Behold. The Future of the Anime. Today.
Forget moe. Forget light novels. Forget visual novels. They are all red herrings. They are just pop eating itself, and most of those who protest their existance would simply replace them with works equally niche and worthless.
If you want the actual future of anime, look to this show. The future is cheap flash animation done badly.
When you look at Akitaro Daichi’s Flash work on Gag Manga Biyori, it is hard to distinguish from his hand-animated work on 1998’s Sexy Commando. The makers of Kaitou Reinya on the other hand have gone for a look that is much closer to Flash artists like FROGMAN or Weebl. And that’s probably an overly favourable comparison. Lets just say it is very obvious that the show has been made in Flash or something similar. At its worst, it equates stretching and squashing a static drawing of a figure as animation.
It feels like they’re seeing just how much they can shave the production budget down to before viewers stop tuning in. Similar to when Adult Swim started squeezing animation budgets and we ended up with stuff like 10oz Mouse. Of course there’s a second factor involved here and that’s the fact the show is a vehicle for one of the womanchildren spat out by the Morning Musume machine. In this case, Tanaka Reina who is cast as the lead character thief Kaitou Reinya. So it’s possible most the budget is going to her, or her management, and that’s why this thing looks so cheap.
It’s a shame, as the character design is quite fun and there’s actually some good gags with the mouse that would work so much better they’d put more money/effort into it. Thankfully what little I’ve caught of Ufotable’s Yawarakeme and of the fourth season of GMB suggests there’s still some promise in this growing sector of anime. And as more people turn to it, I think we’ll see innovation in the same way we’ve seen it in western Flash animation over the last decade.
Sexy Commando, eh? I’m enjoying it so far, so I might check this one out as well. 12 oz. mouse was strange, but I liked it for what it was, especially the slow, dry dialogue.
If you like Sexy Commando, definitely check out Gag Manga Biyori. Daichi’s understanding of the rhythm of jokes transcends language and GMB has a similar absurd sense of humour to Sexy Commando too (though instead of 90s Japanese pop culture references, it’s full of historical and literary references).