The Amount of Time Neccesary to Cover One Chapter

[JulieYBM]

I have been on a big Hajime no Ippo kick for the last few months. The Hajime no Ippo TV series is currently dozens of volumes behind the comic serialization at this point so all of the animated projects going back as far as the 2000 TV series has been able to cover a fair amount of comic effortlessly. The aforementioned first TV series covered the first two hundred sixty-nine chapters of the original comic in only seventy-five episodes. Each episode is jam-packed with three-to-four chapters worth of story, something some episodes of Dragon Ball Kai attempted, but flow smoothly and naturally.

Anyway, what does that have to do with Dragon Ball? The other day I decided to look up an episode of Dragon Ball that covered three comic chapters and pinpoint the length of time each twenty-four minute episode spent adapting each chapter. Using Kanzenshuu I discovered that Dragon Ball episode #24 adapted chapters #41-43. From there I ran over to Hulu and began to do a little toying around. Chapter #41 runs for 7:27, Chapter #42 runs for 6:55, and chapter #43 runs for 5:07. This is interesting to see, considering most episodes of Dragon Ball Z stretch an entire fourteen page chapter over the course of the same combined time. I don't necessarily want to rag on Dragon Ball Z, I think it gets the job done surprisingly well considered the situation, but I think it is interesting to note that a naturally but quickly paced telling of the story is possible...Dragon Ball Kai just wasn't an example of this.

[Sin]

And I look forward to the day that it might be made in such a way, it'd have to be done by re-animating the whole series though (à la HxH, FMA:B). The chances of that happening in any kind of short term are looking entirely slim as we already received the 'Kai treatment' and we've been sitting around waiting for the Buu arc for years now. It's interesting to see how quickly 3 chapters can be covered though, and maybe that's a little too fast for certain chapters, but I'm not young and care-free these days and I don't have time to be watching 200+ episodes, I generally stick to 25-episode-per-season anime.

Contrastingly, I wonder what chapter took the most time to cover, it'd likely be one with a lot of fighting as I know a lot of fight scenes that were only a couple of pages were translated into whole episodes.

[Fizzer]

Fighting chapters are the ones that SHOULD take the least time to cover. A few sentences of dialogue take longer than someone leaping into the air or throwing a punch. This is why the Freeza fight is so slow; they were pretty much on a one-chapter-per-episode basis yet the chapters covered very short amounts of time.

[Sin]

Fighting chapters are the ones that SHOULD take the least time to cover. A few sentences of dialogue take longer than someone leaping into the air or throwing a punch. This is why the Freeza fight is so slow; they were pretty much on a one-chapter-per-episode basis yet the chapters covered very short amounts of time.

Yeah, I guess that they realized fights could be a viable way to 'prolong' episodes instead of story filler, I think Kai got the fight lengths almost right.

[Blade]

I think in the overall scheme of long-running Shonen anime adaptations that Dragonball isn't a terrible example of pacing if you discount the Freeza fight.

I mean, if you remove the much-maligned filler-only story arcs and episodes, I think that the Toei writers did a reasonable job more-often-than-not of padding out some of Toriyama's more paltry chapters. I think the 'Ultimate Gohan' vs Buu fight is a good example, where if the anime hadn't been padded out any, events would have occurred on-screen at a dizzying, almost unintelligible pace. In many instances like this, I think the anime is many times a better narrative spectacle than the work its based on.

For an example of how not to pace an anime series, see One Piece after Thriller Bark. It's almost un-watchable - I praise any kid in Japan with the attention span to follow something so snail-paced over 52 episodes a year. I'd take a couple of trash filler arcs every now and again over the one-episode-per-chapter dross that they're putting out now.

[B]

Three to four chapters of the manga should get you about a half hour of story, so yeah, six-to-seven minutes spent on one chapter seems about right.

[JulieYBM]

Fighting chapters tend to not take a lot of time. Even when multiple chapters of fighting are covered in a single episode you can still wind up creating extra fight scenes, too. Three is defnitely the sweet spot, I think because it still allows for the drama to flow naturally, especially with good direction that doesn't necessarily follow the comic exactly. Chapters #195-197 would have worked much better as the first episode of Dragon Ball Kai. This way episode #2 could have covered #198-201 and episode #3 could cover #202-204, a much more natural flow.

[Kid Buu]

How long would DBZ be if it covered 3 chapters per episode?

[TheDevilsCorpse]

How long would DBZ be if it covered 3 chapters per episode?

Dragon Ball would be about 65 episodes.
Dragon Ball Z would be about 108 episodes.
So the series would be 173 episodes in total; about 20 more than the current Dragon Ball portion of the anime.

[Saiga]

How long would DBZ be if it covered 3 chapters per episode?

173-174 episodes, from the start of DB to the end of Z. As opposed to the 444 episodes of DB + DBZ combined that we got.

[JulieYBM]

519/3 = 173. I actually threw together a what-if scenario that adapted the series as one hundred sixty-three episodes, but doesn't necessarily matter considering how close together the numbers are.

[B]

Glancing over that amazing list, it looks like Trunks The Story wasn't taken into account.

I did a much less polished, straight four-chapters-per-episode count, and put it at the tail end of chapters 395-397. That's basically where it is in the tankoubon, but you could probably move it somewhere more appropriate... It's 20 pages long, so honestly, you could probably pair it with just one other chapter and that would be a half hour of material.

[JulieYBM]

Glancing over that amazing list, it looks like Trunks The Story wasn't taken into account.

I did a much less polished, straight four-chapters-per-episode count, and put it at the tail end of chapters 395-397. That's basically where it is in the tankoubon, but you could probably move it somewhere more appropriate... It's 20 pages long, so honestly, you could probably pair it with just one other chapter and that would be a half hour of material.

I avoided including it because it doesn't really fit and the content as-is kind of sucks. While the TV rendition of it isn't perfect the expanded story ideas really make it the emotional story that it is. I suppose it could be inserted right before the revelation of the second time machine. Squeezing it into episode #112 as I set it up on my list might not be possible, though.

I've done one of these lists for Rurouni Kenshin, too. I've been meaning to do one for Bleach, but I like the present TV series so much I haven't really gotten around to it. The Arrancar arc is the only arc that really 'needs' a remake and even then it would fit into eighty three-chapter episodes perfectly so there isn't much point, I think.

[Kid Buu]

Maybe they should Inuyasha: The Final Act the series and do an entire volume per episode.

[JulieYBM]

Maybe they should Inuyasha: The Final Act the series and do an entire volume per episode.

There's no reason to do that. Hajime no Ippo: The Fighting! Rising rushed through dozens of chapters in its first two episodes providing for terrible entertainment. Three or four chapters is perfect for telling a story in detail.

[Kamiccolo9]

Glancing over that amazing list, it looks like Trunks The Story wasn't taken into account.

I did a much less polished, straight four-chapters-per-episode count, and put it at the tail end of chapters 395-397. That's basically where it is in the tankoubon, but you could probably move it somewhere more appropriate... It's 20 pages long, so honestly, you could probably pair it with just one other chapter and that would be a half hour of material.

I avoided including it because it doesn't really fit and the content as-is kind of sucks. While the TV rendition of it isn't perfect the expanded story ideas really make it the emotional story that it is. I suppose it could be inserted right before the revelation of the second time machine. Squeezing it into episode #112 as I set it up on my list might not be possible, though.

I've done one of these lists for Rurouni Kenshin, too. I've been meaning to do one for Bleach, but I like the present TV series so much I haven't really gotten around to it. The Arrancar arc is the only arc that really 'needs' a remake and even then it would fit into eighty three-chapter episodes perfectly so there isn't much point, I think.

Would you mind PMing me your Kenshin list? I thought it was paced pretty well (aside from some of the most atrociously bad filler I've ever seen), so I'm curious to see what you've come up with.

[Fizzer]

Maybe they should Inuyasha: The Final Act the series and do an entire volume per episode.

This is why I greatly prefer InuYasha's manga to its anime. You get sixty decently-paced episodes covering 20ish volumes, then 100 filler-ridden episodes covering up to volume 34, then 26 light-speed episodes covering a whopping 23 volumes..

[Kid Buu]

Maybe they should Inuyasha: The Final Act the series and do an entire volume per episode.

This is why I greatly prefer InuYasha's manga to its anime. You get sixty decently-paced episodes covering 20ish volumes, then 100 filler-ridden episodes covering up to volume 34, then 26 light-speed episodes covering a whopping 23 volumes..

I enjoy both versions. By the way, there's a total of 40 filler episodes, and I like a lot of the filler.

[Fizzer]

Maybe they should Inuyasha: The Final Act the series and do an entire volume per episode.

This is why I greatly prefer InuYasha's manga to its anime. You get sixty decently-paced episodes covering 20ish volumes, then 100 filler-ridden episodes covering up to volume 34, then 26 light-speed episodes covering a whopping 23 volumes..

I enjoy both versions. By the way, there's a total of 40 filler episodes, and I like a lot of the filler.

Is all of InuYasha's filler just in the form of isolated filler stories?

I do like that kind of filler a hell of a lot more than DB's kind. I guess there wasn't really a way for Dragon Ball to have non-integrated filler though, because arcs can go on for so long. They'd have to have 40-episode filler arcs between every real arc.

[Kid Buu]

Is all of InuYasha's filler just in the form of isolated filler stories?

I do like that kind of filler a hell of a lot more than DB's kind. I guess there wasn't really a way for Dragon Ball to have non-integrated filler though, because arcs can go on for so long. They'd have to have 40-episode filler arcs between every real arc.

59
63-65
68
72
75-79
89-101
127-130
133- 140
147-148
162-163

Are all filler.