With the news about the current run of the anime finally ending, lately I've been thinking a lot about this adaptation, how it began and my overall feelings on it.
These days it frankly seems comical how pretty much every thing that could go wrong with the adaptation went wrong. In a time when the standards for production quality of action shonen anime went up due to more series (including Shonen Jump titles) having seasonal adaptations with better schedules than the typical long-running shonen series of the past, Shueisha had the bright idea to give Black Clover to producers who wanted it airing year-round. Because that worked for Naruto in 2002, obviously it'd work for Black Clover in 2017 no matter what
(fun fact: BC anime started exactly 15 years to the day after Naruto's, on Oct. 3rd). As if that wasn't enough, the series had a very short pre-production period, leading to generally mediocre-to-bad production for many of the early episodes (then production suffered even more for a while from lack of staff). Still not enough though, because they also thought to give the lead role to a complete rookie who clearly wasn't ready, and lacked good enough voice direction to get a better performance out of him. Doesn't end there though, since the series also started airing with a soundtrack that was also generally mediocre-to-bad, either due to aforementioned rushed pre-production or just a bad composer (new tracks starting from the Elf arc make me think the former), and to this day still lacks the iconic original tracks that series of this kind have to accompany their best moments, relying as a result on the first Opening Theme as a crutch.
But the worst by far to me was the pacing. What was a strength of the manga became the biggest weakness of the anime adaptation.
13 Episodes, 10 Chapters.
13...EPISODES...10 chapters. To this day it boggles the mind. That they took a manga that would have over 100 chapters when the anime started, which wasted no time moving through its story which quickly earned it an audience to carry into more and more interesting events, and decided to extend the part where the story, world and cast are easily at their least interesting to the point of adapting 10 chapters in 13 EPISODES, instead of the 25-26 chapters we should've gotten through, is literally insane to me. Even the first chapter isn't properly adapted in 2 episodes. Rewatching the first two episodes, they stand out as much better produced than the average episode of the series, and I'm impressed that the director was able to manage even that with the terrible schedule he was given, but my god there is so much boring and unnecessary fluff when we could've just gotten a faithful adaptation of Chapter 1 in one episode and then moved on to the Magic Knight exam in the second week like the manga did (the exam doesn't happen until Episode 4 here).
Eventually the pacing picked up, the voice acting improved, the anime reached more and more interesting parts of the story and thus became something I increasingly looked forward to as time went on. But even with that, the production remained inconsistent and, despite the occasional standout episode here and there, the anime simply could not be counted on to reliably do justice to the manga, let alone enhance or elevate it. I hate how often I have felt "Tabata snapped on this panel/page/spread" only for said moment to eventually be a letdown in the anime.
I enjoy the anime way more now than I did at the start, but it's mostly due to what's inherent to the manga like the story and characters rather than anything inherent to the anime, except for the voice actor performances, which consistently do their part in bringing the manga to life and I've been happy with, Asta teething issues aside.
With other Shonen Jump action-focused manga like Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen (or Fire Force, outside Jump) getting adaptations that are well-produced to the point where any time the action reliably looks at least good every time, and pretty much every shonen IP even outside battle-focused ones getting a seasonal anime, Black Clover just sticks out more and more as this single series where for whatever reason, despite even series preceding it like My Hero Academia and Food Wars getting seasonal shows, they wanted it airing year-round with no care to having an adequate production schedule and the series just suffered for it. With how good the better-produced episodes of this hellish production look, I'd love to be able to see what director Tatsuya Yoshihara and the staff he works with would be able to do if they were given a better schedule for the series. It just seems like a very talented staff isn't able to put their talent on display as much as they should be, and as they do when they show up in other shows or in the big BC episodes, and that's a shame.
A "big announcement" will be made on March 30th after the last episode airs and whatever it is (at this point, I'd bet on original movie if I had to, for various reasons), I hope the rest of the arc gets adapted eventually and that the staff gets enough time to make their talents shine. I just wanna be able to think "The anime snapped on this" at least 3/4 of the time I think that for a corresponding manga event.
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If you're interested in learning what happened with the BC Anime production, I recommend the following:
Long running action anime are no stranger to controversial production experiments, met with divisive reception among their fandom. The latest example is Black Clover #63: a highly experimental, rou…
blog.sakugabooru.com
