Youjo Senki Episode 3 Discussion

MasterHavik said:
I think I can safely say I like this anime despite the poor animation and Tanya's ugly face.

Takuan_Soho said:


Honestly, I have to doubt your eyes if you think the animation is poor. Now, I can understand why people think that one girl with the big eyes is strange, but Tanya? No, her face is perfect. Remember she is a 10 year old girl with a 40 year old man's brain. It should be strange. This, I strongly believe, the animators have captured well.

Though, like many people, I think the LN illustrations are better, but I believe that translating this to animation was too difficult. That the studio would show it in the EC is a compliment to the artist, it is as if they were saying "we tried, but here is a true artist". I don't blame the adapters, economics (and the fact that this is a new studio) probably precluded them from adhering closer. But since the alternative was no adaptation, I praise them for even trying.

MasterHavik said:
It's just my opinion. Do you have a problem with it?

Tanya's face looks like this to me-> https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/f1/e1/f3/f1e1f30f363f6930154f10674b330dd5.jpg

MasterHavik said:
It's just my opinion. Do you have a problem with it?

Tanya's face looks like this to me-> https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/f1/e1/f3/f1e1f30f363f6930154f10674b330dd5.jpg

Zefyris said:

So Tanya looks tasty you mean? :D

Rehls said:


:o People don't mind it's a man in a girl's body? That salaryman's in there, still. How awkward it must be for him to deal with femininity... How would he be attracted to males? He wouldn't necessarily, I think; he'd remain attracted to females.

MasterHavik said:
It's just my opinion. Do you have a problem with it?

Takuan_Soho said:


And I stated my opinion, do you have a problem with that?

I love it when people throw out an "opinion" and then get mad when people respond to it. If you don't want people to respond, why give it in the first place?

In public, you are free to state whatever opinion you want, and I am free to respond to your opinion. Having an opinion and a right to state it doesn't mean that I have to respect your opinion or that I should silently allow it to pass.

Besides, I agreed with your opinion, I just thought that we should be more tolerant of people who adapt works because, well, its so hard that neither you nor I can do it. There is a reason why the LN only has 5-7 illustrations in them. Of course they should be better, infinitely better, but there is no way such an artist could animate a series.

Shirobako, an excellent animation about animation shows this: they hired an artist to draw a single scene. And that is what they got a single scene. Took him several weeks to do it. No animation could adhere to that schedule.

MasterHavik said:
I know it's hard. I talk about in a thread I made how they should stop making these episodes week by week. It's better to work on it ahead of time like a lot of recent cartoons.

MysteriousBanana said:

But they don't make them week by week? New titles have always been announced at least a year before they're actually aired, it's why if you look up the "Later" tab under "Seasonal Anime" you can see projects slated for late 2017/early 2018 releases. Studios use that year to make the anime, so for a 12-episode title that's almost a month's worth of time spend on each episode.

If you think that's too long, think about it this way: a typical manga chapter is about 24 pages with maybe five or six panels each, which is roughly 12 illustrations (including backgrounds), for a grand total of 266 illustrations and takes a month to produce; a typical anime episode is 20 minutes long (excluding the three minutes for OP and ED) running at 24 FPS, which is essentially 24 "illustrations" per second, but if you figure in all of the static shots used the total illustrations used is around 3,000... but that's before you even get to coloring, adding sound effects, and recording the voice acting. That's just physically impossible to do within a week.

MasterHavik said:
T my knowledge they don't start production until the show is suppose to air. So yeah they announce it but work doesn't really start until their season comes up. It's kind of weird. I know Crystal was animated bi weekly.

MysteriousBanana said:

Hm, it's true that project management would vary from studio to studio/director to director, but I'd argue the PVs are proof that work generally starts much earlier than that: Youjo Senki's first PV used scenes from the first episode and was released on Oct. 30th, a little over two months before the airing date, which suggests at the very least said episode was completed by that point; the same can be said for most of the other anime titles going back almost a decade, but even before that anime mags like Newtype regularly teased scenes from yet-to-be released titles months before broadcast as well, so I'd also argue that suggests it's not a recent practice either (first Newtype I got was around '94~'95, so at least 22 years now).

MasterHavik said:
I think the first episode of these shows is done ahead of time since they are showing them off as events. So they need to build hype somehow.

MysteriousBanana said:

That wouldn't make sense from a business standpoint though. It would essentially mean the studio assembled the staff to produce that first episode, then had them do nothing for three months until the season actually started; that's a massive waste of resources that business management courses teaches people to avoid (basically a business will take the hourly expenses in electricity, water, rent, maintenance, etc. and divide it among number of employees on site, so you're considered losing that much money every hour for the company simply by existing unless your work produces value to offset that) and the studio can't refrain from paying them for that time because it's pretty much illegal in any developed country not to pay employees for three months at a time.

It doesn't make sense from a project management standpoint either, because making episodes on a week-by-week basis exposes the project to all sorts of delays that could be avoided otherwise. In particular is the critical role of voice actors: if one gets sick or in an accident, production screeches to a halt unless they completely redo all the episodes until the VA gets better or they switch the VA mid-season; to my knowledge there hasn't been a single anime suddenly write off characters or change their actors mid-season in the history of the industry. For example, the third season of "Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya 2wei Herz!" lists Miyu Matsuki (RIP) as the voice of Magical Sapphire despite her being in the hospital the entire time the anime aired; if anime was made on a weekly basis, they would have changed the VA that season, not the following season.

Ultimately making anime is still a business and must be handled like a business to be successful, any business that procrastinates in its projects and fails to account for potential obstacles are guaranteed to fail; but the anime industry has been too consistent, even with its worst anime titles, for that to be true. We've had studios delay starting an anime for a season (like Granblue Fantasy), but never had them miss a deadline for the week or suddenly announce they have to finish the rest of the season next season - which should have happened at least a few times if it was an industry standard to make anime on a weekly basis.

MasterHavik said:
This is why I feel the anime business can learn a couple of things from the western animation side and how they do things. Shows are work on so ahead of time it's crazy how polish the final product is.

MysteriousBanana said:

Well, no, my point is that if they really did make it on a weekly basis, we should have clear examples of deadlines being missed or staff changes happening mid-season, but we don't (but we do have examples that suggest they don't make them week-by-week); it's impossible for the anime industry to have managed that for 30+ years unless, especially with as many different titles they put out every season, without some serious black magic.

MasterHavik said:
Let's not forget most of us can't speak Japanese. So we'll take someone google translate tweet out of context.