Forum - View topicAnswerman - The Big Ones
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The King of Harts
 Posts: 6712 Location: Mount Crawford, Virginia |
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Except Gunbuster is an OVA that took months to finish episodes and released whenever, not a TV series where an episode has to be done in a certain amount of time to get it to the TV schedule on time.
Time's not as expensive in that case. |
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Banken
Posts: 1280 |
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Uh, a regular TV episode still takes months to make (6 months to a year for an American cartoon)... the only real difference between a TV episode and an OVA is the budget per episode and how many they have to make (OVAs typically have lower overall budgets...which is the original reason why they made OVAs).
And the real issue I was getting at is labor costs, not the production schedule. If doing it monochrome saves you 15% in labor costs, that's probably within spitting distance of 15% off your total budget, which in the case of a $100,000 anime episode is $15,000. Now, if you've only got $85,000, what do you sacrifice, quality or color? Most of the time they choose quality... (by the way one episode of The Simpsons/Family Guy runs about $2,000,000...actually more for The Simpsons if you include the insane voice cast salaries, while a typical TV anime episode about $70,000 IIRC) |
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walw6pK4Alo
 Posts: 9322 |
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Yeah no. If they really wanted to save budget, there would have been even more stills. That they chose B&W and widescreen cannot be anything but artistic choice. What they could have saved by not using color would have been miniscule.
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Cptn_Taylor
Posts: 925 |
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Maybe Gainax blew the whole budget on the previous 5 episodes and had nothing more for the sixth. Evangelion 26th episode is "artistic" going by your standard. Somehow I doubt many would agree with this assessment. |
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walw6pK4Alo
Posts: 9322 |
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Eva's problems, with still frames like I just said, are more pronounced. If you don't have to animate, you're saving money. Not coloring isn't even close to the same thing. You can't blow the budget on previous episodes when it's an OVA, since they're fundamentally a kind of product funded by the success of the previous installments. I will stick with that it was choice, and I've already seen countless other opinions over many years that agree with that. If ditching color were such an effective tool in saving money, why has it never been repeated? Justin's mentioned several times about how the even film grain stops in Key the Metal Idol, but they didn't stop coloring the cels.
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GeorgeC
Posts: 795 |
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Here, here! I love Lupin III... I've got about every US DVD release except the Streamline/Orion DVD which was in print for about two seconds. Amended: I should say I have ALL the Manga, Funimation, AND Pioneer/Geneon Lupin III DVD's. Plus the AnimEigo release of The Fuma Conspiracy movie AND the Discotek edition of the same. Have both Manga editions of Cagliostro on DVD. I'm nutty enough that I WOULD buy Blu releases of Cagliostro AND The Fuma Conspiracy if they were available. There's a snowball chance in hell of a low-selling series or its movie spin-offs getting the BD treatment... It's just too expensive for small companies that don't have a goldmine like DBZ... P.S. -- Again, I'll mention I talked to Tony Oliver at a small con in 2012. He did the voice of Lupin for the majority, if not all, the Pioneer/Geneon releases. (I've got most, if not all, the P/G DVD's but I have yet to watch them. I saw the series while it was broadcast on CN and it's one of the few anime series where I could watch episodes multiple times without throwing up. Most shows don't hold up well with repeated viewing.) I think he was happier to hear from me that I enjoyed his Lupin more than regurgitating or talking about Robotech for the millionth time! LOL But seriously, Oliver's voice fit Lupin perfectly IMHO. Lupin's basically a decent sort of gentleman's thief but I always figured the guy was a bit of a wiseass, too! LOL |
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E-Master
 Posts: 471 |
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Tony Oliver is among my five favorite English voices of Lupin. I only briefly saw him once at an older Anime Expo, didn't get to talk to him since he was doing some panel talk. But I did took a picture of him from a distance so that was my highlight of the expo. The Pioneer/Geneon English dub of the Red Jacket series was good in its own right even if it was never dub in its entire run of 155 episodes.
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Banken
Posts: 1280 |
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...then why is all manga, with occasional exceptions, in black and white? It's because they don't have time to color it. Because time = money. Obviously saving frames is far more effective at saving budget, which is probably why no one ever did it again. Even Hitchcock only made Psycho in B/W because the studio didn't want him to make the movie and wouldn't give him the budget for monochrome.... |
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walw6pK4Alo
Posts: 9322 |
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Yeah, time is money when it's one person or maybe an assistant having to do all the work themselves. With anime, you have a division of labor where specific artists will be the ones who ink the cels, that was their job, just like key frames and in-betweens are another kind of division. From what I gather, most manga assistants just ink or screen-tone the manga anyway, more time consuming stuff. Then you have to factor in costs for publication and printing all that color ink – manga maintains a super cheap cost in Japan because they stay with black and white, and thus can be printed in telephone books, or where new tankobons only cost 800 yen or so. If special color editions come out, the cost is reflected in the extra labor involved.
As for the choice of color or B&W back in the Technicolor days, it's because you have to then budget for more film development and more lighting, but it's not like Psycho is the last film, or that only cheap films did it. John Wayne's last B&W epic, and the last WWII one, is nearly three hours long and five years after Psycho. Also, maybe I'd need to find a topic that goes in depth on Psycho specifically, but I'm seeing reasons that he chose it on purpose, not the studio. |
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Banken
Posts: 1280 |
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A new tankobon only costs 560 yen or so (still more than a couple years ago). The ironic thing is that tankobon are printed on better paper, but overall lose a ton of resolution due to the smaller size...
But I personally thing the thing about manga is that with their circulation numbers they could easily decide to cut down on the number of pages (# of series in every issue) and print in color for the same price, but the fact that manga has always been in black and white means the consumer doesn't expect or demand color, and the publishers are more than willing to oblige by printing the biggest, cheapest possible magazine every week. If anything, giving artists in weekly magazines two weeks (a chapter every other issue) to draw and color one chapter would probably end up with better overall quality and less artist burnout. ...of course, anime would catch up twice as fast, which would mean the should do the sensible thing and take seasonal breaks instead of stuffing the anime full of filler and stretching out every darn chapter so you have a bloated anime like One Piece which, as much I love it, is 500 episodes of filler and and maybe 150 really good episodes. Especially since around the time they switched to 16:9. |
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Polycell
 Posts: 4623 |
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Isn't One Piece's anime's problem the lack of filler? There aren't many manga that can be adapted one-chapter-per-episode on a regular basis without blatant padding issues and I'm pretty sure the number drops to none in that genre.
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Shiroi Hane
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 7580 Location: Wales |
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I shall have to dig out my copy of Mononoke Hime where they talk about having to colour parts of it digitally because they didn't have the time and/or budget (I forget which) to paint it traditionally. |
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Banken
Posts: 1280 |
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No, One Piece's problem is that they drag out the canon arcs WAAAAY too long now. If you go back and watch the first 300-400 episodes you'll notice that all of the arcs up to Skypea were extremely well-paced with the occasional short filler arc. For example, the Nami arc, which was arguably the best overall storytelling in One Piece, was only 14 episodes long!!! My favorite arc, the Alabasta arc, was only 38. By comparison, the worst canon arc by far, IMO, the Thriller Bark arc, was 45 agonizing episodes long. The longest arc being the Fishman Island, which was OK, but would have been better if it was cut down to about 20, and that's being generous. The best part of any current One Piece episode is the first handful of an arc, the last couple episodes of an arc, and the episodes between arcs, which end up being the most entertaining of all. I'd rather anime shows take a three-four month break every year rather than drag the canon arcs out for years at a time. You know, like shows in every other country in the world. |
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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^
The One Piece anime is kept on air because the producers worry that the manga sales will do poorly if the show isn't reminding everyone that One Piece exists. Given that the manga is the biggest ever in history, I think the producers are way off base. They don't really care about the anime quality because it is just a commercial for the manga, so if it is riddled with filler then that's a small price to pay for the continued advertising. However, the overwhelming bulk of One Piece manga fans are actually adults who probably don't watch the anime much anyway. And the fanbase is only getting older. With this in mind, the anime is hardly an effective commercial, especially when its quality is impaired due to excessive filler. I suspect the anime is aired more for prestige reasons than to bring newcomers on board or to remind people to buy the manga. I like what Bakuman did. Three seasons of twenty-five episodes each, in a six-months-on and then six-months-off pattern. It meant that filler was never a problem, because there's no chance that the anime will overtake the manga. |
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MetalUpa1014
 Posts: 283 Location: USA |
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There's an anime convention in Pittsburgh near where I live and Tony Oliver apparently makes regular appearances there. Really? Because I honestly thought that the dub was one of the weakest I've heard. It boarders between bland and terrible, which isn't a good sign. Oliver is decent, but I think he sounds too effeminate for a gentlemen thief. Besides the second series, did Tony Oliver do any other Lupin projects? I personally think that David Hayter and Sonny Strait were the best ones. |
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