Sometimes a story cannot be told without a large cast of speaking parts. That's particularly common in sports stories. I think there are basically only three ways to deal with that, each of which has pitfalls.

First, you can ignore most of them most of the time. If they're opponents the risk is that they become cannon-fodder, redshirts, doomed to die (or lose) without the audience feeling anything for them. What's worse, it can make the victory by the good guys seem cheap and unimportant.

Second, you can try to give a lot of them back stories and screen time. That's what Saki did, and it fell for a different trap: you can drown in backstory. Saki spent an enormous amount of time telling backstory for opponents during the tournament, which dragged down the story telling into the mud. When I first watched it, one episode per week, I eventually gave up and stopped, waiting until the whole show was done before catching up. And when I rewatch it, I do a lot of skipping.

Third, you can split the difference: make them have characters but not very substantial ones. The drawback here is that it can make them seem like "cardboard cutouts" -- and the best way to handle that is to laugh at it. That's what they did in Girls und Panzer, and we got that cue when all the tanks got painted strange colors. "This is not a deadly serious show, folks. Go with it, have fun, because we in the production staff are having fun.

Plus, they effectively treated each tank crew at Ooarai as a single character most of the time. So Hippo team was "the history club" and all of them were into history. Duck was "the volleyball girls". Anteater was "the gamer girls". Rabbit was "the first year girls". Turtle was "the student council". Leopon was "the wrench wenches". Occasionally individual characters from one team or another would have a special role (i.e. Rommel doing a scouting mission with Yukari during the Pravda battle). And they "hung a lampshade on it" with Mallard, the discipline committee. All three girls look exactly the same except for the length of their hair, and they all had the same seiyuu. None of which was accidental; the director is goosing the audience in the ribs with it.

The big advantage of the third way is that it avoids the problems of the other two. The characters don't become redshirts, and they also don't bog down the story telling. The only characters we get backstory for are Miho, Yukari, Hana, and Mako. All we know about Saori's back story is that she's Mako's friend from way back.

Obviously there's no single best answer, but in GuP I think this one was the right choice. There was so much else they had to cover in 1 cour that they simply didn't have room for lots of backstory. And I think the story telling is paced well; it doesn't feel flabby, and there isn't anything I would consider filler, but it also doesn't feel rushed.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Entertainment at 07:02 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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