Ask John: Is J.C. Staff Over Extending Itself?

Question:
Is J.C. Staff overdoing it? Are they going to end up like Gonzo? It seems to me that J.C. Staff is making more and more series. This fall season has four series from them, not including the Railgun OVA. Will their high production of shows bite them back just like Gonzo?

Answer:
I’m neither in Japan nor part of the anime production industry, so I’m not particularly knowledgeable of J.C. Staff’s corporate stability, financial responsibility, or sustainability prospects. However, unlike Gonzo which emerged, rose to tremendous prominence, then crashed to near extinction within a span of about ten years, J.C. Staff is already over twenty years old. While age doesn’t insulate any anime studio against catastrophe, a studio that’s been in operation for a long time has obviously demonstrated an ability to sustain operations. Among the roughly 35 new TV anime premiering this fall season, J.C. Staff is producing four concurrent shows: Bakuman, Otome Yokai Zakuro, Tantei Opera Milky Holmes, and Toaru Kagaku no Railgun II. Shaft follows with this season’s Arakawa Under the Bridge x Bridge, Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru, and two episode Hidamari Sketch Hoshimitsu Tokubetsuhen. AIC, XEBEC, and Studio Pierrot are each animating two concurrent TV series this season.

Without performing extensive and painfully time consuming research for confirming verification and comparison, my instinct is to say that studios such as Madhouse and Toei have previously produced as many as four concurrent television series. So J.C. Staff presently producing four shows isn’t automatically representative of the studio overextending itself. More importantly, there’s a significant difference between J.C. Staff’s current work and the scale of Gonzo at its height. Gonzo became so widely recognized and internationally celebrated because it consistently produced expensive shows. Even relatively weak shows like Dragonaut ~ The Resonance, Shangri-la, and Kurogane no Linebarrel may have drawn more attention than they would have otherwise earned because of their relatively high production values. In fact, Gonzo has never solely produced four concurrent TV series at any time. Gonzo didn’t overextend with its number of productions; Gonzo overspent on its productions. All four of J.C. Staff’s current series appear to be moderately, reasonably budgeted shows, and I don’t get the impression that J.C. Staff or anyone in Japan’s anime industry is expecting and relying upon each of the studio’s productions to become a breakout smash hit. I do have the impression that especially from roughly 2006 to 2009 Gonzo and its distributors seemingly did seriously anticipate each and every one of the studio’s TV productions to become tremendously successful even if the shows were untested properties or had obvious niche audience appeal.

With a startling number of Japan’s anime production studios recently closing shop, I’m afraid that no studio can be deemed absolutely beyond possibility of financial strain. However, from an external observer’s perspective, J.C. Staff appears to be a studio expanding at a sustainable pace, within manageable tolerances, unlike Gonzo, which seemed to expand as such an explosive pace as to cause countless observers around the world to notice looming potential disaster. Fans were decrying Gonzo’s trend toward quantity over quality for years prior to the studio’s very public 2009 collapse.