Anime and Yashigani

Anime and Yashigani

Have you ever messed up so bad that someone named the foul-up after you?  Well, it certainly happened in anime.

Anime started picking up in Japan in the 90’s.  The quality had been going up and up; and many considered the 90’s the ‘golden age’ of anime.  However, with so many studios opening something of a bubble started to form in which it was difficult to find good animators.  Schedules were as tight as the fiercely fought for advertising dollars.

Now say you are an anime studio in this competitive environment and you’re spinning off a new series called Lost Universe after working on a very successful series called Slayers.  Good right?  You have plenty of work now that you’re right at the beginning of airing and creating this regular TV show.  But now, right around episode 3 – in the middle of crunch mode – a fire breaks out and destroys most of your work. The show must go on – so what happens?  You contract off the work to anyone with a spare pencil and ink.  In this case, a Korean company. But you don’t even have enough character sketches or time to really educate the company about what is supposed to happen in the episode.  In fact, they mix up the characters from one scene to another.  Still images stay onscreen for up to 15 seconds because you didn’t have enough time to make the moving versions.   It was so bad that the company actually had to pull the episode and re-do it for the DVD version after the one and only airing of the episode.  Unfortunately, the rest of the series never really recovers and wallows in a low-quality quagmire that dooms the series to infamy.

Here’s Lost Universe’s episode 4 – titled Yashigani – which demonstrates just how bad things can get (see especially the amazing smooth motion at 3:20 for example).  This clip shows the original along with the re-done version side by side so you can see how bad it got.

This wasn’t the only fumble in the anime world, but the episode 4 of Lost Universe episode became so infamous that drops of quality like this were simply called Yashigani’s from then on.  Ouch.

See this link for more examples of them.

 

One thought on “Anime and Yashigani

  1. hello there and thank you for your information – I have definitely picked up anything new from right here. I did however expertise some technical issues using this web site, since I experienced to reload the website many times previous to I could get it to load properly. I had been wondering if your hosting is OK? Not that I am complaining, but sluggish loading instances times will very frequently affect your placement in google and can damage your quality score if advertising and marketing with Adwords. Anyway I’m adding this RSS to my email and can look out for much more of your respective fascinating content. Ensure that you update this again very soon.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.