It's been a while since we hit the bad anime, so let's get our dose. School City Valanoir is a work of QUALITY. When I say QUALITY please don't assume that I'm talking about a geniunely good piece of work: I'm talking about QUALITY. It takes a drive not to be driven, a certain dedication to finding the bar and digging a hole in the ground beneath it to get across, to create a work of true QUALITY. Valanoir is one such anime.
In the filename, the fansubbers have helpfully included the tag [Yashigani]. Let's talk about that term so that you can, in turn, better understand QUALITY. Sage otomen bangin calls Gundress, Lost Universe, and Valanoir the three great Yashigani anime. The term comes from the title of the fourth Lost Universe episode: it didn't exactly run outright unfinished, the way Gundress did, but the animation, outsourced to a Korean studio that did not give a god damn, was legendarily terrible. Everybody's off-model, ill-proportioned, and jerking around onscreen. To hell with in-between frames! The work was so bad that the studio had to re-animate the entire episode for video release. The Lost Universe and Slayers anime weren't exactly high watermarks of animation quality in the first place, so the result is what is likely the ugliest anime episode of all time. Here's a best-of reel, since you won't find it on the DVDs.
But in laziness, Valanoir might be a cut above the Yashigani episode. The Yashigani episode has motion. People do things. Even if the outsourced studio boned it, there was least the intention of animating something entertaining. Valanoir has no such ambitions. It doesn't need to, after all. It's in the worst genre: Valanoir is an anime based on a videogame. Valanoir is a PS2 school-life sim set at the titular school. I assume the game wasn't too popular, but that didn't stop developer Idea Factory from tossing out two $50 episodes of Valanoir. These DVDs claim to be 50 minutes in length, but the episode I have here is only 26, and I'm pretty sure that only two episodes exist. I assume whatever else is on those DVDs is filler material of some kind, and considering that this entire anime is filler material, you have to wonder what didn't make the cut. This episode is called, as the fansub puts it, "Tilde Myu's Doki-Doki Ellipsis First Experience Heart Tilde".
From the contents of the anime, I'm going to go ahead and assume that this game wasn't worth animating, or hell, probably even playing. The plot is a typically obnoxious pile of anime cliche: an unbearable heroine who only says "waaaaa" or "waaaaiii" or "sugooooi" goes to Valanoir, a school where she will make unbearable friends and say "waaaa" and "waaaaiii" and "sugooooi" to them. So in that sense, they gave the story the treatment it deserved. The backgrounds are all CG, and they've clearly been slapped together in about two minutes. Nobody moves in Valanoir: if there is movement, expect that shot to be used repeatedly in order to fill up time. The best and laziest trick used is when they have the main character's grandpa "eat" a hamburger for the entire first scene, while the main character is almost entirely offscreen. His head moves up and down behind the thing, but the hamburger never gets any smaller, and they never really have to animate his mouth moving. Brilliant.
And it actually gets worse than that: there are transition scenes (indicated, for some reason, by letterboxing) that contain no animation at all. They're just slideshows. Even the OP is just the artwork from the videogame being moved around the screen. It's as though they were actually working really hard on the parts they animated, and they couldn't keep up the standard. Except we know they weren't: even the parts in Valanoir that do move can barely even be called "animation" in the first place! You have to wonder what the budget was, or whether they just locked three guys in a room for six hours and told them to make a cartoon.
The gang at ADTRW translated and released Valanoir at the start of the spring season as a prank: people would figure it was a new, current show, and then they'd be tricked into watching Valanoir. A couple thousand people downloaded, is what I hear. Good job, bros, now get going on that second episode. I hear it's even worse, and I can't imagine how little they'd have to care to manage that! Plus, I'm wondering about the mysterious Naruto Channel.
I'm just looking at that first picture, and all I can really say is: yeah, she got need.
Posted by: OGT | May 03, 2009 at 11:09 PM
Oh, hell. Does NOTHING good come from Idea Factory? Their games sound like they should be good, even by accident, and sometimes I tell myself that it's all a joke, because it makes their existence hurt a little less. Believing that they aren't honest people who mean well but jackasses who think they're hilarious is what keeps me going.
Posted by: Toru Masuta | May 10, 2009 at 02:56 AM
Moetan, everybody's favourite English textbook, has this to add:
"In the lost universe, people can't move smoothly."
Posted by: WAHa.06x36 | May 12, 2009 at 06:15 PM
Unfortunately I have no idea what's on the DVDs, we're actually using old copies I saved from nicovideo. I assume everyone who owns this already set it on fire.
Need to time ep 2 already, I guess.
Posted by: astrange | May 25, 2009 at 02:05 AM
I HAVE TO KNOW HOW IT ENDS
Posted by: David Cabrera | May 25, 2009 at 02:20 AM