Wakaranai

Rating:    

SHAFT has always been known as a studio inundated with disproportionate amounts of work and time pressures, but they have also made a more positive-sounding name for themselves as a surprisingly profitable small studio, making the best of low-budget series. At the moment, they are working on a host of shows - two currently airing, a couple of upcoming TV anime and the looking Negima OVA series, and it seems that they have really over-stretched themselves too far this time. Whether it’s due to budget miss-handling, ill-planned schedule management or some genuinely blameless twist of fate ( someone bought swine flu into the office?), the studio’s unprofessionalism really showed in this episode of Bakemonogatari, to the point where no amount of animation-shortcuts or Akiyuku Shinbo’s trademark sense of humour could rescue it.

At least they were surprisingly honest about their inability to complete the episode, with a whole pile of cuts replaced by black screens with text simply reading ‘cut due to circumstances’. When the cuts did make it into the episode they were often not animated at all. With all the extended periods of dialogue without any movement and black screens disrupting every scene you may as well be reading the novels. Make no mistake, this is a very flawed production effort and I find it inexcusable for this kind of series, which is written to have dramatic impact. This isn’t like the inane and frivolous Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei - serious animation problems interfere with the story and the emotion behind it. I think it’s unfair to the performances of the seiyuu, especially for the star of episode, Kana Hanazawa as the distraught and adorable Nadeko. The climax of her arc, a night-time, school-swimsuit-filled magic ritual could actually have been quite profound and striking, even suspenseful, but instead if just felt cheap and unremarkable. It seems they spent all their cash and passion bringing the tale of Suruga Kanbaru to life!

This was a disappointing end to the Nadeko Snake arc. Animation isn’t everything, and I recognise that the emotional story behind it is quite strong. I found the onii-chan-complex romance of Nadeko particularly affecting and interesting. And Nadeko’s too-shy-shy type character was bought to life with fitting cuteness by the soft-spoken Kana Hanazawa. And I do have to thank both Nadeko and Suruga for the saturation of bloomers and school-swimsuits the last two episodes have delivered. But it isn’t enough to excuse the dead animation effort from SHAFT this time around. I can only hope that the last few episodes of the series will prove this to have been a momentary collapse in ‘quality’ (more like, completeness).

。。 This disaster makes me wonder if the offices of SHAFT are in a chaos state similar to the fictional animation company in Animation Runner Kuromi. The producers didn’t make it through in a pinch this time. Just as long as the same thing doesn’t happen to Negima! Apparently this kind of thing has happened before, when their scheduling caused problems when they were doing Hidamari Sketch. But this is certainly the biggest screw-up from SHAFT I’ve seen.

。。 The character-OP was really great again. Such a cute profile of Nadeko. I usually don’t go for shy girls but this one’s just so sugary-sweet it’s irresistible. ℳℴℯ♥. Actually, from what I’ve heard it’s surprising they can even get these OP’s together:

“The director for Mayoi OP, Itagaki Shin also wrote on his Anime Style article that his OP job “was so sudden he can’t gather many animators” is also somewhat disturbing.”