Thoughts on One-Punch Man Season 2: Can you say mélange?
First part: Structure
Mélange (n): a mixture often of incongruous elements If you asked for a one word summary, mélange would be it. It’s no disaster by any means, and had some real charms, but it is rather mixed. Shall we dive in? :)
This is so long I’ve had to split it into two.
Yup, it’s looong
Here is where the majority of the problems we saw in the production values (no need for me to rehash, if you’re reading this, you’ve heard them all) come from.
Lack of Time
The biggest one that everyone notes is that J.C. Staff had a terrible schedule for actually producing the season, with only three episodes complete by the time the season started. The resulting push for time hurt. When you see episodes with as many as thirteen (13!) different directors on board, you know it’s a scramble. And like a scrambled egg, the inconsistencies in art and direction, often changing several times in a scene for no good reason, it showed. Where they got a little more breathing room, like the unscheduled (but surely prayed for) tennis interruption, subsequent episodes benefitted.
It wasn’t just the visuals that suffered from lack of time. Another major victim was the sound. Once again, JAM Project delivered an excellent soundtrack, but all too often, musical scores were jammed in higgledy-piggledy into episodes, leaving little time to set or build a mood. And the sound effects.. ah, they were rarely creative, often repetitive, and not always appropriate to the action. The soundtrack definitely needs a re-listen and remaster.
Lack of Respect
Probably fundamental to the lack of time, was the lack of respect given to the scale of the task it would be to adapt the manga to anime. A big part of the problem is that the manga is exceptionally well drawn. Murata’s time as an animator for Toei comes through, with many panels that are practically key frames and action sequences that look like they need only a few in-between frames to flow as actual animation.
But manga is not anime. Attempting to transliterate it straight to screen, as they did, caused a lot of problems. Most especially in the Super Fight, which deserves its own section.
Failure to Consider What Matters
Did you know that goats, unlike sheep, have short rather than long tails? If you wanted to keep something short, you could say you were making a goat’s tail of it. Neat, but what’s that got to do with anything I’m talking about here? Nothing. It’s just an aside.
With 47 chapters and 1500+ pages to turn into 12 episodes, OPM was always going to have to be condensed. The only question was what and how to do so while preserving the meaning and impact of the story.
J.C. Staff started out well enough in the first three episodes, but once the Super fight hit, their insufficient planning really hurt the story. Madhouse had planned to condense the Super Fight to two to three episodes, but J.C.Staff transliterated it wholesale, not realising that it was an aside.
Ever have something that seemed really interesting and important to do or write down, that bit you didn’t want to cut from your story? And it’s only looking back that you think ‘damn, I really should have edited that out / not spent so much time on this / gotten on with doing better things with my life?’ (trust me, I think this at least once a day) That’s an aside. That time-wasting aside that seemed so important in the moment, that is what the Super Fight was for Saitama. It not only takes him out of the action, but it also gets him to realise that he’s frittering his life away and is in danger of forgetting what’s actually important.
The way the manga keeps this from being a waste of the reader’s time as well is by using very strong framing. It takes the time to make the Super Fight contestants distinct and interesting characters (I don’t think ONE could write a boring character if he tried). But then it frames their self-important games against a very real background of street warfare. Heroes are valiantly fighting with varying levels of success to save real lives and property. The framing gets most explicit in Chapter 63 (literally called Games and Combat) where there’s a direct juxtaposition between the techniques the martial artists are using and the much stronger versions Genos has come up with to use in combat to kill monsters and save people. Up until their world collide, the Super Fighters are just foils to the heroes.
The anime, faced with time and space constraints the manga doesn’t have, chose what to prioritise poorly. They kept 98% of the Super Fight and pared back on what the heroes were doing, losing at least one hero altogether. Worse, they forgot the framing. When people go to check out the manga, they should have been reading to find out what bits of the Super Fight were cut, not discovering that Bone exists, that Okama Taichi and Iaian can actually speak, that Drive Knight has a transforming box, that monsters other than Gouketsu and Elder Centipede had disaster levels.
sorry guys, you all deserved better than you got
The result are episodes that felt pointless, at least up until Suiryu found himself in a proper jam, needing the very heroes he disparaged to save him. Once Sourface admits that they the martial artists, are completely irrelevant to all that happens next, the time misused on them starts to look silly.
But Some Very Nice Extras
As one may expect, J.C. Staff did not have much time or space to add extra anime-only bits, which is a pity, because that’s one of the biggest reasons I go for different media versions of the same story. However, they did do some. And when they did, most were very well chosen and added nicely to the story.
I loved bits like Saitama and Genos shopping from a joint shopping list, Tareo suggesting to Garou that they read the Hero Data book together. Those were precious. A tired, exhausted Garou arriving at Bang’s dojo was possibly the best single addition, giving us some desperately needed background to their relationship...want more...
This melts the heart every time
And on that note, that’s quite enough words for one session. I’ll finish the rest tomorrow, when I’ll focus on the story they told and how it measured up to what I hoped it’d be.
