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Wait... I'm confused. How has this not gotten a physical release yet?

I'm not all that invested in it. I watched and mostly enjoyed the show (in a passive way) but have no interest in watching it again. But I thought it was pretty popular stateside and Funimation makes sure to license everything Idol@Master, so, why no physical release?

Spastic Minnow wrote:

Funimation makes sure to license everything Idol@Master, so, why no physical release?

The only thing related to the franchise that they licensed was Puchimas.

You can really feel the love of the staff for the characters in this anime.

Spastic Minnow wrote:

Wait... I'm confused. How has this not gotten a physical release yet?

It might have something to do with physical copy song licensing and the continued fear of "reverse importing" even though this anime premiered four years ago as of this review.

Jaw Dropping Production? Comparable to Space Dandy? I found even with the occasional CGI even Love Live TV series looks significantly better and there's no way that the movie for that is going to look worse than this by a whole letter grade but I suppose everyone has their preferences I suppose. I know I vastly prefer the character design in Love Live as well as the fluid less jerky animation style during concerts which I found was a real problem with this adaptation as well as even it's movie.

I didn't find the story or cast much to write home about either similarly to Love Live only I enjoyed the latter's cast a little better, more fun, more growth IMO. I really didn't feel any particular love from the staff for this either, it's your typical A-1 production through and through really, just get it out there and get the money. Also music, again just enjoyed Love Live's a hell of a lot more than this.

I'm just extremely confused that the same reviewer is so head over heels for everything about this one especially the jerky low detail art and animation (how can people not see it as jerky and framey with all the girls just bouncing around and pointing in concerts with little to no choreography or variety to their steps? )which he goes on and on about calling it a labor of love (I just found it cost cutting and middling at best with it being pretty clear especially since it's followup that the staff doesn't like having to do the concerts much and there maybe being one decently animated concert in Smokey Thrill), but so dismissive of the Love Live movie as pure fluff and doesn't even attempt to go into discussing the cast of that one much or what they have going on, almost as if he hadn't seen the original series it was based on or something.

Alabaster Spectrum wrote:

I'm just extremely confused that the same reviewer is so head over heels for everything about this one especially the jerky low detail art and animation (how can people not see it as jerky and framey with all the girls just bouncing around and pointing in concerts with little to no choreography or variety to their steps? )which he goes on and on about calling it a labor of love (I just found it cost cutting and middling at best with it being pretty clear [...]

Well, it's a question of taste.

If you trully think the general animation of Idolmaster in these scenes here are way worse than those in these Love Live scenes (minus the CGI), then I guess you don't like sakuga-animation in general. I vastly prefer the first style of animation because it's more dynamic and more interesting to see, whereas Love Live's style of animation is just too "sleek" (too "sanitized").

I just randomly watched this last week and finished it in a couple days and indeed, it was a great show, only other contact with idol anime I have had was with Cinderella Girls (I just kinda watched that as it aired) and I can't say I was impressed, not at all, it was exactly what I had in mind when it came to this type of show, there's a bunch of girls and they try to sell themselves by whatever, almost desperate, means they can, the cast felt really fake, even during downtime they'd still be trying their hardest to sell their characters, but to who? The audience at home, and that was damn sad, not what I signed up for even if it was kinda what I expected.
Not to mention that the show wasn't that great looking, not at all, especially the character designs.

Then you have the original and wow, it's like black and white, the characters just feel so much more natural and genuine, sure, sure, they are all still their own archetypes and whatnot but they are just themselves at the end, they don't really go out of their way to change their whole personality just to satisfy people but still keep the in-universe fans in mind, and that's how it should be, if Cinderella Girls as much as took that extra step and only made the girls change themselves for their fans then it'd have been great, I feel like that'd be an actual good representation of a idol's life but it decided to try to pander to the audience too and that just ruined for me.

But anyway, back to the original, I'll mostly agree, the start and middle (11~13ish) were good while the rest of the episodes were enjoyable in their own way, then it kinda crashed with the introduction of the antagonist and actually started to drag a bit, that was until episode 20 and forward, which were easily the best episodes I have seen in a long while and episode 20 itself is one of the best self-contained episodes I have ever seen, Haruka's arc was just mindblowing, ending was kinda cheesy but her struggle was so perfectly executed it pretty much made me forget the first half of the second cour completely.

It's one of those shows I went in with rather tame expectations, got really suprised, then kinda just watched, just to end up speechless at the end.

Swissman wrote:

Alabaster Spectrum wrote:

I'm just extremely confused that the same reviewer is so head over heels for everything about this one especially the jerky low detail art and animation (how can people not see it as jerky and framey with all the girls just bouncing around and pointing in concerts with little to no choreography or variety to their steps? )which he goes on and on about calling it a labor of love (I just found it cost cutting and middling at best with it being pretty clear [...]

Well, it's a question of taste.

If you trully think the general animation of Idolmaster in these scenes here are way worse than those in these Love Live scenes (minus the CGI), then I guess you don't like sakuga-animation in general. I vastly prefer the first style of animation because it's more dynamic and more interesting to see, whereas Love Live's style of animation is just too "sleek" (too "sanitized").

That ones not to bad but still kind of jerky and laborious. I also like Sakuga plenty, I just don't see iDOLM@STERs as anything to write home about whatsoever in that regard. Even in the movie it's just not very good sakuga. I'll take Love Live's sleek and smooth look over the jerky repetitive motions of iDOLM@STER if I have to make a choice on music anime to watch. Love Lives art style also doesn't look as washed out and low detail as iDOLM@STER anime's either.

Also in Love Live the focus of the concert is always pretty much on the concert the whole time and they actually last for the length of a full song, whereas iDOLM@STER it seems like they're doing everything they can not to actually have to animate the concert. You'll get a quick 5 second shot of the idols performing making repetitive jerky looking motions as the camera pans around (probably the hardest actual technical thing to do) then a shot of glow sticks in the audience waving in cycles, then cut to the other characters commenting on the performance instead of letting us see it, then finally back to the performance for a little bit with some more jerky movements, cut back to glow sticks, cut to still frame of the character then it's over with maybe 20 seconds max of actual animated performances. Don't see a whole lot of love in that so much as they're doing a job and trying to keep costs down. By comparison Love Live you get the full 3 minutes focused solely on the performance with more different steps and production side things actually going on and frankly I like the song a lot better too.

For me the choice is just obvious and it seems like the Love Live staff is the actual one that gave way more of a damn then they really needed if I had to pick between the two. I wonder if the fixation people have with iDOLM@STER performances animation has more to do with it being the first one a lot of people really saw because I'm just not seeing the love so much as the blatant cost cutting measures. Like who ends a concert in a music anime on a still frame pan.

Paulo27 wrote:

I just randomly watched this last week and finished it in a couple days and indeed, it was a great show, only other contact with idol anime I have had was with Cinderella Girls (I just kinda watched that as it aired) and I can't say I was impressed, not at all, it was exactly what I had in mind when it came to this type of show, there's a bunch of girls and they try to sell themselves by whatever, almost desperate, means they can, the cast felt really fake, even during downtime they'd still be trying their hardest to sell their characters, but to who? The audience at home, and that was damn sad, not what I signed up for even if it was kinda what I expected.
Not to mention that the show wasn't that great looking, not at all, especially the character designs.

I see it as the clearest difference between A-1 then and A-1 now which is way more blatantly and unabashedly a commercial studio. Same franchise, same studio, even a lot of the same general staff but even more noticeably commercial and kind of soulless like they're their to promote a product and that's the sole creative concern on their mind.

I found the loss in character design quality and detail to the CG animation to not be quite as bad as what this original series lost between it's source and the originals though. It's like A-1 just took the franchise art style and simplified it to fit their cost cutting mass production model.

Anyway the reviewers bias is clear and demonstrable here I think. He couldn't wait to claw into the Love Live films apparent flaws which take up the bulk of the tone of that review and what he talks about (again he barely even mentions anything about the cast or really anything that isn't some sort of dig at it's apparently superfluous merit and existence and how it's in his eyes so fundamentally flawed) and yet with this he's tripping over himself to praise it and barely mentions any of the IMO obvious shortcomings in the show. Also the close proximity of the two reviews does not go unnoticed here either. It's all well and good and obvious personal preference, just pretty blatant how everything he mentions with the Love Live movie has some sort of negative spin and framing to it like not one single aspect of the film isn't diminished by some ultra specific aspect of execution in his eyes, while with this everything has some sort of positive spin or framing to it and that every single little thing is apparently accentuated and a showcase of the staffs apparent unconditional love and dedication to some sort of artistry or something like that. It's a tonal difference in approach this is highly noticeable to the point that I feel it bears commenting on.

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who didn't like this show...In general, I love idol animes. Love Live, AKB0048, Wake Up Girls, etc I all loved, but I could only sit through 3 episodes of Idolm@ster before I was just too bored to stand it anymore. It seems like it probably picks up at some point, but I don't know...something about it just wasn't as enjoyable as the other series. Maybe because the cast was too large? I mean, AKB0048 is nearly double the cast, but they tend to put most of the focus on 2 girls. Eh. Whatever it was, it bugged me and I just couldn't get into it.

Quote:

Also in Love Live the focus of the concert is always pretty much on the concert the whole time and they actually last for the length of a full song, whereas iDOLM@STER it seems like they're doing everything they can not to actually have to animate the concert. You'll get a quick 5 second shot of the idols performing making repetitive jerky looking motions as the camera pans around (probably the hardest actual technical thing to do) then a shot of glow sticks in the audience waving in cycles, then cut to the other characters commenting on the performance instead of letting us see it, then finally back to the performance for a little bit with some more jerky movements, cut back to glow sticks, cut to still frame of the character then it's over with maybe 20 seconds max of actual animated performances. Don't see a whole lot of love in that so much as they're doing a job and trying to keep costs down. By comparison Love Live you get the full 3 minutes focused solely on the performance with more different steps and production side things actually going on and frankly I like the song a lot better too.

It IS a financial editing choice, but it is also an artistic one as any performance done in the anime will probably end up looking inferior to the source game.
By the time the Idolmaster Anime came out, the official Idolmaster 2 game had been released at the start of the same year, anyone already a fan has seen multiple hours of the girls performing in the manner you are pretty much describing how the Im@s anime "should have looked".
Love Live NEEDED those performance shots as it would be the first time the fandom has seen the group of characters perform most of the songs.

You can say that the idolmaster versions of the stage performances "looks cheap", because certainly the studio is doing editing magic to stretch the limited budget, but just as well the intention of the Idolmaster series is to try to get behind the girls POV in place of showing off the usual "audience perspective".

Perhaps I'll give the series another try... Personally, I really don't enjoy shows with large casts because it is a really difficult task to give all of the characters sufficient screen time in order to get the viewer to care about all of them, especially if you introduce them all in the first episode. It was really difficult for me to get invested and a few episodes in, I put it in my On-Hold list. This wasn't as bad for Love Live, as they did a good job staggering the character introductions, so we as viewers did get to know all the characters well enough before they did anything as a group.

I know this isn't an idol show but I feel that K-On! really did a phenomenal job with regard to the music implementation. Unfortunately, I am not one to appreciate music for music's sake and meaning must be put into the song to well, make it meaningful. In K-On!, we follow the group as they compose their songs and we see how each and every song is influenced by their experiences and represent their desires, aspirations, feelings, etc...

I can't really speak for Idolm@ster as I haven't finished it yet, but many idol shows give us hardly any reason to appreciate the music. They pump out song after song with almost zero relation to the narrative and it becomes extremely hard to make them memorable. I do suppose it is a reflection of the idol business where on-stage and off-stage are two separate worlds, but I guess that's one reason why I personally haven't been taken by the genre.

WashuTakahashi wrote:

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who didn't like this show...In general, I love idol animes. Love Live, AKB0048, Wake Up Girls, etc I all loved, but I could only sit through 3 episodes of Idolm@ster before I was just too bored to stand it anymore. It seems like it probably picks up at some point, but I don't know...something about it just wasn't as enjoyable as the other series. Maybe because the cast was too large? I mean, AKB0048 is nearly double the cast, but they tend to put most of the focus on 2 girls. Eh. Whatever it was, it bugged me and I just couldn't get into it.

For me I can why people would go for the cute girls aspect, it's the near universal praise for the animation which again I just find so jerky, washed out, low detail and reeking of cost cutting that eludes me. Like this would be one of the last shows I would point to as a recommendation for animation fans, it's just not a good example of it. An example yes, but not a good one.

Alabaster Spectrum wrote:

For me I can why people would go for the cute girls aspect, it's the near universal praise for the animation which again I just find so jerky, washed out, low detail and reeking of cost cutting that eludes me.

I'm a huge fan of both franchises, but to be perfectly honest, Love Live's CG dance sequences seem more jerky, washed out, low detail and reeking of cost cutting than anything that was done in the IM@S anime.

I think you are correct in your assessment that when Love Live actually uses hand drawn animation, their close-up glamor shots smoke anything in the IM@S franchise. That said, the other half of Love Live performances are made up of steadily improving but still jerky, stiff, & poorly blended CG. By and large, Love Live is one of the best looking anime out there, but by and large, being created by one of the largest animation studios in Japan with the combined financial backing of Bandai, Kodansha, and Lantis, I would expect nothing less.

On the flipside, if it wasn't for the success of the IM@S anime, Love Live probably wouldn't even exist. Back in 2000s, idol anime was basically a dead genre, to the point that when Sunrise was given a crack at the property, they decided to try to turn it into a mecha show instead of do a proper adaptation of the video game. Back in 2011, A-1 was a relatively newer studio adapting a popular video game property for a skeptical fan-base who'd been burned by Xenoglossia and the decision by Namco-Bandai to make three of the more popular idols from the franchise unplayable. Rather than phone it in, A-1 rose to the challenge and put out an incredibly good, character-driven slice-of-life series with solid direction and excellent animation. At the time, the anime industry was still recovering from the collapse of the mid-00's market bubble, and IM@S blew just about everything around it out of the water. A-1 did an excellent job hand-animating all their musical segments at a time when CG sequences typically looked incredibly shoddy, and the result is far more immersive than even more modern CG work.

While I agree with you that a lot of Love Live's animation is ultimately superior to that found in IM@S, taking into account the staff and circumstances under which they were made, IM@S is every bit deserving of the praise it gets for the quality of its animation and the way it resurrected the idol anime genre.

I put the franchise off for some time until I got a good chance last year. While I have experience with several other franchises for idols (and even follow some in reality) I would easily mark this first Idolm@ster anime as the best.

The big competition is Love Live now, and that had such an off-putting main character. Liking Love Live is I think based on your tolerance for that character, as the others don't really do much without her approval.

Meanwhile Idomaster has a cast you can easily chop into pieces, mix and match, and still get goodness out of reliably.

I must also agree with the above post that we wouldn't have the idol boom in anime now, if A-1 didn't knock it out of the park some years ago with Im@s. It made piles of money and now all the projects concieved years ago are finally out and we have perhaps too many. Now there are a bunch of male idol projects coming out as well.

I see it that Love Live wants to usurp the throne, but a lot of that is gonna have to come through staying power. The Im@s girls still rank highly in character charts and the movie last year sold quite well. Even if Cinderella Girls had a mediocre show, the game tiself still does well.

There's an idol war going on, between your Aikatsu, PriPara, WuG, Im@s, Love Live...and some other minor hitters (do we even count Locodol? Not really). My money is on the veterans in 765 Pro.

I love this anime. I am so happy it got a spotlight! Very Happy

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