note (2006-10) (3.4)
Buzzer Beater (2007-07) (2.5)
Kaiji (2007-10) (3.2)
Real Drive (2008-04) (2.0)
One Outs (2008-10) (2.5)
Souten Kouro (2009-04) (2.6)
Kimi ni Todoke (2009-10) (2.8)
Rainbow (2010-04) (2.2)
Kimi ni Todoke [cut reair] (2010-10) (2.1)
Kimi ni Todoke Season 2 (2011-01) (2.1)
Kaiji Season 2 (2011-04) (2.3)
Chihayafuru (2011-10) (2.4)
Note in particular the period from 2004 to 2011. That’s some serious all-around ass-kicking, a double whammy of ratings that aren’t bad (especially for 12:50 in the morning) and maximal critic-pleasing potential. By all accounts, this timeslot is currently plugged; Chihayafuru’s second season aired at 25:59, and I can’t find anything currently airing in it. But still, phenomenal run. I guess I’m adding timeslots to the list of industry-related things that really ought to be looked into.
Edit: Corrected the title to reflect the actual day of the timeslot.
Minus Yowamushi Pedal (cheat to win-strong is still way too fresh in my head for me to care about cycling) and Pupa (airs who-knows-when), the last pair of shows to air this season are running in the noitaminA timeslot, the first pair of original series they’ve run in over a year. Shows on noitaminA are still cause for moderate excitement, but the brand’s taken a bit of a dip in recent years, so I approached the day’s fare with cautious optimism.
Welcome to part 2 of this series on how different changes in production and distribution methods affected anime over the years. Last time, I talked about how late-night TV anime came to be the norm for the industry, bringing with it free advertising and the ability to pursue more adult storylines in longer-form media than OVAs (the previously preferred form of adult-oriented anime). The impact of that still plays into today’s topic, though it’s not the subject. This time, the focus is on a pair of subsequent changes that led to still-further increases in production (the second big jump on the graph below).
The first half of the 2000s saw 2 meaningful changes affecting the anime industry. First, studios switched over from old-school cel painting to a digital paint process, reducing production costs and causing a subtle shift in both artstyle and visual presentation. Second, people started buying DVDs over VHS tapes, further reducing production costs (Incidentally DVDs being cheaper to produce than VHS tapes was a key cause of the 2007-2008 WGA strike in America).
If you know enough anime, it’s pretty easy to play Kevin Bacon and link things arbitrarily. Yugioh 5Ds may be notable only for the “Card Games on Motorcycles” meme, but it’s ridiculously easy to connect (via the creators) to the most notable anime of a different decade. If you’re that much of a geek, anyway.
I thought it’d be a fun little exercise to try and pull out as many mangaka names as I could without relying on references. This is that list, written on lockdown mode and complete with the reasons why I remember them.
The noitaminA block’s been out of commission for a few months now, and it’s not coming back as strongly as it could be. One timeslot is being taken up by Ano Hana, a move that’s good advertising for A-1 Pictures but means one less new show this season. Still, the new show we do get comes from strong source material; Hiromu Arakawa’s Shonen Sunday hit Silver Spoon.
Following up on the impressive (well, to me) discovery that Inu x Boku SS is Square Enix’s top manga, I had another thought. It went something like this; “Well, that anime was pretty darn good, and I know it sold a fair amount of Blu-Rays. I wonder if that has anything to do with how successful the manga is right now?” And so I took to the Oricon rankings, checking for shows from Winter and Spring 2012 that came from manga source material, and looking to see if they experienced a boost in sales. So I put a lot of numbers into a lot of spreadsheets, got distracted by the Saurday anime slate, and made a lot of graphs. If you’ve ever wondered why manga publishers sponsor anime, this should be an entertaining read.
So. Much. Paper.
Animetics 