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Low-quality laughing stock of current anime season sends hidden cry for help in closing credits

Casey Baseel Nov 17, 2018
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Animator “Komata Shojiki” has his name in the credits, but that’s not actually a name.

Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki once criticized the anime industry for being full of otaku, but there’s a pretty good reason for that: it’s an incredibly tough industry to make a living in. Wages are low and hours are long, so if you didn’t have an intense affinity for the medium itself, odds are you’d never even look for a job in anime production.

The difficult working conditions Japanese animators work under have come into sharper focus in the modern era, where an unprecedented amount of anime is being made and the vast majority of it airing in weekly TV format. Mercilessly tight deadlines and stretched-thin staff mean that every season there’s at least one TV series that’s limping along as a parade of artwork errors and animation mistakes, and this season it’s My Sister, My Writer (or Ore ga Suki na no ha Imoto Dakedo Imoto ja nai, as it’s titled in Japanese) that’s filling that role in spectacular fashion.

本日この後 11/14(水)22:00『俺が好きなのは妹だけど妹じゃない』第6話最速放送開始です！
※視聴年齢制限番組
キャスト：畠中祐、近藤玲奈他#いもいも #at_x https://t.co/bZfQJShsX4 pic.twitter.com/FpoNZwue3c

— アニメシアターＸ(AT-X)公式 (@ATX_PR) November 14, 2018

Centering on a teenager who acts as the public front for his light novel-writing younger sister (who rose to popularity by writing a story about a girl who’s intensely devoted to her big brother), My Sister, My Writer might have just been one more otaku-oriented naughty romantic comedy seasoned by anime’s continuing fascination with brother-sister incest. However, instead of getting lost in the crowd My Sister, My Writer has inadvertently found a way to stand out: laughably distracting off-model art.

▼ All of those guys in the outer squares are supposed to be the same character (male lead Yu).

俺が好きなのは妹だけど妹じゃないの作画が神掛かってる！！しかも今回ティクビ解禁しとるやん！！！！ pic.twitter.com/QDkgHQVgNs

— ミッチー。🦥🍶🖤 (@micchi0723) November 8, 2018

The characters’ oddly flat faces, vapid expressions, and unfocused eyes have generated as much chatter among anime fans as anything else related to the show, with screen captures regularly flying around Twitter.

【天才】作画崩壊アニメ『俺が好きなのは妹だけど妹じゃない』の正しい視聴方法がこちらｗｗｗｗｗｗ https://t.co/l6secFzOgr pic.twitter.com/BNcSGhxHGD

— 紅覇（コウハ） (@CotetuLgoon) November 11, 2018

https://twitter.com/rusiu6122/status/1052826329115049986

Then there are the truly terrifying screw-ups, like when little sister Suzuka’s mouth rips away from the rest of her face as she’s speaking.

今期のアニメに「俺が好きなのは妹だけど妹じゃない」(略していもいも)があるけど、酷すぎるぞ

4話の作画崩壊はかなり珍しい崩壊っぷり
1枚目は女の子の口だけが先行してスライドしてその軌跡をたどるように顔がスライドする、というあるいみ神業
2枚目は、奥の女子生徒の足がジオングや pic.twitter.com/IspNCctVVo

— たにし (@AK03tanishi) November 7, 2018

When things like this happen, it’s usually not because the artists are physically incapable of drawing any better. There’s a certain bare-minimum level of artistic talent you have to have in order to land a job in the anime industry. The culprit, more often, is a lack of time. The episode has to be finished by its air date, and if there aren’t enough people to handle the job well, it’s up to the few animators who are available to just get it done, paring down the amount of time they put into each line enough so that the show can at least have something to use as the visuals it needs to get through the scene.

How bad are things for the My Sister, My Writer staff? With the anime still currently airing, it’s too early for staff interviews, and in general, Japanese professionals avoid bad-mouthing their former colleagues and employers, so it’s unlikely we’ll ever hear a juicy tell-all. But we can say for sure that the production team for My Sister, My Writer is having a hard time of it, because they secretly told us so themselves.

今週の『俺が好きなのは妹だけど妹じゃない』を見ていたら、EDの原画クレジットに“正直困太”（しょうじきこまった）という仮名アニメーターがいたけど誰なんだ… pic.twitter.com/qiDX2ftqMz

— のざわよしのり (@mad_yn) November 14, 2018

During the credits of the most recent My Sister, My Writer episode, which aired on Wednesday, viewers spotted an unusual name in the credits. As underlined in the above tweet, one of the animators is listed in Japanese as 正直困太, but that’s not really a name.

The first two kanji characters, 正直, are actually a regular Japanese vocabulary word, read shojiki and meaning “honestly” or “truly.” The remaining kanji, 困太, aren’t a name either, nor are they a vocabulary word, but combined as they are they’d be pronounced komata, which is just a slight modification of komatta, which means “to be in a difficult situation.”

In other words, the credits for My Sister, My Writer’s newest episode contain the message “We’re in serious trouble.”

It’s not clear if this is purely a message to viewers, perhaps as a plea for fans’ understanding or forgiveness, or if it’s a pseudonym adopted by an animator who was brought on to pinch hit and get the episode out the door, but in order to do so had to turn in such rough artwork that he didn’t want his real name associated with it. Either way, though, it’s a sign that viewers probably shouldn’t expect any significant quality surge for My Sister, My Writer’s remaining four episodes.

Source: Twitter/@Ly_Su_ via Hachima Kiko, Twitter/@mad_yn

Follow Casey on Twitter, where he wishes there’d been more time to animate the final fight scene in the first Fatal Fury anime.