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Answerman - Why Are Anime Series So Short These Days?

I for one love it when a show is written and planned for a set number of episodes, with the possibility of more seasons down the line. This is much better than how most shows here in the US tend to be made, where they basically keep spitting out episodes until the ratings drop and the show gets canceled. I prefer the story to be well produced and planned with a concrete ending already in mind, seems to make for a much better overall story. At least that way it can end on a high note, as opposed to the whimper of a previously popular show that overstayed its welcome and jumped the shark one too many times.

Which is strange since Marvel (Disney) makes episodic tv series whereas Warner Bros generally makes standalone straight to dvd adaptations of their comic books.

And it's generally only forgettable to people who hate them....yet that doesn't apply to works like Teen Titans Go or Ultimate Spider-Man

Although a big concern is if they adapt too much of the source material in the first season and don't have enough for a second season of a hit series.

Couldn't it also be because they keep catching up to the manga too quickly? I've noticed that Shounen Jump have been handling their anime adaptions much better in recent years, first giving a manga a 24-26 episode season, then waiting a few months, giving them another 24-26 episode season, waiting a few months, etc... Like the Haikyuu!! anime. Their new anime aren't treated like Naruto/Bleach/One Piece, where they go on forever and are constantly infested with low quality filler episodes. The quality of the animation is so much better too, when you wait a few months before giving it another season.

I for one love it when a show is written and planned for a set number of episodes, with the possibility of more seasons down the line. This is much better than how most shows here in the US tend to be made, where they basically keep spitting out episodes until the ratings drop and the show gets canceled. I prefer the story to be well produced and planned with a concrete ending already in mind, seems to make for a much better overall story. At least that way it can end on a high note, as opposed to the whimper of a previously popular show that overstayed its welcome and jumped the shark one too many times.

I wonder with the rise of streaming if things won't change again. I find it hard to justify buying a set box since I know I already watched the show and if I want to watch it again I can probably find it on one of the many streaming service that I'm potentially already subscribed to. On the other hand if I want to buy a merchandise I don't have any other choice, so I'm queasy about spending 60$ on a BR set but I have no problem spending close to 1000$ on gunplas.

I think the biggest impact I've seen is that shows now are more likely not to come to a final conclusion. More likely than not, much is still left unresolved by series end, keeping it open in the hope it will be picked up for another season. It used to be that a show would go for 26-50 episodes, and even if it was cut short, they'd have enough time to eke out an ending of some sort to at least bring the series to a close. Not so now. There might be a season arc that more or less comes to a close, but usually the central story is left unresolved and (sadly, not too infrequently) if the show is never renewed, the story is left hanging (or at the very least, you have to seek out the manga or light novels to discover where things went from there) (*glancing at Spice and Wolf on DVD shelf*).

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the new format is bad. Its just... one of the things that attracted me to anime originally was its serialized storytelling. In such a format, there is the implication that some resolution by series end would take place, instead of the American format of always teasing but never quite delivering. It was one of the things that made anime unique. And now, that aspect seems to be falling more and more by the wayside.

From an artistic standpoint, if but for the financial component, the sponsorship format is the better option. The problem I feel with many shows nowadays is that there is a stuttered production. Many shows are constantly swaying between trying to rush and cover a certain amount of story, and slowing down to highlight parts too. Knowing they only have one cour to hook the audience for a chance at more, they awkwardly morph the original pacing to deleterious effect. It muddies the question of whether a project is itself faulty, or if it's a matter of how it was reformatted to fit the constraints of the TV landscape it's put in.

I may be a bit unusual in that I don't really give a fig about what's airing in the current season (seriously, I've watched maybe two or three shows "live" over the past few years). Most of the shows I watched in my early years were being broadcast on US TV a few years after their Japanese premieres, and even today I prefer waiting long enough for the wheat to be filtered out from the chaff. If you're in no rush to watch things, it makes it easier to appreciate the shows that have honed the fine art of the slow burn.

DRosencraft–

I forget exactly who I heard this from on YouTube (Mother's Basement? Glass Reflection? Someone else?) but someone said that that the best adaptation formula is to take for any given episode to devote a small portion of the said episode to Over-arching Plot "A" and spend most of the time on Sub-plot "B" with the idea that "B" gets resolved in the episode and "A" gets advanced just enough to be its own hook at the end of the episode. TNT's USA's Burn Notice followed this formula to a "T".

Cptn_Taylor wrote:

For a tv series you need at a minimum 26 episodes.

I'm willing to bet that a lot of fans of British comedy and sci fi would disagree with you.

Again the issue seems to escape you. British tv series are short, maybe 10 episodes. But one episode lasts 1 hour (that's like 3 anime episodes worth of running time). So a live British series has as much running time as a 30 episode anime series. Since most anime series theze days have 12 episodes, that's what a running time of 4 hours ? It's not enough time to carry out a coherent storyline, have meaningful characters doing meaningful things in an organic way. All you get is something that feels disjointed. Disconnected. A set of disjointed set pieces. That's modern anime in a nutshell. And it affects every genre. Nobody is safe from this disease.

I agree with zrnzle500 regarding what Cptn_Taylor said.

Ideally, you would determine how many episodes were needed in order to tell the story you wanted to tell, then make it that many episodes. Some stories can be told in a few episodes, others need a whole bunch, but it is the story that determines that, not the economics of it. As I said, that (to me, anyway) is the ideal.

I think it's more efficient to do the other way around, actually--the higher-ups tell you how many episodes you'll have, and then you make a story with a level of complexity and/or pacing to fit that. A good writer should be able to tell a good story regardless of how short or long it is (barring extreme shortness or length). No one has full control over a TV show's length, not even the network.

Unfortunately this seems to mean fewer Shoujo shows in general since merchandising is so difficult. Though personally I would welcome the return of Shoujo anime Barbie dolls.

they're frequently presented with existing source material, and have to fit that existing material into the confines of a series. (And I suspect, under the schedule gun from the get go.) That's a rather different and more difficult problem than writing from scratch.

I think some people are confused, anime has ALWAYS being an advertising medium, whether they are advertising toys, manga, games or itself (see disc or ticket sales).

Short tv anime series do not have enough time to build and develop meaningful character interactions. They do not have enough time to deliver a fullfilling conclusion.
Back in the day, you have a lot of bad /mediocre shows but you also had a lot of good series that delivered on the storytelling character interaction front. Nowadays this is simply impossible save for a handful of exceptions because of the short number of episodes.

Is it possible that the types of stories that you enjoy just aren't represented by the new crop of shorter shows? For example, Votoms could never be done as an 13-episode series, but at the same time a story like Serial Experiments Lain really wouldn't have benefited from 12 more episodes. Perhaps you prefer the former to the latter?

Series are short because they cater to otaku who have the attention span of goldfish.

MarshalBanana wrote:

I do miss when 26 episodes was the standard(from around the mid 90s to late 00s), now it is usually 13 episodes, if it 26 episodes, then it's broken up into 2 seasons. I think the only new shows in the 10s to go over 100 episodes have been Toriko and Hunter x Hunter(JoJo of you combine all parts).

Also Aikatsu and Fairy Tail 2014. And Space Brothers ended at 99 episodes, so you might as well give it an honorary membership in the club.

MarshalBanana wrote:

I do miss when 26 episodes was the standard(from around the mid 90s to late 00s), now it is usually 13 episodes, if it 26 episodes, then it's broken up into 2 seasons. I think the only new shows in the 10s to go over 100 episodes have been Toriko and Hunter x Hunter(JoJo of you combine all parts).

Also Aikatsu and Fairy Tail 2014. And Space Brothers ended at 99 episodes, so you might as well give it an honorary membership in the club. But yeah, definitely not nearly as many as there used to be.

I don't miss the 100+ episode marathon shows myself, but I wish we did have more 24-26 episode shows, because it often felt like that was the sweet spot between giving enough room to develop the characters and fully flesh out the story without letting things get dragged out too much. A quick glance at my top ten favorite TV anime says that seven of them were two-cour or split-cour, most recently Silver Spoon in 2013/14, and none were longer than that.