Talk:Shuu Tsukiyama/@comment-25465330-20150307165102/@comment-24494906-20150312000243

The studio only really matters for animation quality. Maybe also number of episodes, though 24 episodes are normal, and you only get more episodes at once with Toei quality nowadays. Besides, if it had been another studio, we might have gotten even less episodes.

More important are the director and the series composer. And Ishida probably isn't innocent in what's going on - or rather, he is probably the main culprit for how this adaptation was handled in general. (Though the main culprit why the second season is so bad is the series composer/scriptwriter.) For example, I'm certain that the anime was split into two seasons because Ishida intended to end Tokyo Ghoul, indirectly forcing the staff to adapt TG at this pacing. I can't remember any other split 2-cour Pierrot anime, though there might have been some, but I'm certain they are really rare, and most of the time Pierrot produces quite faithful adaptation, if at a lower animation quality. Or his proposal to go an alternate route probably pushed back the production of the next season, which forced them to rush the production of the second season later. It's probably the reason why the script survived into the production, otherwise, it'd have been trashed.

The direction is currently what is allowing the anime to survive. Not a surprise, since the director of the anime has managed to be nominated for an Oscar once, so he knows his stuff.

The problem is the script. It's just incompetence. There's actually a pattern in how the episodes are composed, and it's making me angry. The episodes seem to be scripted such that the scenes of each episode are thematically related, and the scriptwriter is sticking to these thematic boundaries between episodes quite strictly. The result is that there are some episodes where the episode director doesn't know what to do with all this air time, because he has too little to tell, other episodes where there is too little time and the episode director has no idea how he should fit all this into one episode (ep4 comes to mind), and also that the scriptwriter had to cut a lot of story. But in exchange, the scriptwriter managed to give each episode has some sort of theme. The scriptwriter couldn't have done that if he had to follow the manga, but because Ishida asked them to go this alternate route, he suddenly gut leeway and he used it badly. I'm positive that the moment you try to reorder some scenes in Ishida's draft to create these themed episodes, the story collapses. I think the events are even more finely interwoven in Ishida's draft than in the manga.

Also, the priorities in the script are completely wrong. Tokyo Ghoul is Kaneki's journey, so tell his journey, damn it. If you have to cut back on the characterization of some secondary characters, then do that (but make sure you spread these cuts over the whole cast), but tell the Fool's Journey that is at the core of Tokyo Ghoul.