At this point I think I know enough to see how this will all turn out for this show. The three episode rule may not be an ironclad measure of a shows worth but here I can see that without a big change in direction or animation this show isn’t going to live up to the manga. The director definitely seems to be using the philosophy of Illumination animation of making animation as cheap as possible. Case in point, the titan faces of the manga were often used for exaggerated outburst but in the anime it’s definitely not used out of loyalty but instead as an animation saving technique as just pulling a still image from the manga is easier than animating it. We even have this show pulling the removal of the background and replacing it with a gradient colour. The animation in these episodes is parse and once again I am reminded of Wotakoi which was hampered by its production values too. But the direction of the jokes also has me confused as the pacing is just wrong and jokes are changed to less funny versions.
As an example there is a joke with Iori planning to play strip rock paper scissors with the newcomer Azusa but has to play with some other guys first. Ten minutes later he comes back to Azusa posing dramatically ready to play but he’s got nothing left to strip. In the anime however, rather than have Iori go away for ten minutes, they just jump straight to the punchline and before it has even time to land the anime moves on. They also cut out Asuza laughing her ass off and saying to the other guys about how Iori was the best.
Same with the more lighter jokes like the guys trying to figure out how a girls school uniform could have to do with diving and Kouhei just casually dressing up a hug pillow in it. The punchline is there but the anime never lingers on it enough for it to make an impact and it just passes without much notice. This is part of the process of adaptionas with manga you have time to linger on any panel for how long you want and the sudden page turns make jokes hit you right in the gut. An anime needs to put extra effort in presentation to make the jokes land. You can’t just put the manga on a screen and call it a day, it needs work for the joke to land the same. The problem I see here is that the anime has the same punchlines of the manga but none of the build up to make them as funny as they were. Of course this problem doesn’t quite seem to be affecting first time viewers from what I see so it could be just that I know the jokes and hearing them a second time isn’t as funny as the first. Like a meme that gets repeated ad nauseam with slightly altered context to the point where it loses any humor it once had and just becomes a reference that people point at and say they get. Quite a number of Grand Blue jokes got ruined in this manner, like the lighter and water joke or the Grand Blue is a Diving anime joke.
