In a twenty minute or so anime episode you have a two minute opening song, and a two minute ending song every damn episode! Then to eat up even more precious narrative time the next episode will start by replaying the final minutes of the previous episode:smack:
This is just omnipresent and it annoys me, watching Attack On Titan I keep groaning and hitting FF.
I’m no expert on anime, but I lived in Japan 8 years and have an opinion: most anime are terrible, low-grade crap. I’m talking about “animation” in which nothing moves but the character’s mouth, etc.
I think stuff such as you describe is literal time-waster now codified as tradition, which of course still serves to waste time.
The anime songs themselves are a kind of terrible genre of their own. They all manage to sound alike, and none individually impresses. Out of the thousands that have been pumped out, how many are actually excellent songs? It’s another weird aspect of anime.
Anime is under extremely, extremely tight production schedules. I can’t remember the specifics, but I can ask someone who knows more about this stuff.
Basically, the production schedule is so starved for time, they basically have to use any time saving measures they can. Part of that is reducing the time of new stuff they actually have to draw. See also: repeated scenes, flashbacks, Sailor Moon transformation sequences. When I read all the bullshit most studios go through, it’s kind of a wonder than any good non-OVA anime exist at all.
I agree with the rest of your post, but sometimes we get a gem of an intro song, such as “TANK!” from Cowboy Bebop.
Right, I don’t doubt it. It’s just that, as with every other aspect of anime, they are just churning so.much.stuff out.
Thanks I guess this is the answer, and yes I did used to wonder what the deal was with those “transformation” or power up sequences played pointlessly.
Even in AOT they sometimes have a scene that is a still pic with dialog over it!
And even still, you’ll occasionally end up with a flashbacks or “two voices talking while the camera pans over some background illustrations” episode every once in a while. Though I think usually that’s less because they fell behind and more because the director wants to do a fancy piece of animation for a particular episode and decided to cannibalize another episode rather than spreading the suck around through a bunch of episodes.
My fave is the opening theme to “High School of the Dead.”
I’ve never seen Sailor Moon, but it’s taken to hilarious levels in “Rosario+Vampire.” And I’ve always figured the reasons were similar to why a 30-minute show here is 20 minutes or so.
These things are all much less noticeable when you are watching one episode of the show per week.
I remember MAD Magazine’s parody of the original Battlestar Galactica pointing out that they needed to drag out the Viper launch sequence in every episode to justify the fact that it was their most-expensive special effect 