This Week in Anime
Are Anime Production Delays the New Normal?
by Monique Thomas & Steve Jones,
With the recent delays to Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead and the Nier anime's final episodes dropped unceremoniously late, Steve and Nicky look at production delays in the anime industry.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
@Lossthief
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@BeeDubsProwl
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@NickyEnchilada
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@vestenet
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Steve
Nicky, while this season has no shortage of zombies, vampires, ghosts, and isekai adaptations to sate our appetite for horror, it's about time we steeled ourselves for a conversation about true terror, i.e., the anime industry.
Nicky, while this season has no shortage of zombies, vampires, ghosts, and isekai adaptations to sate our appetite for horror, it's about time we steeled ourselves for a conversation about true terror, i.e., the anime industry.
Nicky
Ever the persistent menace, anime production woes continue to plague anime viewers and anime producers alike. Since the dawn of the industry, exploitation in the industry has been a rampant issue, and occasionally we might even get anime that depict or satirize the unhealthy work environments that anime companies are notorious for. While not an anime company specifically, the production company depicted in the recent Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead is art imitating life. The first episode impressed me with how well the direction captured the real-life dread of a work environment that leaves everyone feeling lifeless.
It's not an exaggeration to say that it feels like one of the season's best animated and best-directed premieres.
Ever the persistent menace, anime production woes continue to plague anime viewers and anime producers alike. Since the dawn of the industry, exploitation in the industry has been a rampant issue, and occasionally we might even get anime that depict or satirize the unhealthy work environments that anime companies are notorious for. While not an anime company specifically, the production company depicted in the recent Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead is art imitating life. The first episode impressed me with how well the direction captured the real-life dread of a work environment that leaves everyone feeling lifeless.
It's not an exaggeration to say that it feels like one of the season's best animated and best-directed premieres.
Oh, no doubt about that. It's in the running for the best premiere of the whole year. And that's also why it makes sense to start having more open conversations about the behind-the-scenes of series big and small. Even casual anime enjoyers will likely notice the increased prevalence of delays, setbacks, and flagging quality as these issues affect higher and higher profile shows. And here we have a stunning blockbuster premiere that cheekily parodies a real-life anime studio as an example of an overtime-saturated corporate hellscape. The monster is here, and it's scratching at the door.
To summarize, Akira Tendo was once a fresh and lively young working adult until he finally landed a job in his dream industry. After three years of making advertisements under nightmarish conditions full of unpaid overtime, power harassment, and sex scandals, his thoughts have grown dark, leaving him with no will to live. Until a zombie apocalypse happens, he's suddenly revitalized by the thought of no longer having to go to work! Given a second chance at life, he's determined to make the most of it.
You have to love an episode where the literal message is that fighting through the end of the world is better than going to work. I frequently have that thought when my alarm goes off in the morning.
It goes from depicting the dark reality of struggling to live everyday life like some survival horror to a morbid but humorous fantasy where the collapse of society releases this everyman from all the barriers that kept him from enjoying life. I would be lying if I said I didn't wish that everything in the fast-moving world would crash so I could breathe.
The cruel and unfair truth is that we live in a dull world bereft of zombies but full of responsibilities. And it turns out not even Zom 100 can outrun its gravitational pull. Real-life production problems have put us in the middle of an unscheduled off-week for the show, proving that irony is the most potent force in the universe.
Anime has always been a vital reprieve for me from my everyday life, but the animators can't seem to catch a break. While still early in the season, the fourth and upcoming fifth episodes of Zom 100 had a one-week delay. Despite the fantastic headstart, the subject, and a good adaption and story, no amount of fantasy can escape the horror that walks among us. I enjoyed what I saw in the show, but I fear for the future. What good we saw might not be sustainable—a shame for a season that has otherwise felt dreary and limp.
Speaking solely as an audience member, it's demoralizing to see such an incredible first episode and then contend with the implication that only unsustainable circumstances could have produced it. And that's the good end of the bargain. We're the ones who still get to sit back and enjoy the animation. On the other side of the screen, an entire team of workers scrambles and compromises to meet imminent deadlines, so they can have time to scramble and compromise to meet the next deadline.
Tbf, I also thought episode four had a dip in quality, but I would rather have a show be delayed than shamble in front of me; it's still a horror. In my discussion about adaptions with Nick in (This Week In Anime) and the kind of horror felt when an anime adaptation doesn't meet your expectations, I would consider this kind of fall-off to be a subgenre of that. Usually, I avoid shows that look and feel bad, but watching wonderful art slowly decay, transform, or reveal itself to have monstrous behind-the-scenes is more of a creeping horror.
We should clarify, though, that it's perfectly normal for quality and ambition to wax and wane throughout a series. It could even be a sign of good planning! Every anime works with a finite set of resources, so if you know in advance that specific episodes will be more labor-intensive or more critical to the story, it makes sense to allocate more resources there and cut corners where you can afford to. For instance, many shows will have flashy premieres because they want to wow their prospective audience, and then they'll dial it back to a more consistently achievable standard. That isn't what we're talking about here.
The end quality also isn't everything; Steve and I talked about how some shows like the recent Ooku, while not the prettiest, were at least consistent in their inelegance and told the story well. There are good-looking shows that have harmful work environments. As viewers, the only way we ever learn the truth about an anime production is when something leaks out, an employee might vent on social media, or we might get an announcement about delays. Companies try harder to avoid showing symptoms on the end product because it's too easy to notice something is wrong.
It reminds me a lot of Shirobako, an inspirational series about working in the anime industry, where some of the motivation for the fictionalized production to get completed on time is to avoid the shame of releasing a terrible-looking episode like before.
Which speaks to how bad things have gotten. How stretched thin the animators are. They don't need to hide cries for help in the ending credits anymore when you have a highly anticipated adaptation like NieR: Automata Ver 1.1a getting multiple, mid-season, months-long delays. Anyone can see a crack in the foundation that big.
The emergence of COVID also didn't help since a highly infectious virus doesn't fair well when everyone is stuck in one office pushing themselves to their physical limits. However, it's notable that A-1 also struggled with the second season of 86, and I am still fond of that show despite its troubles, including some of how it had to be adapted given the conditions. For what it's worth, the NieR anime still really sticks the landing and ends up doing what I wanted, which is being a very different adaption than just a straight adaption of the game. The delays did pay off for having a better series in the end, but it's still a shame. As a consumer, delays reduce hype and interest, they're inconvenient, but they also look bad because it shows that the corporate expectations are frequently unrealistic. The same happens in games, too, people get upset when games or movies get delayed, but those are different from anime broadcast every week.
Ultimately, I'd rather deal with the inconvenience of a long delay than many short ones, and it's better than having a less flexible approach when everything is so strict.
We could take something like the NieR anime and look at it as a disaster, but it's better than what we could've gotten. Many shows hit production snags and never recover.
Even an apparent success story like NieR 1.1a belies a ton of extra stress and squeezing behind the scenes. It isn't like you delay one show, and it bumps all the other shows down the queue. It means you have staff and freelancers juggling the delayed episode completion on top of all the other work they already had lined up. NieR 1.1a might have gotten away with it because it's a franchise with clout, so it might have been easier for producers to line up the extra resources needed. But not all anime can be so lucky.
This is a roundabout way of saying I'm still not over the Wonder Egg Priority finale.
Yeah, my speculation on NieR is an attempt to be optimistic; anime professionals have stressed that the production committees that contract anime studios still prioritize quick turnaround above all else. Any extra time that has to be taken is just borrowing; the studio still pays for it, just later. If it's not one job, it's the next one, and since anime studios don't see much profit unless they're part of the committee or get much budget, it's common for them to pile up projects to make ends meet. I always wonder how much better the Farewell, My Dear Cramer or Tribe Nine anime could've been if it weren't for the enormous amount of series Liden Films was producing at the time.
That's me when I think about the tragedy of Farewell, My Dear Cramer.
That's me when I think about the tragedy of Farewell, My Dear Cramer.
The Wegg situation was a real eye-opener for me. A lot of people palpably felt the show fall off after they had to turn the eighth episode into a clip show, but for the most part, I still really liked it up through the end of the course. And with three entire months to put together a single episode, there's no way it wouldn't be able to wrap things up nicely. I could not have been more wrong. Even ignoring all the unique exacerbating factors that eventually turned the series into a perfect shitstorm, parts of the final episode looked like they were held together with scotch tape. That showed me just how time-crunched the whole system must be.
It's the opposite of what happened to the original first season finale of Blood Blockade Battlefront, which took almost a whole year to complete, partially because they couldn't get a good timeslot to air it. It's worth noting that some anime do recover from woes and slumps; hell, I'm not sure how true this is now, but it used to be that part of the reason having sloppy off-model episodes was considered "ok" in the industry because they would be corrected for the Blu-rays. You can still find entire fan blogs dedicated to documenting all the little changes for Attack on Titan S1.
Even still, logic dictates that correcting something takes more work than doing it right the first time. This logic also holds outside of Blu-rays. The anime task force is increasingly international, with some studios recruiting animators hot off the Twitter presses. That somewhat alleviates the workforce issue, but now you've got a bunch of long-distance animators who might not be familiar with the subtleties of the industry's pipeline, which means more mistakes, corrections, and work overall.
Not to mention, it's not going to work out if you have apparent story or pre-production issues. You can't recover if the story choices and script are bad, the direction from the storyboards is unclear, or someone from the top decides to make a sudden change. This is also true of many VFX studios for movies. These issues are not all unique to anime but true to many creative industries, and I'm sure many of you will see this as we learn about the current Hollywood strikes and the effort for workers to unionize.
Organized labor! It's in the news, and for a good reason: it works! And, short of the collective bargaining power that anime workers would have as part of a union, I can't imagine another way for conditions in the industry to improve without some disastrous financial collapse and readjustment.
Things are dire even in the West, where many creative industries have been unionized for decades. This partially has to do with broader social attitudes about art. Most people consider art a trivial product compared to more practical items like food, clothes, or other goods. As an artist myself, most people underestimate the kind of time, focus, and energy it takes to make anything good. They might think that because it's a "fun" thing to do, it couldn't be exhaustive, and even in Zom 100, you see similar excuses where Tendo's co-workers devalue themselves because they're conditioned to it. Schedules and funding are often decided at the executive level.
It feels like we're approaching an inflection point across these creative industries, and although it's a tough battle ahead of them, it's the artists who deserve a win. That's not to say the industry can't take measures to alleviate these widespread problems and production collapses in the interim. I'll let Seiji Mizushima suggest one I've long argued about.
Trust me, if anyone understands the need for far fewer anime, it's the people who work in the industry and the people who write for "This Week In Anime."
Trust me, if anyone understands the need for far fewer anime, it's the people who work in the industry and the people who write for "This Week In Anime."
The true tragedy isn't that crunch and delays that occur due to the complex nature of the creative industry; it's that much of it is entirely preventable. There are a lot of factors that go into it, sure. Still, as of now, we keep seeing these disasters because the system is inflexible and unsustainable, primarily due to the arbitrary decisions of corporate powers that be. In that, it might not be different from any other job. The people at the top of the pyramid don't care about people working below them. Even the studios and animators who are the victims here, it's on them to push back and negotiate how to be treated fairly. It takes real courage to walk out!
It's worth watching that entire Mizushima interview with Otaquest because he gives much insight into the production process and its current woes and weak points. More to the point, he has the stature to do so. Most animators don't have a voice. Speaking out may blacklist them from future work. It sucks, and it again emphasizes how important interdisciplinary solidarity would be for pointing the industry back in the right direction.
While the dream of sticking it to the man is inspiring, it's not about the individual action that matters. One person quitting might not affect a destructive industry that deems its workers disposable. It would be very different if everyone started acting with the same self-respect and stood up. Though, that's only from the inside. What about everyone else? We've talked about the state of the industry many times before. What's the point of beating a zombified horse if most of us can't do anything about it?
Well, if some of us watched a little less isekai, that might be a start.
Well, joking aside, there might be some truth to that. I'm not talking about anything concrete, like view counts or dollars. Tracking consumerist habits' effect on the industry isn't that exact, and boycotting isn't always the best action. There needs to be more we can do directly. But as I mentioned, the industry can get away with this stuff because most people aren't taught to appreciate art. Today, I focused a lot on how much even the "failures" mean to me because I wanted to show that there's still value to the things people made beyond the systems that exploit them.
Honestly, there's not much we can do as anime consumers at this point. The organization just isn't there. What we can do for now, though, is show our support for analogous movements—the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes, the VFX industry unionization efforts—so that when they do win, they might show other creatives in other fields that things can be better. There is another way. You're not doomed to be a zombie.
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