This Week in Anime

Are Anime Production Delays the New Normal?

Nicky
Ever the persistent menace, anime production woes continue to plague anime viewers and anime producers alike. Since the dawn of the industry, exploitation in the industry has been a rampant issue, and occasionally we might even get anime that depict or satirize the unhealthy work environments that anime companies are notorious for. While not an anime company specifically, the production company depicted in the recent Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead is art imitating life. The first episode impressed me with how well the direction captured the real-life dread of a work environment that leaves everyone feeling lifeless.


It's not an exaggeration to say that it feels like one of the season's best animated and best-directed premieres.

To summarize, Akira Tendo was once a fresh and lively young working adult until he finally landed a job in his dream industry. After three years of making advertisements under nightmarish conditions full of unpaid overtime, power harassment, and sex scandals, his thoughts have grown dark, leaving him with no will to live. Until a zombie apocalypse happens, he's suddenly revitalized by the thought of no longer having to go to work! Given a second chance at life, he's determined to make the most of it.

It goes from depicting the dark reality of struggling to live everyday life like some survival horror to a morbid but humorous fantasy where the collapse of society releases this everyman from all the barriers that kept him from enjoying life. I would be lying if I said I didn't wish that everything in the fast-moving world would crash so I could breathe.

Anime has always been a vital reprieve for me from my everyday life, but the animators can't seem to catch a break. While still early in the season, the fourth and upcoming fifth episodes of Zom 100 had a one-week delay. Despite the fantastic headstart, the subject, and a good adaption and story, no amount of fantasy can escape the horror that walks among us. I enjoyed what I saw in the show, but I fear for the future. What good we saw might not be sustainable—a shame for a season that has otherwise felt dreary and limp.

Tbf, I also thought episode four had a dip in quality, but I would rather have a show be delayed than shamble in front of me; it's still a horror. In my discussion about adaptions with Nick in (This Week In Anime) and the kind of horror felt when an anime adaptation doesn't meet your expectations, I would consider this kind of fall-off to be a subgenre of that. Usually, I avoid shows that look and feel bad, but watching wonderful art slowly decay, transform, or reveal itself to have monstrous behind-the-scenes is more of a creeping horror.

The end quality also isn't everything; Steve and I talked about how some shows like the recent Ooku, while not the prettiest, were at least consistent in their inelegance and told the story well. There are good-looking shows that have harmful work environments. As viewers, the only way we ever learn the truth about an anime production is when something leaks out, an employee might vent on social media, or we might get an announcement about delays. Companies try harder to avoid showing symptoms on the end product because it's too easy to notice something is wrong.

It reminds me a lot of Shirobako, an inspirational series about working in the anime industry, where some of the motivation for the fictionalized production to get completed on time is to avoid the shame of releasing a terrible-looking episode like before.

The emergence of COVID also didn't help since a highly infectious virus doesn't fair well when everyone is stuck in one office pushing themselves to their physical limits. However, it's notable that A-1 also struggled with the second season of 86, and I am still fond of that show despite its troubles, including some of how it had to be adapted given the conditions. For what it's worth, the NieR anime still really sticks the landing and ends up doing what I wanted, which is being a very different adaption than just a straight adaption of the game. The delays did pay off for having a better series in the end, but it's still a shame. As a consumer, delays reduce hype and interest, they're inconvenient, but they also look bad because it shows that the corporate expectations are frequently unrealistic. The same happens in games, too, people get upset when games or movies get delayed, but those are different from anime broadcast every week.

Ultimately, I'd rather deal with the inconvenience of a long delay than many short ones, and it's better than having a less flexible approach when everything is so strict.

We could take something like the NieR anime and look at it as a disaster, but it's better than what we could've gotten. Many shows hit production snags and never recover.

Yeah, my speculation on NieR is an attempt to be optimistic; anime professionals have stressed that the production committees that contract anime studios still prioritize quick turnaround above all else. Any extra time that has to be taken is just borrowing; the studio still pays for it, just later. If it's not one job, it's the next one, and since anime studios don't see much profit unless they're part of the committee or get much budget, it's common for them to pile up projects to make ends meet. I always wonder how much better the Farewell, My Dear Cramer or Tribe Nine anime could've been if it weren't for the enormous amount of series Liden Films was producing at the time.
That's me when I think about the tragedy of Farewell, My Dear Cramer.

It's the opposite of what happened to the original first season finale of Blood Blockade Battlefront, which took almost a whole year to complete, partially because they couldn't get a good timeslot to air it. It's worth noting that some anime do recover from woes and slumps; hell, I'm not sure how true this is now, but it used to be that part of the reason having sloppy off-model episodes was considered "ok" in the industry because they would be corrected for the Blu-rays. You can still find entire fan blogs dedicated to documenting all the little changes for Attack on Titan S1.

Not to mention, it's not going to work out if you have apparent story or pre-production issues. You can't recover if the story choices and script are bad, the direction from the storyboards is unclear, or someone from the top decides to make a sudden change. This is also true of many VFX studios for movies. These issues are not all unique to anime but true to many creative industries, and I'm sure many of you will see this as we learn about the current Hollywood strikes and the effort for workers to unionize.

Things are dire even in the West, where many creative industries have been unionized for decades. This partially has to do with broader social attitudes about art. Most people consider art a trivial product compared to more practical items like food, clothes, or other goods. As an artist myself, most people underestimate the kind of time, focus, and energy it takes to make anything good. They might think that because it's a "fun" thing to do, it couldn't be exhaustive, and even in Zom 100, you see similar excuses where Tendo's co-workers devalue themselves because they're conditioned to it. Schedules and funding are often decided at the executive level.

The true tragedy isn't that crunch and delays that occur due to the complex nature of the creative industry; it's that much of it is entirely preventable. There are a lot of factors that go into it, sure. Still, as of now, we keep seeing these disasters because the system is inflexible and unsustainable, primarily due to the arbitrary decisions of corporate powers that be. In that, it might not be different from any other job. The people at the top of the pyramid don't care about people working below them. Even the studios and animators who are the victims here, it's on them to push back and negotiate how to be treated fairly. It takes real courage to walk out!

While the dream of sticking it to the man is inspiring, it's not about the individual action that matters. One person quitting might not affect a destructive industry that deems its workers disposable. It would be very different if everyone started acting with the same self-respect and stood up. Though, that's only from the inside. What about everyone else? We've talked about the state of the industry many times before. What's the point of beating a zombified horse if most of us can't do anything about it?

Well, joking aside, there might be some truth to that. I'm not talking about anything concrete, like view counts or dollars. Tracking consumerist habits' effect on the industry isn't that exact, and boycotting isn't always the best action. There needs to be more we can do directly. But as I mentioned, the industry can get away with this stuff because most people aren't taught to appreciate art. Today, I focused a lot on how much even the "failures" mean to me because I wanted to show that there's still value to the things people made beyond the systems that exploit them.