Series directorSeries Director: (監督, kantoku): The person in charge of the entire production, both as a creative decision-maker and final supervisor. They outrank the rest of the staff and ultimately have the last word. Series with different levels of directors do exist however – Chief Director, Assistant Director, Series Episode Director, all sorts of non-standard roles. The hierarchy in those instances is a case by case scenario. Midori Yoshizawa has ushered in a new era of visual creativity in the Monogatari series that synergizes with its themes of time, identity, and creation. And yet, for as fresh as their take on the franchise feels, her team and the narrative agree: that necessary growth toward the future shouldn’t turn a blind eye to its past.
Seven years ago, we published a piece about the distinct eras within the Monogatari franchise, corresponding to the series directors who headed the project alongside the studio’s leader—Akiyuki Shinbo. On their own, studio SHAFT already sport a recognizable style, which is narrowed down some more to formulate a visual approach for this series that you couldn’t mistake for any other. Even people who don’t watch Monogatari may easily recognize a screenshot from the series bereft of context, because its text-heavy, hyper-stylized, often desolate world is unmistakable. Though that may sound somewhat restrictive, the studio’s greatest works demonstrate that their identity allows teams to easily establish a framework of creativity, rather than acting as rules that mindlessly dictate their artistic choices. The letters may be familiar across their catalog, as are Monogatari’s words on a more specific level, but the sentences that each director has strung together are distinct, and thus have an appeal of their own.
To put those differences in a more tangible way, you can simply compare each of those directorial eras from an audiovisual standpoint. By contrasting the work of Tatsuya Oishi with Tomoyuki Itamura’s, you’d quickly be able to pinpoint their stylistic propensities—not just as personal quirks, but as means to adapt such a troublesome series. From Oishi’s various usages of live-action footage to Itamura’s pop culture reaction shots, there were plenty of choices that, if not entirely exclusive to their eras, were orders of magnitude more prevalent under those specific creative leaders. And yet, those periods weren’t perfectly monolithic either. This was particularly true of Itamura, who was thrust into the franchise as a greenhorn and then went on to have the longest tenure in Monogatari history, developing a visual lexicon of his own along the way; late entries like Owarimonogatari showcased that the best, through choices like the paper textures to the text interstitials, or the bespoke chapter markers unlike the consistent typography that preceded it.
Even for a masterful veteran like Oishi who didn’t have to grow in the same way between Bakemonogatari and Kizumonogatari, there still was a clear contrast between the rampant usage of photorealism between the two. In the former, it manifested as bursts of live-action footage that either gave an unnerving spin to a serious moment or caught you off-guard for an emphatic quick gag. In the very first arc of the series, Senjougahara’s sensitive backstory relied on those stylizations to make topics like abuse feel more viscerally uncomfortable—such is the inherent othering effect that real footage has when inserted into otherwise very stylized animation. At the same time, those shots served as a means to abstract away the most explicit details of her traumatic past and spare her intimacy. From a different vector altogether, Kizu built its entire aesthetic around a photorealistic CG environment that strongly contrasted with the animation cels. This way, it visually embodied the sense of not belonging of the protagonist, who isn’t just a teenager—specialists in feeling misunderstood and without a place—but just so happens to have become a vampire, meaning he quite literally doesn’t belong under the sun. Though both of them drew from the same tendencies, they manifested in very different ways.
Rather than assessing those eras strictly according to the prevalent techniques, then, we may be better off taking a step back and considering the philosophies of adaptation that those are derived from. On that conceptual level, the first two series directors to handle the series maintained consistent perspectives that explain how they tackled this work. When first adapting the series, Oishi saw an uphill climb and decided to make it steeper; which is to say, that his approach to NisioisiN’s characteristic verbose writing was to attempt to distill its effect through the intangibles of his direction. Mind you, that doesn’t mean eschewing the original author’s writing—if anything, the author’s actual words were everywhere, as SHAFT’s head honcho Shinbo was on board with making the typography a core element like it often had been in Oishi’s sequences.
Rather than using this text as a plain vehicle for information, Oishi’s Bakemonogatari weaponized its usage to modulate the pacing and capture specific mindsets in a more concise fashion than NisiosiN’s original prose, while ultimately achieving the same effects. Sure, one could constantly pause an episode to read every dense slide of text, as the information remained there after all. The real genius of his approach, though approach was preserving that while making the viewer feel a burst of anxiety through rapidly flashing screens; a similar feeling that the original text wanted the reader to experience, albeit in a more roundabout way.
From a different angle, Kizumonogatari embodied Oishi’s appeal to the visceral experience at its most impressive extremes. The original novel is inseparably tied to the point of view of a deeply confused teenager, who didn’t have enough with the classic woes of his age so he tripped with a dying beauty and became vampiric along the way. It’s wordy as NisioisiN ever is, and at its most chaotic, it repeatedly descends into Araragi’s stream of consciousness—and yet, Oishi’s adaptation saw it fit to remove any semblance of inner monologues and exposition, instead projecting that information onto its world as a whole. As if to make a statement, these movies began with a striking introduction that didn’t string together a sentence for nearly 10 minutes. And frankly, there was no reason to, as Oishi’s delivery already captured the spirit of the source material in very elegant ways. Every shifting pupil, every cawing crow, every deliberately dull color that makes way for vivid flames, every isolating framing choice: it was those that embodied the anxiety and feeling of inadequacy of the protagonist, so why should Araragi prematurely open his mouth?
What about Itamura’s Monogatari, then? While there is an undeniable gap between what both directors are capable of accomplishing, it’s not technical skill alone that differentiated those eras; more than any brilliant directorial choice, it was the mentality behind the adaptation—and the otherworldly ability to succeed with such a challenge, yes—that set Oishi apart from Itamura. Under the latter’s regime, the adaptation instead aspired to preserve NisioisiN’s actual writing in a much more explicit form, conceiving the visuals as a way to accompany the text rather than as an embodiment of it. This was a paradigm shift for Monogatari as an anime: a transition from the metaphorical Oishi to the reactive Itamura, which informed all the moment-to-moment direction henceforth.
If we look back at some of the previously mentioned visual quirks of the series, understanding the specifics of that shift and the relationship with the directors’ philosophies becomes much easier. By examining the typography, for example, you’ll notice that text in Monogatari became more plainly readable with the passage of time. The series preserved mechanical tricks to abbreviate scenes like the written conjunctions to gracefully shave seconds in lengthy conversations, but gradually stepped away from Oishi’s perception of text as an abstract tool to define the mood; a shift from something you feel to an element you parse in its more traditionally intended way, which embodies the evolution of the adaptation altogether.
Across Itamura’s tenure, the Monogatari anime invited the audience to sit alongside the characters, to react to the narrative alongside them; a manner of speech, though at points it did literally spend entire episodes reading tales of its own world to the cast. Tendencies we’ve previously mentioned like the increase of pop culture references as reaction shots, then, were merely a natural consequence of this new mindset. While you could find examples in Bakemonogatari itself—like Araragi and Kanbaru fooling around to calm down Nadeko when she attempted to explain her supernatural woes—it was from Nisemonogatari onwards that they turned into a defining trait of the series. Similarly, characters striking unusual poses went from an occasional visual gag to one of the most common tricks in its storyboards. Placing the text first, and then having the characters (and world) react to it in amusing ways became the new standard.
A big reason why this approach that relies more heavily on the original writing worked so well is simply that the iterative nature of Monogatari’s storytelling kept making each new entry more interesting. Mind you, this is not due to genius planning by the original author—there was never such a thing. Monogatari is, and I say this affectionately, a writing aberration that would never work were it not written by a brilliant madman; something demonstrated by the many authors inspired by NisioisiN, entertaining as their works sometimes are. With no real foresight, he marched onwards with confidence, constantly adding pieces to a board that eventually felt like it moved on its own, guided by interesting ideas that could only be born from the interactions between its eccentric cast.
Itamura arrived with the most luxurious foundations already laid out for him, both by the writer and the preceding director. Mind you, this is not to say that his job was easy—succeeding a brilliant genius director on an otaku megahit is a scary prospect—but that his timing was perfect to begin building something that for many would rightfully be the most memorable parts of the series. And to do so, he wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel, but rather just scale the production down to something he could manage, and hopefully get an increasingly better grasp of it as time passed; something that in retrospect we can deem a resounding success. Sure, a direct comparison between Bake and Nise feels like a sizable downgrade in directorial punch, but he weathered the storm for long enough to allow the original work to grown into something magnificent, and for his own style to mature in interesting ways. Itamura’s theatrics to accompany the text worked, because the text was excellent, and the performance more than fun enough.
In 2017, the second season of Owarimonogatari finally lived up to its name and marked the end of Itamura’s era in the series. That project became his last major effort at studio SHAFT, as he was one of the many key veterans who left the studio at the time; independently so and in different directions, with varying degrees of bad blood depending on their involvement in the internal feuds that had led to a toxic environment at the company. Though a renewal at the studio was by all means the healthier route, that had consequences on some of their longer-running properties, with Monogatari being the most obvious example. Back in 2019, Zoku Owarimonogatari was allowed to keep the inertia and finish its six episodes without a central directorial figure alongside Shinbo—but for a larger effort like Off & Monster Season, a new co-leader would be required. Enter Midori Yoshizawa, with little to no experience on that level of responsibility, but an agreed-upon source of hope for the studio.
Yoshizawa’s career began in ordinary fashion: after finding her way into the anime industry through Studio Luna, an unremarkable assistance studio that specializes in kids shows, she joined Toei Animation where she acted as an assistant director for a period of time. As a freelancer, though, she took no time to make it clear where her heart lies. And that place is studio SHAFT, where she quickly progressed amidst their usual chaos. From clean-up to directorial assistance in 2014, precisely in Tsukimonogatari. Fully fledged episode directionEpisode Direction (演出, enshutsu): A creative but also coordinative task, as it entails supervising the many departments and artists involved in the production of an episode – approving animation layouts alongside the Animation Director, overseeing the work of the photography team, the art department, CG staff… The role also exists in movies, refering to the individuals similarly in charge of segments of the film. in all of the studio’s works at the time by the next year, and storyboarding duties starting with Sangatsu no Lion in 2016. Someone who was a complete outsider just a few years prior, in a system where that’s often a big issue, began being entrusted with increasingly more important moments.
By the time of Magia Record, and thanks to the wide distribution of duties for its interesting but also chaotic production process, she was granted responsibilities akin to series direction for specific episodes. She has stuck with the studio during very tough times, proving that she’s not just a big fan of their works, but also someone who deeply understands the intricacies of their style; something that they can’t take for granted from any director, as we’ll discuss later. She has gained the trust of her peers and the admiration of all hardcore SHAFT fans, which makes this chance to lead one of their biggest works feel entirely deserved.
But what was it that earned her that positive reputation? Internally, there’s the fact that working with her is breezier than their chaotic norm, since she requires little oversight to put together a compelling package that will retain that vague SHAFT identity. Painting her as someone who’s simply easy to work with, however, would be a massive mischaracterization. For starters, Yoshizawa is an ambitious director whose roots in animation make her envision troublesome layoutsLayouts (レイアウト): The drawings where animation is actually born; they expand the usually simple visual ideas from the storyboard into the actual skeleton of animation, detailing both the work of the key animator and the background artists.. SHAFT works lean towards very symbolic framing, with impossible cross-sections of buildings and flat yet memorable staging. As a storyboarder, she packs her framing with meaning in similar fashion, but often with more spacious approach that makes the job inherently more complicated for the animators. The more realistic fundamentals (which she then loves to exaggerate through fish lens distortions) have great synergy with Yoshizawa’s ability to compose attractive shots where not just the animation is laid out with depth and intent, but backgrounds, CG, and even live action elements work in conjunction to guide the eye together. Quite the important skill within SHAFT’s idiosyncratic system!
This brings us to another characteristic trait of Yoshizawa: the sheer creativity represented not just in form, but in material. SHAFT’s most visually radical days, represented by the likes of Oishi himself, are behind them… but Yoshizawa never got that memo, because the more leeway she’s been granted, the more she has emphasized live-action footage and unconventional analog materials. For one, Yoshizawa often leans on the inherent link between time and tangible elements. As something that physically exists, those real materials evoke the passage of time in a more direct way than intangible animation could—hence her usage of time-lapses and seasonally coded live-action reels, analog drawings, paper cutouts, and so on.
A remarkable example of this can be found in one of Yoshizawa’s episodes of Magia Record, where she busted out an actual hourglass for the cuts indicating the passage of time. When reaching the present, she prepared a similar canvas of sand where she herself painted a convincingly childish picture to represent a relationship that had blossomed during that period. With this move, a form of expression that evokes time goes on to become time spent together, a diegetic element that also represents the bond between two individuals. In a way, this sums up the aspect that sets her apart the most from her peers at the studio. Fascinating as her technique is, it’s that emphasis on personal, emotional storytelling that differentiates her from the more logically-oriented veterans like Yukihiro Miyamoto (or her Monogatari predecessor Itamura) as well as mad geniuses like Oishi, who always feel like they operate on higher levels of abstraction. The outlandish visuals in Yoshizawa’s works might lead you to expect detached storytelling, but her natural tendency is to use those unorthodox tools to humanize the characters in small, very personal ways.
As mentioned in the staff discussions featured on MagiReco’s fanbooks, Yoshizawa does indeed have a reputation of excelling at capturing the inner hearts of characters—particularly women—through her eccentrically depicted mundanity. You can arguably trace that back to her work in Sangatsu, with a particularly memorable episode centered around a bullying incident. This burst of negative yet rightful pent-up feelings showcased the impact of her delivery of very real emotions, turning eyes in her direction in and out of the studio.
Even beyond this highlight, a young Yoshizawa’s appealing sensibilities began rearing their head across the show. There’s an interesting economy of colors in her episodes that could be reminiscent of Oishi’s penchant for monochrome landscapes with accents, but that in her case is more directly used to showcase the gap in emotional intensity between characters, or exactly what in the moment is truly meaningful to them; again, a more personal angle from her direction. Perhaps unsurprisingly, listening to her peers talk about what they admire in her work illuminates her true strengths.
Now that we have a solid grasp on the stylistic evolution of Monogatari as an anime series, plus an understanding of its new director and the priorities she brings to the table, we can finally take an informed look at the first arcs of Off & Monster Season. Did Yoshizawa’s arrival change the series in any meaningful way?
Confidence was the adjective we assigned to NisioisiN’s writing earlier, and that’s also the feeling that oozes from the introduction to OMS #01—storyboarded by Yoshizawa herself, as it ought to be. Tsukihi Undo is an amusing little arc where the titular immortal bird, as impulsive and dangerous as ever, finds out the truth about her life-size doll. Or rather, she’s fed lies about the situation by said doll Yotsugi, a being with a similarly dubious relationship with mortality and catastrophically bad damage control skills. While their interactions are very entertaining by themselves, it’s Yoshizawa’s delivery that immediately makes this story feel special. The truth inside this brazen bird is revealed by cracking a real egg, and then following it up with a barrage of inspired, relevant imagery; birds and cages, as she’s technically under surveillance, plus hand shadow puppetry that emphasizes that a creature like Tsukihi isn’t what she appears to be.
Even beyond this brilliant intro, the first episode of OMS appears to have all the upside that Yoshizawa believers had hoped for. That ability to match the symbolic shot composition characteristic of SHAFT anime with her more spacious layoutsLayouts (レイアウト): The drawings where animation is actually born; they expand the usually simple visual ideas from the storyboard into the actual skeleton of animation, detailing both the work of the key animator and the background artists. is in full display off the bat; it’s used, for example, to showcase the mismatch between Tsukihi and Yotsugi that makes this arc so amusing, as well as the anxieties of a character that the series will soon revisit. Monogatari’s proud reclaiming of its wide range of expression brought Oishi to mind for many viewers, and I can’t fault them for that; especially not when there are sequences with ideas so similar to those that were once so common across his show. That said, I believe that looking at her work like the second coming of Oishimonogatari does everyone a disservice—the director, with a style of her own, and the show, which underwent something more nuanced than a complete reboot.
An important reason why it felt necessary to discuss Yoshizawa’s style and preferences before heading into OMS was not just to be able to identify the many ways in which it has influenced this season of Monogatari, but also to appreciate when it doesn’t, instead deferring to the series’ history. The diversity of visual ideas may resemble the start of this franchise to a degree, but the reactive way in which those are deployed brings it closer to the philosophy of Itamura’s Monogatari—one that through sheer mass and closer proximity has come to represent the series more than the allegorical Oishi. Yoshizawa directly iterates on Itamura additions as well, evolving his bespoke chapter screens to turn them into snapshots of parallel storytelling; and also, to deliver the final punchline in this episode, indicating that Yotsugi is eternally stuck in a loop of ice cream and poor choices. With inventiveness closer to one director, a philosophy of adaptation closer to another’s, and quirks from a third party, we move forward onto Nademonogatari.
Monogatari’s bursts of animation, which once belonged to aces like Ryo Imamura, and later people like Hironori Tanaka, have now also been passed along to their current stars like Hiroto Nagata. In this regard too, you can feel the generational shifts in OMS.
Due to the structure of the series and its unplanned nature, Monogatari’s character arcs are harshly fragmented. Over the years, we’ve witnessed Araragi and his gang grow as people (and as mythological beings), though not in a particularly linear fashion for most of them. Given the large cast and how arcs tend to focus on an individual or two—within a series that abstracts away the whole population of the Earth otherwise—we miss much of the connective tissue between their pivotal moments of growth. Returning to a character the series has explored before is akin to catching up with a friend you haven’t seen for a while, with the added knowledge that they’re about to experience a new form of catharsis that will hopefully better them as a person.
Considering that arcs like Nadeko Draw are built upon the evolution of those characters, you might think that they’d brush off that fragmented nature. A more conventional writer, perhaps a saner one, would indeed do that—but this is NisioisiN and Monogatari that we’re talking about. Rather than fill out the gaps, the series emphasizes Nadeko’s distinct selves anytime she has been a major point of focus in the story. They’re separated as independent characters, given humorous names, and become coded with distinct stylizations by Yoshizawa and company; most notoriously, they have palettes of their own that are recognizable at first glance. The ultimate message of self-acceptance is the expected endpoint for an arc like this, but its road there is formally fascinating, and happens to perfectly mirror the state of the series as a whole at this point in time.
The synergy between the production and the story begins with the themes. Current Nadeko is working towards her dream of working as a mangaka, which is a good excuse for Yoshizawa to lean into all sorts of stylizations around the arts; another stunning introduction finds a multitude of ways to incorporate comics from various angles, already tying the key concept of Nadeko’s identity to the paneling in those. Further episodes lean on layering tricks to visualize those ideas, and on paper as both simulated and real material. It’s especially when concerning that current self that Nademonogatari becomes a fun arts and crafts display to accompany her dream.
As she reaches towards that future she wishes for, Nadeko has to confront her past as well, which now physically exists in the form of her previous selves wreaking havoc around the city. With the passage of time being another key concept, this is a good time to remind everyone that one of Yoshizawa’s fields of expertise that we previously delved into was evoking that through the usage of live action footage and analog materials—exactly what Nademonogatari ends up doing as well. This becomes intertwined with Nadeko’s desire to create something with her own hands, building a visual language that feels very coherent. A fresh style, and yet not an entirely new one, which also ends up reinforcing the conclusion.
In the same way that this team decided to retain a sizable part of Monogatari’s identity of despite Yoshizawa’s breath of fresh air, Nadeko herself builds her growth on acceptance and incorporation of the good and bad of her past selves. Nademonogatari isn’t about supplanting the past with a more refined present persona, but about reaching to the future with an understanding that your current self would never exist without its predecessors, mistakes and all. Monogatari has been appealing to the nostalgia of the fans for multiple entries, but its callbacks have never felt as poignant as in this iteration that showcases a stylistically distinct present and future, while at the same time taking an interesting narrative angle as this retrospective tale about how much a quiet child has grown.
If Yoshizawa ever has an opportunity to lead a series from scratch, I’d be delighted to see her formulate a visual language fully of her own. Even before being granted a position to co-lead an entire series, it was clear that she had what it takes to accomplish that, based purely on the density of interesting concepts she could infuse other people’s works with. This is to say that I can understand anyone who’d have wished for an even more radical refresh for this series, but also that I’m very happy with the balance she managed to strike and how well that matches the message of the series itself. Having arrived in this very specific late era of Monogatari, I can’t help but feel that it’s appropriate to evolve in a more iterative way, to move forward while incorporating the elements from its past. That was the lesson for characters like Nadeko, crystalized in a beautiful ending where she confronts her original meek self.
Out of the countless references to previous iterations of Monogatari, none hit as hard as returning to the beginning of everything, the place where she once expected to catch a glimpse of her crush. Her yearning for that first love mimics the mannerisms of her first opening sequence, though those cute motions feel tragic now that we know it’s an unrequited, impossible dream. Current Nadeko urges her to move on, but not to discard who she is. Instead, she promises her that their future will hold love just as strong and fulfilling as the one she felt in the past. A touching scene that benefits from the irruption of Yoshizawa’s emotional storytelling, animated by one of the studio’s future hopes, but accepting of everything that led to this. In short, I believe people call this cinema now.
Although this has been a very positive writeup about the series, it would be remiss not to mention how SHAFT’s instability is also a factor at play; if we’re talking about the novelty brought by a new director, we also ought to mention the issues that sadly remain unchanged. Their management failures have been a massive problem for longer than most anime viewers have dedicated to this hobby, becoming the type of running joke that threatens to dilute the severity of the situation. As usual, only a fraction of the cries for help and expressions of dissatisfaction over how their work turned out bubble up to the—though it’s always telling when your ace animators are forced to do it.
As we head into Wazamonogatari, you may have noticed that a suspicious 東冨耶子 is the first person credited as a storyboarder on the official website. Grab a specific onyomi for each kanji, reverse their order, and you get shiyafuto—which is to say, SHAFT, because it’s their leader Shinbo himself. I’ll be honest and say that I’m glad he was explicitly (albeit jokingly) credited for it in public fashion, since it means we can address this more directly. Shinbo wasn’t slated to storyboardStoryboard (絵コンテ, ekonte): The blueprints of animation. A series of usually simple drawings serving as anime’s visual script, drawn on special sheets with fields for the animation cut number, notes for the staff and the matching lines of dialogue. this episode, but ended up redrawing it almost entirely. By saying this, you might be imagining that he fixed lots of existing panels in some way or the other, but it’s more akin to getting rid of entire sections across the episode and drawing entirely new ones that don’t directly correspond to anything that was originally drafted. He’s credited in the lead for good reason.
It’s important to note that series directors checking storyboards is a regular part of the production process, and that for SHAFT in particular, Shinbo going through them extensively is an ordinary task. So, rather than the fact that he did this, it’s the degree to which it required action (and the reason behind it) that become a hindrance for the production. One of Yoshizawa’s qualities that we highlighted earlier was that she requires little oversight, because she has internalized the precepts of SHAFT anime like its unique cadence in ways that lots of otherwise talented directors haven’t. Younger staff and outsiders tend to struggle to deliver what is expected from a director at SHAFT, despite the studio providing actual guidelines to help them.
Speaking of outsiders to the studio, Shunsuko Okubo’s opening sequence is another great example of iterating on the franchise’s preexisting imagery while putting together something that feels fresh.
That’s a particularly worrying issue now, as the departure of many veterans in preceding years has forced the studio to work more alongside individuals who lack this experience at the studio. I first heard of OMS’ production in the summer of last year, when it was already getting stuck in this long process of fixing storyboards. By stalling during the pre-production, even a project that spans a sizable amount of time like this one ends up getting strangled by its deadlines as the broadcast approaches. And of course, this has consequences not just for an individual project but also for other titles in the making. If your system requires veteran in-house members and you’re running relatively short on those, the remaining individuals will have to help out more than was originally planned, which means neglecting other jobs they may have. Though the situation isn’t as simple as to draw a straightforward correlation, the fact that Monogatari is demanding extra help should help you understand why a certain magical girl movie has been punted a full year away.
For as critical as I am of their management, I think it’s important to be understanding of the issues that escape their abilities—they can’t simply clone those remaining veterans—and also not to be melodramatic about their effect on the quality of the show. On its own, having Shinbo take control of episodes with vampire gothic horror leanings is as good as news can come from the studio. That is precisely the genre space where he made countless people fall in love with his style after all, so of course he’d be particularly interested in this next arc. Yoshizawa herself has also clearly provided extensive input throughout Nademonogatari; her stylistic quirks appear even in the rare instance where she’s not listed as a storyboarder, and the episode credits don’t match the authorship information on the official site for starters. No one should lament that talented directors are very actively involved.
It’s only when you consider that those additional tasks create bottlenecks that this becomes alarming, especially at a studio where the production process is never smooth. And indeed, it has taken a toll on the animation, both in ambition and level of polish, though I would argue that not to a degree that obfuscates how brilliant it is otherwise. A degree of frustration over the show not reaching the heights it could is justified, as is the anger that even a widely successful series that should be in no rush can make work so crushing for the staff. The trickiest step might be to come to terms with OMS being an excellent show nonetheless… though given the series’ production history, long-time fans might be used to this already. I know I’ve happily embraced Monogatari retaining old traits even as Yoshizawa ushers it into a new era, but frankly, those production woes are one aspect I’d like to leave behind.
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