The Announcement Game, and not playing?

With the assiduous way I keep up with the Anime News Network site I do pick up on many announcements of upcoming series. In the past I’ve gone so far as to make some posts here about reports that particularly got my attention. A few announcements in recent weeks did catch my eye in much that way, but I kept finding myself reluctant to gather my thoughts together. That does seem to have something to do with a collective hangover from some series last year that had seemed to have had everything going for them only to go awry. It might only have strengthened a general gloomy awareness among those anime fans whose discussions in the language I can follow of the strains on and woes of the animation industry in Japan.

“If there wasn’t so much anime being churned out, the shows that would get made would be much better” floats around at moments like this. Sometimes, though, I just fear “and of course that’s too good to be true.” Beyond the question of whether corporate controllers would let fewer studios hire more staff apiece or even budget for more production time, I keep imagining “fewer shows” amounting to “only the sure genres, and so much for whatever variety there is.”

That I did get to scraping these thoughts together was a matter of the eye-catching announcements piling up. In each memorable case, I suppose I’m able to look back to “original source material” I’ve already taken in or am taking in, so adaptations that hold together would be bonuses. I am a bit conscious anyway of “those who might have started with anime only to wind up focusing on manga and ‘light novels’”; the fuss more than a decade ago about manga panels being retouched over here just in case someone raised a different fuss did seem to have held me back from winding up there myself.