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Answerman - Why Are Anime Series So Short These Days?

Ajin, the CG anime by Polygon Pictures, sold like crap in Japan and yet it's getting a second season. I wonder why (hint: it was released on Netflix after it's original run in Japan).

Growing up watching anime through the 70s, and dealing with a considerable number of titles with 24+ episodes, I have to say I appreciate these 12/13 episode series more.

People only tend to remember the good shows, but forget how many of those longer episode series had more filler than story, a feature I do not miss about anime. I couldn't imagine trying to watch those older shows, such as Magic Knight Rayearth (in which all three girls get their own "quest" to find their uh ... mecha-like things.

A show like Cowboy Bebop was a rare thing, where the action was nice and formulated through its 24 episodes, which kept many entertained.

The biggest reason I enjoy the 13 episode series is I can now consume more of them. Those which do well tend to get another season, while the others... wait for a century to pass before finally getting licensed.

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).

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

But seriously, the problem in anime is that the writers are often hobbled out of the gate - 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.

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.

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.

Aphasial wrote:

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.

I think the Fullmetal Alchemist manga could've been adapted to an entertaning story told within 12 episodes. It would've had to be drastically changed, but it could be done.

The issue isn't the length *directly*; it's the length in relation to the story wanting to be told. If everyone knows something is only going to be 12 episodes long, then the full breadth of the story can be condensed down into that (however unsuccessfully).

But what's worse than a highly-abridged version of a story (like a 12 ep FMA would be) is an unevenly paced one, where they have little choice but to split the difference between the likely results (either 1 cour or 2) and plan out around 16 eps worth. By episode 9 they either find out they won't be getting an extension and have to squeeze 7 eps of plot into the final 3, or find out they have more room and have to stretch that 7 out info 15. That doesn't serve much artistic benefit compared to the case where a 26 episode series is planned and they either a) adapt more of the source material to fill it, or b) spread more character development and world building into the series from the beginning.

I think that's my problem most of all here: 12 eps gives you room for plot, but not world building, and the overall story of the characters' development suffers. A 12 ep series (eg, Lain, Madoka) is fine if handled properly as a coherent, well-paced story. But that's like asking every novel to be 100 pages in length.

As for world building, I think that's something that doesn't need to be prioritized. You want to make your characters relatable and your plot going forward, and world building does neither of those. Part of the reason why The Force Awakens was liked way better than any of the Star Wars prequel movies is because, unlike the prequel movies, there is almost no world building in The Force Awakens other than the background, and any world building done in that movie is plot-relevant. The movie is set in some other galaxy with space travel and aliens and all that, but it only tells you what it needs to tell you, and nothing more.

If a show is one cour, and doesn't have a conclusive ending, they won't watch it.

It is not as if open ended series based on ongoing manga are something new. Back in the day such shows as Bastard!, Video Girl Ai, and 3x3 Eyes provided only the very beginning of the series an let you go to the manga for more. Other shows such as Compiler and Hyperdoll simply started in the middle of a series you were supposed to be familiar with and provided side stories to the manga.)

relyat08 wrote:

If a show is one cour, and doesn't have a conclusive ending, they won't watch it.

One cour show from this past summer season with a conclusive ending:

Orange
Time Travel Girl
Qualidea Code
Ange Vierge

If you expand the definition to "shows that went full circle" I would add;

New Game!
Amanchu!

So it is not like one cour series that tell a full story are scarce, but if you add the "coolest series" tag you would be asking to have your cake and eat it.

The Force Awakens could get away with that for the same reason that Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows could get away with leaving out some of the finer points - the worldbuilding, the finer points, these were already established in previous movies and well known to the target audience. An anime adaptation of an existing property is explicitly targeted at a very different audience - an audience that is unaware of your property and which you wish to convince to buy the property you're advertising. You can't simply drop the characters in and push the "go" button.

The problem with worldbuilding is that so few authors are any good at it, let alone conveying the necessary details to the audience.

Even if you list them out, that's still a pretty small number. We had 45+ shows this season, and only 6 of them have solidly conclusive endings?! That's pretty weak sauce. If you include 2 cour shows, you could probably(hopefully. I haven't started it yet) add Kuromukuro as well. And maybe Twin Star Exorcists(?).
(Interesting, didn't know that Ange Vierge had a conclusive ending was that an original?)