All right - I’m going to have to sit down and watch this all the way through sometime later, but after a quick browse (and not having read the story), did this literally bankrupt the studio? Like the budget for this is what killed them?
Because with the little I watched, I think I believe it. What I saw of it at least, the animation goes beyond amazing and into a realm that’s almost ridiculous. There’s so much detail and it’s all so smooth and nothing is ever static - there’s constant little changes of expression and movements of hair and hands and flutters of cloth and so on - just an obsessive amount of detail.
Some details from the discussion in MAL
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producer-centered over-drafting caused by the burning of funds (an episode of 23 minutes could burn millions of yuan; Up to 12,000 original paintings were drawn in the first episode, and the process went through 5 to 6 repaintings, resulting in a rapid drain of funds.)
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According to leaked internal chat logs, the company lost key staff due to worsening financial conditions and management chaos (including frequent retakes and producer decision-making errors).
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failure of the management to introduce AI transformation
Feel free to disagree but I feel that the last one isn’t a valid point. What’s the point of introducing AI if mismanagement of budget is the primary cause of concerns? Unless AI is introduced to replace the producer and execs.
Yeah - that one struck me as suspect at best.
I don’t doubt that it really is a criticism that’s being floated now, but I think it’s much more likely that that’s just AI pimps sensing an opportunity rather than an actual criticism made by people who were actually involved.
Not only is it the case that AI couldn’t do anything about mismanagement of budget, but AI couldn’t even really do much of anything at all, since all of the roles that AI can play in that sort of production have been filled in the anime industry for years or even decades now by purpose-built software. So to the degree that the problem might be a failure to use technological tools, it still wouldn’t be a failure to use AI specifically, since they wouldn’t have used AI anyway - they would’ve used the tools that already existed back when AI was still just a techbro fantasy.
So, essentially, mismanagement of funds and labour that could have happened on any project. (Just for comparison’s sake, back in the days when every cel would have needed to be hand-drawn, producing 23 minutes of NTSC-TV animation would have taken a little over 41300 cels if they weren’t able to re-use any (29.97fps * 60sec * 23min), and this studio did around double that amount of work for the first episode if they redid 12000 stills from scratch 5 or 6 times.)
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Watched this all the way through twice (and English-subbed) last night, and it was… odd.
A good illustration of the likely source of a lot of their bankrupting costs:
There’s a scene in which one character is writing on a piece of paper.
A normal production would’ve likely left the paper and the off hand static and used two or maybe three short loops of generic hand motions for the writing hand.
This one used a complex and undoubtedly accurate single set of writing hand motions (complete with shifting positions of the pencil in the hand) and dynamic movement of the off hand and the paper, even going so far as to show the off hand shifting in such a way that it twisted the paper and created a wrinkle. And all of that for something that was essentially just a backdrop to the conversation that was the actual focus of the scene.
It was very impressive, but hardly necessary.
The even more notable oddity to me though was that all of the exquisite animation was in service of a cute girls doing cute things school slice of life with a side of girls love - sort of a cross between Lucky Star and YuruYuri.
So even beyond the oddity of investing that much obvious time and effort and care (and budget) into lush animation - they invested all of that into animating a lightweight CGDCT SOL, which seems doubly pointless.
I liked it though, and to some degree specifically because of the budgeting thing. Just as far as CGDCT SOLs go, it was only okay. It didn’t really compare with the classics, but it was at least as good as the run of the mill (I liked it better than Ichijouma Mankitsu Gurashi, for instance).
But there’s something sort of quixotic about it. Looking at the incredibly complex and subtle animation of a skirt fluttering in the breeze or a character’s hair shifting with every little movement of their head, I can’t help but be impressed. It’s all sort of pointless, and as it turned out, unfortunate, but it’s still sort of admirable.
