"Work expands to fill the time available." That's Parkinson's law. There have been dozens of variations on it: clutter expands to fill the desk space available, book collections expand to fill the shelf space available, porn expands to fill the disk space available, you've heard 'em. (Steve's posts expand to fill the browser space available. shaddup...)

To that we add a new one: story filler expands to fill the anime broadcast time available. My experience has been that half-season series have averaged better than full-season series. I've seen some half-season series which monumentally sucked, and there have been full-season series which have rocked me, but on average it's much more likely that a half-season series will be good.

Some of that is because many series concepts just don't have enough juice to fill a full season. But an important factor is that the short format forces story-telling discipline on the writers.

Figure 17 has an unusual distribution format. It's 13 episodes, but each episode is 44 minutes long. I've watched three episodes now, and so the obvious question is, how does the long format stack up?

Unfortunately, not too well. The story-telling feels flabby. Just as having too many episodes to fill causes writers to reach for the filler, so having a long episodes seems to have done the same.

And it's already settling into a pattern. We follow Tsubasa in her daily life, as she faces some small hurdle (usually social) which make her miserable and angsty, while off in the distance another maguar egg hatches. Danger looms -- but it spends ten or fiteen minutes looming, as we get brief glimpses of the danger looming intermixed with long essentially-irrelevant sequences of Tsubasa's daily life, and see how it's been changed by having Hikaru around.

The main theme of the series is that Hikaru is zestful, cheerful, outgoing, willing to take risks; Tsubasa is quiet, miserable, withdrawn, unassertive. Hikaru has been pushing Tsubasa to be more assertive and proactive, less of a victim, and I can see that slowly, slowly, Tsubasa is changing.

That's the real story being told. Effectively, all the rest is just a carton to explain how and why Hikaru came into Tsubasa's life, plus an excuse to put a pretty spectacular fight sequence into each episode.

It's almost like they're afraid of really telling that story. The action is a form of pandering, like the fan service in Divergence Eve. It's something they include in each episode because they don't think anyone would watch the series otherwise. That's what it feels like.

Ep 3 seems iconic, and it was definitely much, much too long. It could easily have been fit into a 22 minute episode, and it would have been a better story for it. Too much time was spent watching DD find, and then to try and fail to fight the third maguar himself. WAAAY too much time was spent watching the kids practicing post-ball. The battle, once Tsubasa and Hikaru finally got involved with it, was about the right length, but it was only a few minutes. Even leaving that alone, there would still have been plenty of time in a 22-minute episode for an adequate second story about that game. And the whole sequence with DD trying to fight the critter himself could have been collapsed down to about 30 seconds.

Pete mentioned that when he watched it, he felt as if he had to struggle to get through it. I've been feeling the same. I started skipping through the post-ball parts of ep 3, and I felt like skipping through parts of the first and second episodes.

The story is placed in Hokkaido, which is Japanese for "the ass-end of nowhere". Hokkaido is big-sky territory, Japan's equivalent of Alaska, a place with marvelous scenic vistas and cold winters and no real cities to speak of; a nice place to visit but who in their right mind would want to live there? It's rural, it's Hickville, it's the sticks. It's a slower life, a slower place. That's the stereotype. Did the writers somehow subconsciously try to adopt a more languid story telling tempo because of that?

I doubt it; I think it's just an attack of the fillers.

I'm finding myself comparing this series to Tenchi Muyo: GXP which is, of course, entirely different in most ways. The one thing they have in common is that they're the same total length. TMGXP's story telling is crisp, even staccato. What we see is a year in the life of Yamada Seina told in 600 minutes, but Nabeshin shows us the "good parts" version of his life. He leaves out all the boring stuff. As we're watching it, it's clear that Nabeshin has been brutal in cutting out everything that's boring and mundane, not just between episodes but also within each episode. And that means that the story never bogs down, never gets in a rut. That's only possible because Nabeshin has 600 minutes of good-stuff with which to fill his series. He doesn't ever need to reach for the filler.

I've always prized economy in story telling. And I'm not feeling it here, which means that I have had to struggle a bit to keep watching. There's something wrong with the story-teller's art when the audience starts muttering, "OK, OK, I know about that, already. Get on with it! Get to the good stuff!"

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 03:41 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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