J.C. Staff’s Original Sins?
Does J.C. Staff commit sins of anime-original injustice? Myssa Rei contented that ‘J.C. Staff seems to stumble when they have to make things on the fly’. Haesslich pointed to ‘levels of failure‘ in ZnT 2 & 3 as well as parts of Shana 2; J.C. Staff original = t3h suck?
I’m not really able to comment meaningfully on the above hypothesis with reference to ToraDora! or Shana2 because I haven’t seen the manga or light novels respectively and I didn’t even watch ZnT 2 or 3. But two thoughts do come to mind.
First, are we fair to consider J.C. Staff to be monolithic? Stripey’s post on the series composition process strongly suggests that animation studio credit may not be the sole or even most important determinant in the quality and enjoyment level of an anime series. Is it possible to isolate a sub-studio-level centre of gravity that is the cause of much woe and teeth-gashing, like a specific individual or group that does areas mostly like to touch on ‘original’ parts such as script writers, screenplay writers, story boarders, directors?
Secondly, there could be exceptions that prove the rule but it also suggests that J.C. Staff orginal does not always equal suck. I really enjoyed Episode 19: One Spring Night in Azumanga Daioh. Having checked my four volumes of the Azumanga manga, I’m pretty sure most of the material in this episode is anime-original. And it was, for me, the most touching episode; it proceeded on two parallel tracks that charts the students’ and teachers’ sakura flower viewing, it was a lovely glimpse into the teachers’ world.
There was an intriguing tension between how Nyamo, in particular, was an adult figure to the students and yet she herself didn’t feel fully adult in comparison to her peer, Eiko, who had a better paying job and/or who had ‘gotten herself a man’ (as Yukari put it with her usual tact and finesse), neither was she really recognized as actually being fully ‘adult’ by her mother.
I wouldn’t have thought that these themes could be best explored in the context of Azumanga’s world. But it fit perfectly in the episode, contrasting with Chiyo and Kagura’s conversation about their dreams for the future, as well as the overall direction of the series which was moving towards graduation and beyond the here.
But, outside this single dissonant case, has J.C. Staff, in general, snatched the mark of original sin from GONZO?
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