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Answerman - Why Are Anime Series So Short These Days?

TsukasaElkKite wrote:

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

Series are short because storytelling isn't the focus anymore. It's selling associated merchanise that's the fundamental thing. This is a by product of the fact that by and large anime has been kicked out of tv (japanese broadcast tv). It now only survives as 13 episodes advertisments for manga, figures, blu-rays, pillows to be shown late at night, or very very early in the morning.
I worry that fans of anime have bought hook, line and sinker into the quantity is quality mantra. No, quantity is not a sign of quality. Most modern japanese anime short 13 episode series are shit. And this is across the spectrum. Slice of life series, science fiction series, mecha series. Choose your genre. They're all identical in that the storytelling aspect has gone out the window. And you're left with characters either infodumping for sake of infodumping, or just characters standing there 'cause they're cute.
13 episodes is barely enough for an oav. There was a reason most oav were derided back in day. And it wasn't because the animation was poor. They were derided because try as you might the story telling aspect was always botched. And the main reason for that was the very small number of episodes.
For a tv series you need at a minimum 26 episodes. You can do a fully fleshed out story, with real character interactions and developments withing this framework. If it works out it is really a fulfilling experience for the audience. If it doesn't work out one can always blame the writers.

That means they just tend to resist any sort of tendency that comes from the west, like streaming services, Steam or whatever.

Ironically, we here in the west actually have access to far better and cheaper services like Crunchyroll or Funimation if we want to watch anime as soon as it's released, while Japanese fans either have to stick with television hours or buy insanely overpriced Blu-Rays. And in case you were wondering, yep, Crunchyroll and Funimation are blocked in Japan.

Steam is a different matter though as Japan doesn't really game that much on the PC like a significant fraction of the west does.

I would think the Japanese have access to pirated stuff just as easily as we do

We can watch simulcasts and any other available titles any time we want online by paying a rather small fee, while the people in the country all this stuff is from have to spend about 48.000 yen if they wish to have all the episodes in a 12-episode show available at any time, but in physical form. At least Blu-Rays usually come packed with goodies.

BodaciousSpacePirate wrote:

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?

If it were as you say I would have stopped watching modern anime a long time ago. I like anime, I watch modern anime each season. But I do see how things have changed for the worse over the last couple of decades. Take for instance Knights of Sidonia. It's not a 12 episodes series although it was made as 3 seasons of 12 episodes each. Now each season is quite faithful to the manga, the animation was good to great, the audio aspects were done really good. So what was missing ? The organic feel was missing in that you could see the story advancing episode to episode and yet it felt like reading a grocery list. Item A checked, item B checked but we don't see how we went from A to B. That's why I talk about modern anime feeling like a set of disjoint pieces. The very few episodes of each independent season makes this disjointness in the events and character development that much more apparent, and even dominant. Another example is Macross Delta. Even this one is a 26 episodes series yet it is bad. Not because of the number of episodes but because the writers simply forgot about the story.

This is my criticism, that the shorter the series (or the focus on 12 episode independent seasons) the more dominant the "disjointness" of events and character development. It ends up feeling like watching the equivalent of reading a grocery list.

You can of course tell a story in 60 seconds. It's just that the type of story is going to be completely different from that that you would tell using 26 episodes. 12-13 episodes simply do not give the writers the necessary leeway to be ambitious in the narrative. So you always end up with the same kind of constraints. Either the series ends up in infodump, or you simply lose characters because they're effectively irrelevent, or the ending "just happens". It's all very unfulfilling.

Series are short because storytelling isn't the focus anymore. It's selling associated merchanise that's the fundamental thing. This is a by product of the fact that by and large anime has been kicked out of tv (japanese broadcast tv). It now only survives as 13 episodes advertisments for manga, figures, blu-rays, pillows to be shown late at night, or very very early in the morning.
I worry that fans of anime have bought hook, line and sinker into the quantity is quality mantra. No, quantity is not a sign of quality. Most modern japanese anime short 13 episode series are shit. And this is across the spectrum. Slice of life series, science fiction series, mecha series. Choose your genre. They're all identical in that the storytelling aspect has gone out the window. And you're left with characters either infodumping for sake of infodumping, or just characters standing there 'cause they're cute.
13 episodes is barely enough for an oav. There was a reason most oav were derided back in day. And it wasn't because the animation was poor. They were derided because try as you might the story telling aspect was always botched. And the main reason for that was the very small number of episodes.
For a tv series you need at a minimum 26 episodes. You can do a fully fleshed out story, with real character interactions and developments withing this framework. If it works out it is really a fulfilling experience for the audience. If it doesn't work out one can always blame the writers.

mangamuscle wrote:

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).

Being used for advertising isn't the problem. The problem is that that's ALL they are used for. Telling a coherent story, having any kind of resolution, having good animation. Essentially none of that matters for certain members of the production committee when the goal is simply to put their product into peoples minds and peak their interest ever so slightly. You can make a show, like Madoka, that tells a complete story, but also works as advertising for books, music, figures, discs, etc etc. That's something I'm totally okay with. What I'm sick and tired of(and I think most people are), are shows like NGNL or Overlord, that cover a tiny and incredibly unsatisfactory amount of a story, and then are never renewed.

The shorter the series (or the focus on 12 episode independent seasons) the more dominant the "disjointness" of events and character development. It ends up feeling like watching the equivalent of reading a grocery list.

This this this. If you think 12 episodes is all you have, you're going to pace your story entirely differently than if you have a larger mythology you're trying (and expecting) to get to. At best, you get an uneven release that doesn't feel like a 40 episode *series* so much as blocks of discrete stories with coherence limited by periodic "final episode material" that could be used to end it.

Would FMA/FMB have worked if they had to wrap things up every 12 eps? Probably not. It organically flows because they're not trying to.

Likewise, if the production is unsure if it's going to last by around episode 8, you can't really wrap things up. Imagine how much more awesome ERASED would have been if they'd been able to not hurriedly rush the last few eps out and could take their time with pacing.

You say that as if Japanese are collectively of the same mindset. That's like stating all Westerners are fickle bandwagoners who would jump at the "next big thing" at a drop of a hat because change, change, change. Not every country has to drink the "streaming is the future" koolaid either.