So, JC Staff have been working on four series at the same time this season. The strange thing is that somehow Bakuman ended up with the least impressive animation out of the four. Zakuro has some amazing artwork, Index got their best inbetweeners while Milky Holmes was chockful of interesting poses, Bakuman always looked a bit average in comparison: the animation did its job but never really stood out. This episode was the first time in which the visuals really caught my eye, especially the poses were finally a bit creative and detailed. Hattori in particular surprised me by showing some completely new sides of him.
With this episode I finally understand why people keep calling this a hot blooded manga making series. Especially Hattori suddenly getting fired up brought a lot of new stuff to the table, and I especially liked how they were desperately trying to come up with interesting premises, and how hard it is to not take creativity for granted. That string of uninteresting premises that they came up with really shows that they were under a lot less pressure for those ones, so they probably didn’t spent as much time or effort into making it original (especially the one with that dude and the sword looked generic).
I also liked it a lot when the editor in chief popped up. This partly was because he was the main cause for Hattori’s sudden change of personality, but also because of how maturely he treated Moritaka and Akito: he knew Moritaka’s uncle, so he felt no need to sugarcoat things like Hattori had been doing. I just love his confidence, and that he seems far less secure when he was still working with Moritaka’s uncle.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
There finally a sub out. Just telling you all.
Another great episode, for some reason this gets me really fired up… And its great to see the whole manga business works
That “buy knowledge with money” concept is actually pretty interesting, I would watch that
“So, JC Staff have been working on four series at the same time this season. The strange thing is that somehow Bakuman ended up with the least impressive animation out of the four.”
I think you have the wrong idea about how studios go about animating these titles. Even though J.C.Staff are producing several shows at once this season, you have to remember that the only thing that would be stretched inside J.C.Staff is management, as each show is allocated its own budget by a production committee made up of several companies who all put their share of the pie in and the animation/art itself is mostly outsourced to other companies. The only thing J.C.Staff really handles as a production studio is the management in these projects, most of the money and staff are not coming directly from them.
Bakuman reminds me of that other NHK show, Giant Killing. You’ve got minimal production values (enough to “make it work” but not impress), lengthy recaps at the beginning of episodes, and deliberate pacing with extra content to expand on character relationships.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the two teams were given similar instructions and budget considerations.
This episode was nicely done. The meeting was as tense and interesting as its manga counterpart. I still hate the lukewarm/generic music in the series though…
And yeah the budget is pretty low.
If their stories aren’t jack-like and too mature and deep why not try some other genre like seinen? I mean does it have to be Shounen?