This article reads not so much as an "exposé" on the behind-the-scenes making of the 2016-2017 Berserk anime, but as an attempt to whitewash and exculpate the Berserk Partners, Liden Films, GEMBA and whoever else responsible for making this abortion of an adaptation.
But to say the staff lacked foresight would be unfair. Many voices within GEMBA spoke out as the project was being greenlit, skeptical about their ability to produce such taxing work.
Interesting. If there were dissenters within GEMBA who realized they were biting off way more than they could chew, then why we've never heard their voices when the 2016 anime was first announced?
But it would be great if a kind soul from within GEMBA/Liden Films was generous enough to reveal the current Berserk anime's budget. That person can use the Wikileaks or even Reddit to leak that information. Because the series' budget is the elephant in the room that May keeps constantly alluding to throughout his article, but carefully dancing around it without mentioning directly. Only a wretchedly low budget could explain why Berserk ended up getting animated by some shoddy moe anime studios like GEMBA/Millipensee. Because the high-caliber anime studios like Madhouse, Sunrise or Production IG do not come cheap. Nor do the services of top tier directors like Shinichiro Watanabe, Hideaki Anno or even Naohito Takahashi for that matter.
It's been argued that Itagaki's history with brightly-colored comedy and silly action series would clash with the dark and gritty world of Berserk, but the real cause of the conflict turned out to be Itagaki's insistence upon a very particular aesthetic that proved too difficult to achieve.
For fuck's sake....
Really, man? So according to May, Shin Itagaki's ADHD-style directing had
absolutely nothing to do with this series being a steaming pile of shit that it is? And that the issue was just the "aesthetic" choices, and everything else about Itagaki was was fine and dandy?
A quick Google search on Itagaki reveals that he is, first and foremost, a moe anime specialist. About 95% of stuff he worked on before Berserk lies in moe/kawaii genre. You have to look no further than "Teekyuu" to see what type of lowest-common-denominator horseshit he's passionately into (seriously - he directed, scripted, edited, storyboarded and even composed the music for that thing) and if you need evidence as to how woefully unfit he's for directing anything even remotely resembling Berserk.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JONNUF65tLYNotice how Itagaki's trademark hyperactive directing style, jumpy scene transitions and herky-jerky pacing are already firmly established in Teekyuu, way before he had the opportunity to perpetrate those self-same "talents" onto Berserk.
3D animation is the only practical way to adapt Berserk to a television series in today's anime production environment.
Let's see if I'm reading this correctly - has the Japanese anime industry so far degraded since the 1990s, that it's become impossible to produce serious, mature anime that doesn't look like shit? Or is he saying that Berserk is unworthy of receiving an anime adaptation with the integrity and the production values afforded to the likes of Attack on Titan or Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood? And that Berserk deserves to be chucked into the hands of grossly incompetent morons who can't direct worth shit, write worth shit or animate worth shit?
If this is what the "today's anime production environment" has come to, then it's far better off if Berserk anime
never got made in the first place. At least not until if the anime industry recovers from its current stagnation and there would be a door open for a faithful and decently animated Berserk series.
