Miscellaneous Whimsey – In Defence of Endless Eight

I never personally knew any of the staff at Kyoto Animation. That’s probably how it is with most readers of Random Curiosity. Even so, perhaps like me you found the news of the attack on KyoAni difficult to process, especially now that Takemoto Yasuhiro, the director I respect most at KyoAni, is confirmed to have passed away. It speaks to the power of art, perhaps, that it has made anime meaningful to us and made isolated violence on an anime studio meaningful to us. Unfortunately all I have to make sense of an ultimately senseless crime is a blog and a keyboard so that’s what we’re going to have to work with. I don’t want to talk about the headlines and the violence and give evil madness more credence than it deserves, though. So instead let’s talk about KyoAni and what they do instead. I’ll try to make this stuff not sound like a wake — and let’s not say that KyoAni is ‘dead’ — but we’ll necessarily be delving into the past a bit. Hopefully the entire exercise will at least be an interesting distraction.

It was not actually that many years ago that internet pundits were clamouring about the death of the anime industry. This was before foreign capital from the West and from China reinvigorated the chequebooks of the production houses to eventually bring us our current wave of isekai shows and mobile game adaptations. No, this was when Miyazaki was retiring (but before he was un-retiring), even Disney had long tossed hand-drawn animation to the wayside, and the Japanese economy was showing no signs that it was going to grow out of its rebellious recession phase. As studios shuttered left and right there was a fear that, at least, ambitious, high-budget anime were no longer tenable. The risk was just too great; even one major failure could sink a studio for good. But, even as established studios were whipping out as many as five or six shows a season to stay afloat and animators were literally working themselves to death, Kyoto Animation had a different idea.

OH! L.E.D.

 

Regular anime watchers will know that Kyoto Animation did not make a lot of anime. Even at peak capacity they hardly pushed out one show a season, sometimes even as little as two a year (they also made movies and such but let’s put that aside). In return each show had plenty of production value behind it, but from a pure business standpoint wasn’t that a few too many eggs in a few too little baskets? Even if we set aside the issue of risk, is KyoAni’s model really cost effective? You’d think those in the business of selling anime will strive to sell more anime. But long before many other studios, KyoAni had already cracked the code. They weren’t selling anime. They were selling goodwill.

The power of moé compels you!

 

You don’t need me to tell you that hand-drawn animation is expensive. Good animation is exponentially more so. The amount of man hours that must be invested into anime compared to your average television programming is staggering. These days it’s industry wisdom that the profit doesn’t come from what is put on TV — got to sell those BDs — but KyoAni had long decided on a business model that didn’t rely on pumping out volumes of content. Chasing the breakneck pace of the more mainstream entertainment industry was simply untenable for traditional animation without enormous staff or, more likely, an abused one. Cost-effective anime was a lost cause. So, KyoAni doubled down. Visually appealing anime (both technically and aesthetically) became part of their brand. And this dedication to eye-candy brought goodwill, which brought dedicated fans who would buy BDs, music, and merchandise. And in turn that funds more eye candy. It’s the circle of life.

NANTS INGONYAMA BAGITHI BABA

 

This didn’t lead to universal appeal, though. KyoAni’s productions were also sometimes a bit divisive. They got criticism for ushering in an entire generation of cutesy copycats, for pandering to the common-otaku-denominator, and for a narrow output of almost exclusively adaptations (especially of in-house properties). I would wager that this doesn’t bother KyoAni too much; better to attract both love and hate than to face a flat field of ambivalence. The ambivalent weren’t going to buy the merch anyway, so go big or go home. And because KyoAni didn’t really sell anime, but goodwill, as long as they retained a sufficient bank of goodwill they were allowed to get away with things that many other studios could not. Even as animation became increasingly expensive KyoAni continued to keep most of their productions in-house, and fostered in-house talent to further their prime directive of making pretty eye candy. Relatively inexperienced hands were allowed to take a turn as episode directors, or sometimes even to helm an entire series. It would seem that KyoAni’s business model, as cynical as it could have been, actually allowed for a degree of artistry or, at least, a certain tolerance for potential and actual failure. And there were plenty of those; while it’s tempting to generalise KyoAni’s fare, they did also bring us the niche, Pythonesque comedy Nichijou, made an exercise of throwing out the source material while adapting Musaigen no Phantom World, and indulged in passion projects like Munto. Yes, there were disasters (you think Phantom World was bad, but who even talks about Munto?) but even in those disasters KyoAni continued to demonstrate their commitment to pretty animation. Even if they were not always master storytellers, it was undeniable that they valued their artists and were keeping the dying art of animation alive. Which brings us to our main topic.

I’m going to spoil large parts of Suzumiya Haruhi from here on, so if you’ve never watched it… well, you should get to it. You’ve had more than a decade! You’ve missed out on an anime cultural touchstone and should catch up if only for the sake of conversation. Then you’ll know the reason for all those thousand-yard stares whenever one mentions… Endless Eight.

PTSD intensifies

 

So, we have Steins;Gate. We have Madoka Magica. These anime made time loops fun! There was drama! There was tension! There was excitement! Repetition by its very nature makes things stale, so to make a Groundhog Day scenario interesting there must still be a sense of progression. Luckily, the loop itself provides an easy source of conflict. For a suitably curious protagonist the story’s conceit serves as a mystery, and the quest to break out of that loop and/or avoid the BAD END provides all the conflict we need. Without this conflict, there won’t be much of a story; we’d all get rather bored just watching characters blissfully unaware of the loop and who would be perfectly satisfied with inaction even if they were.

Thus began Endless Eight

In this particular arc of the story our hero, alias Kyon, is suddenly stuck in a time loop. Ah ha, a call to adventure! Two hiccups: one, Kyon is not aware that he is in a time loop, since he loses his memories of previous loops each cycle. More importantly, Kyon is in many respects a tragic hero, and his hamartia is apathy. So, even when he is alerted of the fact that he is in a time loop, his main response is a resounding, ‘Meh.’. So, he just keeps living the same week over and over. And we, the lucky audience, gets to watch him do it. Each episode Kyon would go through a carefree summer routine, eventually be informed that time is looping, fail to do anything about it, then finally decide to procrastinate on a meaningful resolution.

This goes on for some time. Needless to say, many viewers at the time were not amused.

There was a pervading theory that at the time KyoAni was simply trolling its audience. And, sure, in light of Lucky Star KyoAni was definitely capable of cheekiness. But if KyoAni simply wanted to bask in the schadenfreude produced by ten thousand outraged nerds they certainly went about the most costly way of doing so. Even when they were just looping the same week for half a season of anime, even when they could have just dubbed over the same episode six times in a row, they made sure to animate each episode from scratch. Take a look at how one scene can be done seven different ways:

 

 

 

Keep scrolling

 

 

 

 

Say what you want about KyoAni, but they at least don’t lack in effort. Each variation is quite deliberately different from each other from storyboard to costume design; it helps that each episode was done by a different team of KyoAni animators. I suspect that this was more than just KyoAni being cute; having everybody take a shot at making a roughly similar episode of anime would have been an educational in-house exercise for them. If I’m correct, then perhaps no anime in the KyoAni repertoire demonstrates their dedication to the art of animation so much as Endless Eight. And even if Endless Eight was not just an expensive homework project for the studio, I feel that something valuable came out of it. Sure, it was a frustrating and tiring ordeal for the audience, but was that not that point? Recall that there was actually one character who had to sit through and remember the time loops, like we did. And, like us, she also couldn’t do anything about it. In hindsight, Endless Eight was a set-up for Nagato Yuki to go insane in time for Suzumiya Haruhi no Shoushitsu and we needed to empathise with the descent into quiet madness. And in a way, I did; like her, when I was slogging through Endless Eight I also found myself playing spot-the-difference between each loop, and in those moments I appreciated KyoAni animating each episode differently even as I resented them when the episode ended in disappointment. Excessive? Perhaps. At least we didn’t have to sit through the full 595 years of it, and were able to eventually turn our frustration at Endless Eight into a cathartic experience in Disappearance.

Ultimately, we should probably consider Endless Eight a failure. Media has a fundamental onus to be engaging, and so anime that is intentionally designed to not be engaging is already abdicating success. But it was an interesting failure, and produced an experience not easily replicated (though one I have no desire to replicate). That KyoAni was willing to cash in the goodwill it had earned from the Suzumiya Haruhi series for a stunt like that said a lot about their studio, I think. Kyoto Animation will go on to make many more series, some loved, some less so, but nothing else would so exemplify their character.