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The studios that interest me most at the moment are:

Brains-Base - After some remarkable shows like Baccano!, Kure-nai, and Durarara!!, they seem to have faded from the scene. The couple of recent shows I see listed are Servamp and Cheer Boys! which seem to have more in common with that company's horrid Akikan! than Baccano!. (They do like their exclamation points!)

Studio 3Hz - Out of the blue, this little studio has produced two incredibly stylish and unusual shows, Flip Flappers and Princess Principal. Where did they come from, and can they survive? Princess Principal had much better average disc sales (6,000) than Flip Flapper's abysmal sub-900 figure, so their future might be less in doubt than I thought six months ago.

The histories of Madhouse, Manglobe, and Satelight might also be fairly enlightening in terms of their ability or, in Manglobe's case. failure to survive in a rapidly changing industry.

yuna49 wrote:

The histories of Madhouse, Manglobe, and Satelight might also be fairly enlightening in terms of their ability or, in Manglobe's case. failure to survive in a rapidly changing industry.

I feel really bad for Manglobe's closure. All they tried to do was produce original stuff that was trying to potentially appeal more to the Western market (and definitely succeeded in the case of shows like Samurai Champloo and Ergo Proxy), but didn't quite manage to appeal to their own country's audience, which cost them big.

yuna49 wrote:

Brains-Base - After some remarkable shows like Baccano!, Kure-nai, and Durarara!!, they seem to have faded from the scene. The couple of recent shows I see listed are Servamp and Cheer Boys! which seem to have more in common with that company's horrid Akikan! than Baccano!. (They do like their exclamation points!)

Don't forget Kamichu! and D-Frag! too.

Anyway, Brain's Base did put out Anonymous Noise in April and have Gakuen Babysitters due out in January, but it seems like a lot of their time has been taken up with working on Rin-ne over the past couple of years (including another 25-episode season this year), plus they've also been working on a new Dance With Devils film that's due out next month, and producing films always tends to slow down a studio's TV output, especially a smaller studio. They're also another studio that lost people, though. Studio Shuka was founded by former Brain's Base staff a few years ago, and they apparently took Durarara and Natsume with them (having done the most recent seasons of both those shows in lieu of Brain's Base).

Gonzo is a studio I think people underestimated and its a shame, cause they made some great shows like Last Exile, Kaleido Star, and my favorite one from them: Samurai 7

I love this article, I can't wait to read the rest of them! I would love to see them go even more in depth, this was cool but I wanted even more lol

the article skipped the stage when gonzo was doing hentai Sad

Last edited by Zeino on Wed Oct 18, 2017 11:30 pm; edited 1 time in total

Ah, I remember the days when they were Funimation's favorite anime studio to license from and have a fair amount of their output from their glory years.

Of which, Gankutsuou, Last Exile, Welcome to the N.H.K. and Kaleido Star are excellent. Full Metal Painc season 1, Basilisk, Samurai 7 and Romeo × Juliet quite good. Kiddy Grade decent and the original Hellsing anime which was fun at the time but became meh in retrospect of Hellsing Ultimate. So yeah, I never really thought of them as one of weaker studios but then I stayed cleared of their later work like Strke Witches or early misfires like Trinity Blood. Good to know though that they aren't a total shell of themselves like Gainax is now and Madhouse may be becoming.

The recent cycle of being doing one or two shows in a year, and then not doing any the next probably explains why my first reaction was to say, "Gonzo's still around?" when I started Akiba's Trip. I suppose being around for when they were pumping out a bunch of shows that Funimation was licensing might have skewed what I expected from them.

Oh man, do I have a love/hate relationship with GONZO.

They either did decent adaptations (Hellsing TV, GANTZ), or really, really poor ones (Black Cat, Rosario+Vampire), or have a decent show but yard-sale hard on the ending (RomeoXJuliet, LAST EXILE).

Hellsing TV holds a special place for me especially. Long before the OVAs were even rumored, I considered the TV series a poor adaptation. Not as bad as Black Cat,but not something to write home about compared to the original story. Time has softened my view dramatically on the adaptation considering they had about 3-4 books to work from during production. It's one of my favorite shows and I still enjoy re-watching it.

Black Cat I could not even finish because it was just so, so awful. The art was beyond ugly and so much of the characterization was changed from a what is a shounen-styled mirror image of Cowboy Bebop to some ugly atrocity that 4Kids could manhandle and it'd be an improvement.

RomeoXJuliet was solid all the way till about the last 4 episodes or so when the tree plot line reared it's ugly head and...stuff happened that wasn't really relevant and kinda brought up once a million episodes ago.

My enduring image of Gonzo is their eminently-terrible Trinity Blood, in which the director apparently decided that shots like a gun sliding across a table necessitated being rendered in full CG. At that point I figured they were just going for self-parody. But on the other hand they did produce the mad visual genius that was Gankutsuou, and the extremely solid Last Exile, so there were certainly hits amongst the spectacular misses. They're certainly not a studio I'd ever accuse of being boring.

Yes, I remember the glory days of Gonzo, in the early days of digital anime their stuff stood out with it's ultra bright, eye popping colors, sure a lot of it looks dated today, but it was impressive at the time.

They were maybe inconsistent, but still a solid studio overall and once so ubiquitous with so many series coming out per year that's it really hard to believe how much they've flamed out.

It's a shame, Last Exile is a favorite of mine and I've always been fond of Speed Grapher, while it's animation is a bit of a mixed bag it has one of the more unique stories I've ever seen in an anime and was oddly precient too, sorta predicting the 2008 financial crisis.

I feel like a few people are totally misinterpreting this piece. Writing about something doesn't mean you love that thing, it generally just means you find it interesting. And Gonzo is nothing if not interesting.

Zac wrote:

We have more pieces like this one currently in production - glad you liked this one, thanks for reading.

Good to see you working with Kevin, Callum, and others involved with Sakuga and Animation Production, so much these days. Happy to know more similar stuff is on the way(A post on the best animation of the year, or another piece about Sakuga would be cool, I thought Kevin's "What is Sakuga" thing was pretty well received last time). Lot's of great content on the site, but I can read about production for hours a day.

I also didn't have a problem with how the article was laid out(there were some grammar errors, and spelling mistakes though).

yuna49 wrote:

Studio 3Hz - Out of the blue, this little studio has produced two incredibly stylish and unusual shows, Flip Flappers and Princess Principal. Where did they come from, and can they survive? Princess Principal had much better average disc sales (6,000) than Flip Flapper's abysmal sub-900 figure, so their future might be less in doubt than I thought six months ago.

They came indirectly from Bones(directly from Kinema Citrus), and they are truly a fascinating group of creators. As a huge fan of Bones's(Minami's) approach to anime, I've been thrilled to see the work that has spawned from their "children". I mean, two of the best shows of Summer were Made in Abyss(Kinema Citrus) and Princess Principal(3Hz), both from a production stand-point, and a narrative one.

So this was an interesting exploration of studio history and I'm glad to have read it. Yet I marvel that one can produce a considered study of Gonzo's many successes and neglect to mention their masterwork of sexually innocuous space opera fluff that is Vandread. Alas, it is lost to the pages of time, along with the fabled season 3.

Zhou-BR wrote:

The way I see it, the downfall of Gonzo was due to their excessive output in the mid-'00s, which led to poor quality control and inconsistent animation pretty much across the board, and the fact that most of their projects seemed to be made with an eye on the international market instead of catering to Japanese fans.

I just don't agree with generalizations like "Gonzo shows take too many liberties with the source material", as if all of them were written and directed by the same people. And even though they produced a lot of crap, I think a studio responsible for shows like Blue Submarine #6, Last Exile, Gankutsuou, Welcome to the NHK, Kaleido Star, Samurai 7 and Basilisk has a lot to be proud of. I even have a soft spot for Speed Grapher, the only show with a bad guy whose big plan is spoiler[putting all of Japan's money inside of a builiding and blowing it up. And he succeeds!]

I agree, they really overloaded eventually on the amount of stuff they were making. Still they used to be one of my favorites, they've got plenty of lesser shows but they also do have a good stable of some real gems and fan favorites. And Last Exile is still one of my favorite shows.

pachy_boy wrote:

It's really too bad what happened to them, but they've made their mark. I will always be appreciative of Gonzo for Chrono Crusade, Full Metal Panic Season 1, Burst Angel, Romeo and Juliet, Last Exile (both series) and Origin: Spirits of the Past.

Yeah, one of my favorite studios for quite a long time even if they had their share of mistake shows or cash-ins as time went on.

Vandread I think is still very much a highlight as well, I think it balanced the bigger story and action with the ecchi romantic comedy stuff and harem-ish start (spoiler[really just pseudo harem at most since Dita is really the only one who remains romantically interested in him for most of the show and some of the others get their own other love interests]) very well, even for someone who's not usually a big viewer of those shows, as it was paired with some really great sci-fi and adventure thanks to it being just as much a space fairing exploration and giant robot show at the same time, with a good mix of drama and humor. Such a fun cast of characters, cool story (both the scifi and the jokes on male/female stereotypes and propaganda from both sides), and action. I need to watch it again since it's been a while and I feel like it'll still hold up pretty well.
Yes, I would have liked that season 3, just to have more back then lol.

I've enjoyed a couple of their shows since their gradual 'return' and even though 18if was really bizarre, and perhaps not consistent which kind of fit the premise and how there are different directors for the eps there were some good eps in there, I liked to see that they were able to put out something kind of experimental, even if related to a mobile game, so hopefully they still might tackle another interesting original again eventually if the right director and writer develop something cool.

It's really a shame what happened to them over time as I miss them tackling bigger shows, the last pretty much being Last Exile Fam, which wasn't as good as the original but I still mostly really liked it a lot.

Huh. I neither knew that Graphinica used to be part of Gonzo, nor that it is part of Q-Tec.

Top Gun wrote:

My enduring image of Gonzo is their eminently-terrible Trinity Blood, in which the director apparently decided that shots like a gun sliding across a table necessitated being rendered in full CG.

That black mark definitely belongs more to Final Fantasy: Unlimited, as my one enduring memory of that show is the stock footage of Kaze employing his dust gun where, because the sequence was rendered entirely in early CG, he suddenly had a plastic hand.

Vandread is an example of early CG put to better use as, like with early experiments with 3D rendering for live action TV such as Babylon 5, the full CG experience was reserved for external shots of spaceships and mecha. Thankfully Kiddy Grade somehow managed to get cel animated mecha and, by the time of Last Exile, they were getting much better at compositing 2D and 3D.