
a review by Shibou

a review by Shibou
While Black Clover is a rather great shonen and good manga, the adaptation takes away from the value, animation mainly. The animation team, which is pierrot, is known for pretty mediocre adaptations. The format they chose for the adaptation is a weekly format, which won't necessarily stop until either cancelled or the part of the series they're covering ends for a while, much like Naruto and Naruto Shippuden. This format isn't necessarily good because it doesn't allow for more time to be spent on animation like a seasonal adaptation does. Take My Hero Academia for example, because the anime is seasonal, Studio Bones not only has enough time to focus on other series once it's done, but it also allows for the animation to be in greater production value for when the adaptation is scheduled to air again, but with the weekly format it cause tons of problems. Such as the need to outsource to other studios which sometimes could be beneficial and other times end up making the animation look like, for lack of better words, complete dogshit. Now i'm not saying the adaptation is completely bad, it has it's high points, but those high points are over shadowed by the amount of low points. The pacing was made to be slower then the mangas(i.e the first couple episodes)so while the manga would be fast at covering the events, the pacing in the anime is often slower and may or may not add filler. One thing i also won't to nitpick is episode 63, which is also the episode where Asta and Ladros fought. The episode was phenomenal in my opinion, it had ambition and great animation effort. Where it fell flat however, lies within the amount of time they had to work on it, the episode was rushed and there were many things unfinished due to the lack of in-house animators and Yoshihara having to use his special connections to push out a rather ambitious episode, the ambitious vision Tatsuya Yoshihara had wasn't able to be completely realized due to pierrot's lack of concern for the BC team, i don't know if i should phrase it like that but that's how it is just about, Pierrot has too much going on right now and in my opinion should switch to a seasonal format for it's adaptations rather than long running, it helps out with animation effort and production value and quality. It makes sure animators aren't overworked and have enough time to work on each episode accordingly, and makes sure the manga keeps a good distance from the more recent chapters so we don't get 100+ filler episodes just to finish 1 arc, that is a problem that Naruto Shippuden suffered from greatly from during the Fourth Great Ninja War. Now i won't lie, this adaptation has a ton of negatives but don't let that deter you from a rather great series, it does have it's really well animated episodes, such as 1, 2, 4, 17, 34-35 49, 63(in my opinion), 80-84, and the more recent 91 that aired today. Is the adaptation bad? It has it's downpoints but isn't entirely bad, is it good? It takes a while to get used to the bad animation but becomes tolerable once used to it, i just want new fans going in with what to expect, or to read the manga instead. Hopefully this long ass essay helps any newer fans. Please correct some of my points if any of you find something to be false or disagree with it. Just know that bad animation shouldn't deter any of you from an otherwise good series.
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