This Week in Anime
Will We Ever Know Why Anime Get Cancelled?
by Christopher Farris & Nicholas Dupree,
Nick and Chris recount some of the most frustrating anime cancellations from the second half of Stars Align to the 2007 JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood movie.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
Yuri on Ice, Stars Align, Panty & Stocking, and Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer are available on Crunchyroll, while Mysteria Friends is available on HiDive. Outlaw Star and The Vision of Escaflowne previously streamed on Funimation but are not currently available.
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Chris
Nick, it's been a weird season so far. We've had previously unlicensed anime suddenly appearing on streaming services. We've had high-profile anime skipping simulcasting. And now, just the other week, we had a major anime cancellation so many fans were dreading.
Nick, it's been a weird season so far. We've had previously unlicensed anime suddenly appearing on streaming services. We've had high-profile anime skipping simulcasting. And now, just the other week, we had a major anime cancellation so many fans were dreading.
It looks like Yuri truly has been put...on ice.
Nick
We need to cancel you just for that pun.
We need to cancel you just for that pun.
Okay, maybe that was still a little too soon. The wounds must still feel fresh, after all, given that Yuri on Ice fans were waiting with bated breath for eight years for the film follow-up Ice Adolescence, only to have it unceremoniously axed. Pour one out due to "various circumstances."
Those circumstances are as various as they are cruel, though considering what MAPPA's CEO said about it not all that long ago. We have a pretty good guess as to at least one of them.
Given what a cultural phenomenon Yuri on Ice was in its heyday, it's an odd dissonance. We're talking about a series that joined the auspicious "Crashed Crunchyroll" Club. Still, suppose none of that translated to much trickle-down to MAPPA themselves. In that case, you start to understand why they pivoted to self-funding series themselves, as well as favoring sure-fire shonen adaptations like Chainsaw Man and Jujutsu Kaisen.
Given what we've heard about MAPPA's work environment lately, it's only a little grim that they cited "human resource development" as something they were supposedly investing in.
Given what we've heard about MAPPA's work environment lately, it's only a little grim that they cited "human resource development" as something they were supposedly investing in.
It's a messy situation, not helped by the fact that nobody who knows what happened behind the scenes has any incentive to tell anyone. Projects get started and canceled behind the scenes all the time, and we never hear about them because it all happens before anything is announced. So it's pretty rare for an anime to get canceled after it's been confirmed for production, let alone when it already has a teaser's worth of finished animation.
Our esteemed editor Lynzee has chronicled some of the confirmed failures to launch in older columns. A few of these were high-profile enough that I'd heard about them through other avenues (mainly the way the cancelation of Lupin VIII led to the creation of Inspector Gadget). However, I will also claim hazard pay for being reminded of t.A.T.u.
Lists like those were beneficial in researching this, so thanks to our boss for All The Things She Sa- er, wrote.
Even most of those were just victims of overzealous or overpromising press releases. Anyone who follows news about Hollywood live-action anime adaptations knows there's a vast difference between saying something will happen and getting far enough along to have anything to show for it. It's been what, seven years or so since they announced that Your Name remake?
To say nothing to Hollywood's dogged insistence that the live-action Akira is totally happening, any day now, you guys! However, that thread does remind me of another property that keeps threatening the live-action treatment, and its attempt at a new animated project never made it off the runway. I'm sure you know of this one, as it's a franchise that's very near and dear to your heart.
I'm not even mad because Robotech Academy makes me laugh. Especially now that we can compare its failed crowdfunding attempt to the massively more successful one for Macross II. Like damn son, Harmony Gold got lapped by the worst Macross entry. I don't think you can recover from that.
It's pretty much the opposite of the Yuri on Ice case, where the circumstances of Robotech Academy's shutdown are less "various" and more obvious. They found so few people to pay them to make it that they gave up and shut the Kickstarter down six days early! It turns out it's tough to make a cartoon without any money, and at least, unlike some other projects that imploded, no one got left holding a bag on this one.
The Ice Adolescence situation is so weird. It's not wholly unprecedented, but even a peek at MAPPA's financials doesn't explain letting a massively popular series that had global attention just...evaporate. It might be hard for folks to remember, but YoI was huge for a long while after it aired. It got tributes from real-life ice skaters! It had the kind of franchise momentum executives usually have to drug themselves to dream of!
As we've talked about with bizarre business decisions before, it can be hard to guess what goes on in the boardroom meetings that determine these things. Ice Adolescence had already been delayed from its originally scheduled release in 2019. Then, a year later, it's presumable that a COVID-sized wrench got thrown into the production process. Even then, co-creator Mitsurou Kubo confirmed she was still working on the film from home at the time.
With all that, I can understand how it took them another four years of looking at the sunk costs to decide if they really wanted to give up on it.
The long-languishing period offers some plausible answers, but it's still so strange that they let it sit for so long. Though probably not the strangest cancellation. That title still goes to the original version of Mysteria Friends getting canceled less than a month before it was supposed to air.
Oh hey, there's "various circumstances" again. And also another series that's MAPPA-adjacent, huh?
Manaria Friends is one of those anime I would love to one day get a full tell-all on just to find out exactly what the hell happened with it. The way it bizarrely got rolled over, only to resurface two years later in a completely different form, even divorced from its Rage of Bahamut connection, is...well, it's a lot for what ultimately wound up being a perfectly nice short-form fantasy yuri series.
Manaria Friends is one of those anime I would love to one day get a full tell-all on just to find out exactly what the hell happened with it. The way it bizarrely got rolled over, only to resurface two years later in a completely different form, even divorced from its Rage of Bahamut connection, is...well, it's a lot for what ultimately wound up being a perfectly nice short-form fantasy yuri series.
The branding at least makes sense. By 2018, the Rage of Bahamut franchise had run its course (thanks for nothing, Virgin Soul). Since Anne and Grea were already represented in the more successful Granblue Fantasy, dropping the franchise name was a reasonable call. Everything else is a goddamn mystery. It's like they just remade that whole show with a new studio, director, and art style, and nobody knows why.
To me, that all calls to mind the similar situation that occurred with the original anime adaptation of ARIFURETA, where "various circumstances" once again caused a year+ delay and major staff shufflings. What eventually premiered had taken a hit from the rush, and one wonders how far the original staff got into the canceled version and if it looked any better than the, uh, product that ultimately aired.
I've heard scuttlebutt that would at least provide some more context for ARIFURETA's scrapping compared to the absolute mystery that is Mysteria Friends, but nothing concrete.
Yeah, the accepted story is that the original creator saw what they had done for the first version, hated it, and threatened to cancel the whole project if it wasn't redone basically from scratch. Hard to say how much of that is true, but it's at least an explanation for why that show looked like a refried ass.
Given the appearance of the ARIFURETA anime we got, I have to be morbidly curious about how the original version looked that it would provoke such a staggering reaction. But who am I to question the whims of light novel authors?
There's a similar story around the extremely depressing Lucifer & the Biscuit Hammer anime, apparently based on some long-deleted tweets. It goes that a "certain animator" tried to implement changes to the show that Mizukami objected to, and a ton of early work had to be thrown out, massively cutting into the budget and resources until we got a show that was held together by half-hearted prayers and rubber bands.
It seems like adaptations can be a minefield of these sorts of hang-ups. Anime is one of those mediums where the more you know about it, the more you're amazed that anything gets made. But at least ARIFURETA and Biscuit Hammer still actually saw release, compromised as they were. For an adaptation to get wholly canceled while deep into production, apparently actual crimes need to be involved.
Ah, the scandal that we once hoped would free us from the disorienting grasp of GoHands. If only.
Sayo Yamamoto had to cancel her dream project, while GoHands plagiarized material after scoring a CLAMP adaptation but still gets to keep announcing new projects. That's justice.
For the record, Tokyo Babylon 2021 is another project like others we've discussed here. I would be interested in seeing what they had produced, if only out of morbid curiosity. And only for as long as I could keep my lunch down.
For the record, Tokyo Babylon 2021 is another project like others we've discussed here. I would be interested in seeing what they had produced, if only out of morbid curiosity. And only for as long as I could keep my lunch down.
Judging from everything the studio has made in the last decade, you could probably watch an episode of Handshakers with the names changed.
Again, we at least have an apparent reason why that project got locked away. After looking into many of these cases, I'm glad to have an explanation more specific than "various circumstances" now. Like, the canceled Ten Count movie at least says it was "issues relating to its production". Vague as that is, it at least acknowledges that there were issues!
So much of this is just that anime productions can be notoriously tight-lipped compared to some of the more famous blow-ups in Western entertainment. The only reason we have such concrete information on what went down with Tokyo Babylon is, again, the crimes. Public record! Otherwise, it's just a general acknowledgement of issues, plus hard-to-source stories like the one about the ARIFURETA author. And sometimes, those stories can spin into full-on misinformation!
That can be too bad, since while it's probably not as sensationalized as "Araki hated it so much he forbade it from making it to video," it'd be nice to have some full explanation for what was so wrong with the 2007 JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood movie that it netted the extremely rare post-release cancellation.
That can be too bad, since while it's probably not as sensationalized as "Araki hated it so much he forbade it from making it to video," it'd be nice to have some full explanation for what was so wrong with the 2007 JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood movie that it netted the extremely rare post-release cancellation.
My theory is that they didn't make Dio hot enough, and Araki refused to let that out into the world.
Given the blurriness of the non-upscaled versions of some of the trailers I tracked down for this infamous installment, I can neither confirm nor deny that theory.
The narrative around that movie does highlight the issue of being left with no official word. So much of anime fandom's common wisdom is based on conjecture or just straight-up imagination, to the point where we can spend decades fighting against misinformation that's just been taken as fact.
For years, it was common knowledge that The Vision of Escaflowne was scheduled to be three parts but was suddenly cut to two, forcing the creators to cram all of their ideas into the show's second half. Yet nobody seems to have a source on that at all.
For years, it was common knowledge that The Vision of Escaflowne was scheduled to be three parts but was suddenly cut to two, forcing the creators to cram all of their ideas into the show's second half. Yet nobody seems to have a source on that at all.
The passage of time can almost undoubtedly muddy the waters on those sorts of rumors, especially for series like Escaflowne, which came out when fans had even fewer lines to creators and their intent. It means sometimes a series we assumed was "cut short" or "canceled" wasn't. Like sure, Outlaw Star ends on what feels like a setup for a second season. But was that the intent and said season got canceled, or was this just wishful thinking by the crew that never got fulfilled?
The real insane part is that over 20 years later, the thing that everyone thought happened to Escaflowne ACTUALLY happened to director Kazuki Akane's original show, Stars Align.
That show, which was planned to be two parts, was cut to one mid-production, so the creators were forced to settle with making only half of their story. The show ended on one of the cruelest cliffhangers in anime.
That show, which was planned to be two parts, was cut to one mid-production, so the creators were forced to settle with making only half of their story. The show ended on one of the cruelest cliffhangers in anime.
I'll still say I prefer the defiant mic-drop they left us with, as opposed to a compromised condensation of the story they intended to tell. As in the link you posted, Akane has considered finding some way to get the rest of the story of Stars Align out, but there's been no movement since. It's tragic, and being a fan of that series, I can certainly sympathize with the disappointed fans of Yuri on Ice. These queer boys' sports anime can have it rough.
Knowing why these cancelations happen wouldn't take the sting out in the grand scheme of things. If somebody steals your lunch money, it doesn't help to know what they will spend it on instead.
In Mappa's case, we sure as hell know not much of it is going to the animators! sad rimshot
Gallows humor aside, the consolation I can offer is that you don't have to truly give up. Look at Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, which ended on a cliffhanger and tease for a second season, which was later properly announced. Only then did the Gainax exodus that resulted in Studio Trigger seem to cast the project into purgatory, alongside other productions like Uru in Blue and Gunbuster 3 that were totally still happening!
Only then, a decade and change later, did Trigger come out that they'd recollected the rights to Panty & Stocking and were making that second season!
Stuff like that keeps the fire alive in an almost cruel way. If PSG S2 was still vaporware, letting the torch die out for other long-forgotten projects might be easier. We've even seen that death itself can't stop a project if the circumstances are right.
The Magical Girl and the Evil Lieutenant Used to be Archenemies was a manga cut short by the tragic death of its author, Cocoa Fujiwara, and unbeknownst to us, it had an anime underway back in 2015. Now, almost a decade later, they're completing that project, and it's only a couple of months away. Truly, anything is possible.
The Magical Girl and the Evil Lieutenant Used to be Archenemies was a manga cut short by the tragic death of its author, Cocoa Fujiwara, and unbeknownst to us, it had an anime underway back in 2015. Now, almost a decade later, they're completing that project, and it's only a couple of months away. Truly, anything is possible.
I don't want to get Yuri on Ice fans' hopes up too much, especially with the pain of cancellation still fresh. Still, stranger things have happened, and Ice Adolescence is already the sort of passion project where its creators were taking it home to work on it. We all have our white whales, and if I can continue to carry a torch for the possibility of Yusuke Murata's Back to the Future manga, you can hold out hope that you might see Yuri and Victor yet again.
For now, all I can tell fans is to keep their eyes out for whatever the creators make next. For over a decade, it helped me survive as a Weekly Shonen Jump reader. Sometimes your faves are cut short, then come back with something that runs for a decade.
Indeed. Now that Yamamoto is free from whatever they still had her doing on Ice Adolescence, she'll be able to find time for something new that can truly make history.
Alternatively, be on the lookout for Yaoi!!! on FIRE in a theater near you, Summer 2025.
Wait, they already made Promare.
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