Well, you can really see that the animation director has changed, because the animation really is abysmal. Seriously, this episode was full of horribly distorted faces and rushed drawings. I think there were only two or three shots where you could see that time was spent on making them look good. The animation was very shoddy (just take a look at Dan and his basketball: physics don’t work that way!). Only the CG didn’t suffer from his influence.
As for the change of directors, you can also notice that, but at least this guy isn’t as much of a disaster as the new animation director. This guy thankfully is competent at what he does: he knows how to build up and flesh out characters, and the characters act natural enough. But something is definitely missing: the chaos and the randomness that made the first bunch of episodes so enjoyable.
In the first couple of episodes, there really was so much going on at the same time: every character had his or her own agenda. This episode… just concentrated on the little princess and Dan walking around town and Sera visiting the grave of her mother. The rest of the characters only had one or two scenes in which they really didn’t do anything and were… sleeping through the major part of this episode I guess. Oh, we did have Iceman who paid a visit to his rival again, but that also pretty much was a pointless visit.
All in all though, it’s a bloody shame that the staff was fired in the middle of the production. Satelight already is understaffed this season with no less than three series they’re working on at the same time. Guin Saga already showed that they lack the man-power to animate everything correctly, and this really isn’t the best time for them to create a production goof-up. The worst thing is that they’ve had this before with Kiss Dum, and even though this doesn’t look to be as big of a disaster as Kiss Dum turned into, it does show that the producers haven’t really been learning from their mistakes of keeping all of the staff-related business going smoothly.
It’s going to be really difficult for this series to surpass itself now. It’s now all going to matter whether the creators can develop the characters right, and plan out the basketball matches correctly.
Rating: (Enjoyable)
Really bad animation, though an enjoyable build-up nonetheless.
I dont really see what you’re talking about the animation being bad. In fact, it looks really good this episode. Definitely much, MUCH better than episodes 6 and 10 which I think were the worse animated ones. And I dont think the fired staff really makes a difference now. This episode was probably already done when the director got changed. In fact, I read somewhere they were doing episode 17 right now, when they got fired. Plus I dont think that removing a director would really change anything in a series that is done by so many people together. Its not like the director was the project leader, Kawamori/Romain are.
There were some poorer animation quality episodes of Satelight’s last big project, Macross, as well. But the lower budget episodes were pre-planned, and the high quality returned for the more important parts of the season.
Given the care that went into some of the major episodes earlier in Basquash!, I expect to see the quality bounce back.
“Plus I dont think that removing a director would really change anything in a series that is done by so many people together.”
Kiavik clearly isnt a fan of good animation nor has the education to know what it takes(watch DVD extras, thats all you really need to do to point yourself in the right direction) to create a series. Maybe a fan of anime in general, just not the stuff that sets it apart from the never ending sea of garbage. GAH, this boils my blood. This was about as noticeable as replacing an actress in the middle of a season on a live action show. The differences are like night and day. Even the proportions of the characters’ features have changed for the worst. I mean look at the top two pics she provided for us… you mean to tell me you can’t see how it went from pretty good to “wtf am i watching?”
This is a tragedy. The fact that I haven’t been able to find a subbed version yet just made how bad this was stick out even more.
Apart from the CG, this is ugly pre-FLCL shoddy craftsmanship(by comparison). This change might’ve just killed the series for me.
The thing is, as Thomas Romain himself commented on Catsuka, when the director and head of animation staff were fired Episodes up to 16 were already done. His comment went something like this “You may start noticing a change from episode 17 onward”. So the fact is this supposed “abysmal animation” (which isnt at all, btw) is totally unrelated with the changes made to the staff. Plus, I AM a fan of good animation, and that’s why I felt I had to comment. In my opinion Psgels has been too harsh with this episode, when episodes 10, 6 and even some parts of 5 were clearly worse, animation wise, than what was seen here. I bet that if he hadnt known about the changes in the staff he wouldnt have commented it that way.
As an addendum, I’d like to point out the difference between animation and artwork. Starting the review with “This had horrible animation. Faces were distorted” isnt very smart. Should’ve said “This had horrible artwork” because the animation was perfectly fine. Yeah, some of the drawings were off, as they were in the already mentioned episodes 10,6 and 5, but certainly not to the point that “there were only two or three good shots”.
I’d hardly call the animation perfectly fine… there was definately a change in the quality, not just the off-model characters. The backgrounds were still nice, the CG was still nice.. but the animation was off.
Like… if a Pixar animator had a year one Media Arts and Animation major’s model to work with… the animation would still be top notch due to rigging and actual key framing. But the model would be more than likely, horrible by comparison.
In this case the animation was OFF. Even put next to the previous 3-4 episodes.
i think it was a lot to do with who was fired and who was the clear leader(not my job description) of the artists as a whole. In animation production there are sertain people who stand out and help put everything in motion and keep it going who arent nessisarily art directors… the slightest change in the machine can bring drastic changes. I mean within the first 10 seconds i was wondering what the hell happened.
I don’t like where this series is heading. Please! This is the only series apart from NnA and Eden that I’m watching this season. Crappy episode! Argh.
Well, my mistake was that I could have sworn to have read somewhere that the changes could also be noticable after episode ten, instead of seventeen. That still leaves some hope for the time at which the new staff is going to take over. However, I still remain convinced that this episode was way too full of distorted faces and bad artwork, but my guess would be that this is due to bad outsourcing.
“According to the official BBS of Hirata Katsuzo (the chief animator of “Basquash!”), Itagaki Shin was fired from the director of “Basquash!”. The official website of the anime indicates that the new director is Sato Eiichi (the director of “Kiss Dum: Engage Planet”). Hirata said the production staff of Basquash were largely reorganized from the episode 9 and Hirata himself also had to leave the team by the end of May.”
http://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=90769&show=0
So. we began seeing changes with 10, which makes sense. This is a genuine shame as I’d decided this was my favorite show of the season, with absolutely beautiful artwork and compelling characters. IT reminded me a lot of gurren laggan minus the formulaic nature of the series. I had been avoiding it because the idea of car-mechas playing basketball just sounded silly but after catching up on all my other shows a few weeks ago, I gave it a shot and quickly realized that the basketball was just a vehicle for a much larger story and interesting characters I couldn’t help but enjoy with their constant antics. I read low toy and dvd sales were the reason for the decision to change the staff, but I don’t see how that could increase the popularity of those items when it is only going to piss off the fans the show does have. Far better would have been to roll the money they must have spent on such a massive change into better marketing… I hope they get it together because it will really piss me off if they ruin such a great series.