Welcome back to my TED Talk, as I follow where my curiosity goes. Today, I woke up in the middle of the night in a sweat. I realized what I must do for my next entry: start figuring out how the internal structure of the team was setup for AIC Build, the studio behind Oreimo, Haganai, and KoiChoco, using a variety of sources with some loose assumptions through observations and guess work. I love puzzles and will continue until I stop enjoying myself. Let's Jam!!!
Genesis of This Thread of Logic
I have a confession: I barely know a thing about Dragonball or Toei Animation (its primary Anime studio). While looking up how Anime gets produced, I found the image below from a Dragonball fansite showing the general hierarchy of the team that does most of the franchise (and it's apparently been mostly the same for the past 40 or so years). The one above: I just love Toriyama's art work but have almost no clue what is happening there. Can someone please explain it for me? Thanks
Note the line about this being only applicable to Toei Animation; every studio out there has a different structure with varying official role names based on way too many factors to list here. I would be them and so would you!!! 🐒
First Discovery
The ending credits for both Season 1 of Haganai and KoiChoco have some similar layouts and compositions. The left credits are from Haganai and right are from KoiChoco. I'm using these three screens for demonstration purposes and will only be focusing on the Kanji on the far left side of each Anime's credit screen. All of these were sourced from the official Anime ending credits and both use slightly different fonts but are mostly identical with the third example having some exceptions that I'll dissect further when I get to them.
To make things easier to follow, I've taken a small portion of the Toei Animation hierarchy image and marked what shows in order by number in that credit screen. I won't be using it that much here but it's very well done. I hope my scribbles work well enough for you. I also used both Haganai's and KoiChoco's AniDBs as guides for figuring out the names on the credits. My plan for this one is not to dive completely into each individual person but instead just to get a feel for the how and why for each team.
Credits 1 (Production Department)
From Haganai's Storyboard AniDB Section
- Only Endou Hirotaka storyboarded Episode 6
- Saitou Hisashi storyboarded Episodes 1, 3, 5, 8, 11 and 12 and the first season's ending animation (ED1)
From Both Storyboard AniDB Sections
- Kitahata Tooru and Kanasaki Takaomi storyboarded on both shows
- There were also some Episode Director crossovers
- Looks like Tooru-san was primarily working on Haganai Episodes with only the ED1 Episode Director credit for KoiChoco
From KoiChoco's Storyboard AniDB Section
- Episodes 3 and 9 of KoiChoco (two episodes I did have some minor complaints with on a recent rewatch) hired an external Assistant Episode Director, meaning that there was probably some trouble getting those finished on time
Credits 2 (Key Animation)
The Key Animation Team (原画) worked directly under the Assistant Animation Supervisor (作画監督補佐) on a per episode basis.
KoiChoco Only
I don't hate its ED at all but compared to Haganai's, there were almost no staff that worked on it; it's very much a recreation of scenes shown in the original Visual Novels, just using the adaptation's "fresher" style
Credits 3 (Marketing and Promotion)
This was the one that had the most differences out of these samples. See Part II for more information about KoiChoco's Marketing Team if you're interested.
Haganai came out in Fall 2011 (source) while KoiChoco was released in Summer 2012 (source). I'll be putting the most focus on this one due to how personally interesting it was to me.
With Haganai:
- The general Marketing Team was smaller but there was a dedicated Planning Team (企画協力)
- It had a Logo Designer (ロゴデザイン) (which meant more of a brand presence; this is a pretty good rundown about the ins and outs of how brands are used)
- There was no Web Manager (WEB制作), though; it's the only one out of the three that didn't use one (Oreimo's AniDB)
- The website was not important in this section of the credits
- The Official Anime Twitter account only ceased having major activity (after being live since 2011) just a few months ago
- It had multiple eyecatches
eyecatch - a single image with a character or concept, some kind of branding (such as a logo or character tattoo) and (now) QR Codes, that are used to immediately entice a random person in the wild to further research its meaning; not used as much now and were originally used primarily for returning from ad breaks Source
With KoiChoco:
- Bigger general Marketing Team
- There was no Planning Team on this; that meant the Marketing was most likely handling that too, due to its bigger size and composition (the Toei Production Staff link above gave information I missed)
- No Logo Designer, but Kaya-san, the A&R Producer, was on the Marketing Team for several other Anime prior, so it's very possible she was a support on this team along with handling all of the sound work (will briefly come back to that shortly)
- KoiChoco's website and WEB marketing teams were brought to the forefront in the second screenshot but had the least amount of social media activity long-term
- KoiChoco is a niche property in an oversaturated Eroge adaptation subgenre, so getting that web presence known in the credits was critical for that aspect to have any chance of success
- No official Eyecatches but this one of Non-chan should be tattooed on my body (source)
What I do find fascinating is how many people use the #koichoco hashtag on Twitter (including me as the most recent user) along with a very particular Non-chan Gif that trended fairly recently. I'm glad it gets some love and wouldn't have started this series of posts otherwise if I hadn't randomly watched it, but I'm still surprised nonetheless.
Side Notes:
- Tanaka Mizuho (田中瑞穂) (TBS) was on both Marketing Teams; they were on multiple projects in 2012 with these two being the only ones that they were involved with for the entire season. The rest, they were only working on individual episode promotion (source)
About Kaya-san, the Sequel (Speculation Time)
Remember how in Part II, I was trying to figure out what caused her to leave the Anime industry after KoiChoco in 2012? I now have a new theory or two based on the data from today's dive.
The image above shows what all an A&R Producer / Director would be in charge of on a production like this. If she was also an uncredited major support role in the marketing, I could imagine how stressful the project actually would be for her. There's also a possibility that the SHIFT UP Kaya-san for the Destiny Child OST was coincidentally a wholly different individual. Then, you get more "coincidences" like this, where both the SHIFT UP founder and her worked together on the same project at a different point, further solidifying the surface area in which they both could have directly interacted and at least shared business cards / contact info.
Bonus: Woke Up to This Track on My YouTube Recommendation List; r/satisfying
If you enjoyed this style of content, feel free to reply down below, reblog and vote on it. I'm available to research Anime, studios or anything similarly related that you have interest in. Your support is greatly appreciated.
I'm not fully sure how far I'll go with this main or what the next part will be like, but welcome to my brain. Thank you for reading, and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your night.