Dogasu wrote:Didn't Super have a troubled production as well, given how little was revealed before the show came out? I remember plenty of people (myself included!) wondering if the show was actually going to make its July 5th debut given how the only real footage we had beforehand was a brief teaser trailer that consisted mostly of pan shots and still images where the only things moving were the characters' mouths. The reused Kai footage also points at the show being behind schedule a lot of the time.
Series Director
Chioka Kimitoshi had been storyboarding for other series up to just a month before
Dragon Ball Super began broadcasting. This means he was either brought onto the project very late or Toei Animation needed to divert his attention mid-pre-production to work on other projects that had no storyboard artist available. The series director is the lead creative force of a series and the series typically reflects their attitude and production philosophies. Traditionally a series director will personally storyboard and see his storyboard through for the first episode of a series. Series Director Koga Gou had four months between abandoning
One Piece Episode #570 (28 Ocotober 2012) to direct and storyboard
Doki-Doki! PreCure Episode #1 03 February 2013). When Tanaka Yuuta finished his storyboard for
Majin Bone Episode #23 (02 September 2014) he immediately jumped ship to become the series director of
Go! Princess PreCure (01 February 2015). Tanaka has so far storyboarded and directed Episode #22 and storyboarded Episodes #32 and #39 of his series.
We know the core staff for up to twenty-one episodes of
Dragon Ball Super and Chioka has yet to storyboard or personally oversee a single episode. When Chioka was series director of
Hakaba Kitarou he at least had the time to be an episode director for three of the eleven episodes and storyboard two of them himself. Before becoming the series director of
Dragon Ball Super Chioka had the time to storyboard episodes of many Toei series all year long.
Dragon Ball Super Episode #5 had good staff work on it. Shimizu Junji has directed some great fights before, like
One Piece Movie #9 and
World Trigger Episode #7. If
Dragon Ball Super Episode #5 as aired so far actually reflects his storyboard then I would imagine the storyboard was massively rushed, too. The animation supervisor,
Tate Naoki, is a great action animator, too and was the animation supervisor and character designer of the aforementioned
One Piece Movie #9, to say nothing of being a veteran animator for the
Dragon Ball franchise. Although Tate didn't have time to do any key animation for the episode himself he did have freelance animator and storyboard artist
Ootsuka Ken provide key animation.
To recapitulate, pre-production was either delayed or practically non-existent, the number of animators available is terribly small due to the lack of proper scheduling and the industry being so busy with other projects, the series director's hand seems to be non-existent. Another aspect to consider is how so many storyboards are not being drawn by their episode directors. Typically Toei Animation is strict about having their episode directors do their own storyboards but on
Dragon Ball Super many episodes will first have a storyboard artist do the storyboard and then a separate episode director see the board through to final product. This either means that the episode directors have no time to draw their own boards (the average board takes three weeks to finish), storyboard artists are boarding quickly and passing their boards on as quickly as possible to get to the next episode to help get ahead of schedule or the episode directors available cannot draw so extra help is needed. Episode Directors
Mikami Masato and
Satou Masanori are relatively young directors so they may either not have the ability to draw their own boards or are not trusted to draw their own boards. Both only recently began being credited as
enshutsu rather than 演出助手 (
enshutsu joshu) so I'm thinking that they were only promoted due to a lack of manpower at Toei Animation.
The series also has three rotating chief animation supervisors. Even
World Trigger has only two while
One Piece and
Go! Princess PreCure have but one. Coupled with how Yashima Yoshitaka does not have the ability to finish all of the key animation for episodes himself like he has on other series and I think there's room for an argument that the situation is dire. Then again, the use of three animation supervisors might be an attempt at simply rubbing out the quirks of the animation supervisors...but if that were true we wouldn't have Toma Seizou and Iseki Shuu'ichi as animation supervisors as they were for Episode #4 and Episode #16 respectively.
I'm probably forgetting something but I'll leave things here for now.