Ask John: Why Wasn’t the First Kanon Anime as Successful as the Second?

Question:
Why isn’t Toei’s anime adaptation of Kanon least successful and not faithful to the original PC game?

Answer:
When comparing the 2002 Kanon anime television series to the 2006 re-make or other recent TV anime adaptations of adult PC games, it’s very important to also consider the circumstances surrounding the 2002 production.

Toei Animation’s 13 episode Kanon television series was the third “eroge” (erotic game) ever adapted into a mainstream anime television series, and the first such production from Toei Animation. Although the “Elf Ban Kakyuusei ~ Anata Dake wo Mitsumete…” series was the first eroge anime broadcast on Japanese television, it wasn’t specifically created as a television series. It was an OVA series which was also broadcast on television. The first two mainstream anime television series based on eroge were ToHeart (1999) and Comic Party (2001), both animated by studio OLM.

In 2002 the Kanon computer game was obviously popular and successful enough to justify an adaptation as a mainstream television anime, but at the time mainstream anime adaptations of eroge were still a new and untested genre, and Toei had no experience adapting eroge into extended serial anime and probably little knowledge of what to expect from viewer reactions. Since the prior ToHeart and Comic Party anime adaptations had been 13 episode shows, it’s unsurprising that Toei approached Kanon tentatively and also made it a 13 episode series intended to appeal to both existing fans of the Kanon anime and new television viewers unfamiliar with the title.

By 2006, mainstream eroge anime adaptations had become very common and successful, and the Kanon re-make was not only double the length of the 2002 series, it was also produced by Kyoto Animation, a studio directly coming off of its tremendous success from the Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi anime.

While Toei’s 2002 Kanon anime may be seen as a hesitant, almost experimental approach to adapting a popular adult game into a mainstream anime, by 2006 Kyoto Animation’s Kanon anime was a virtually guaranteed success, which allowed for a bigger budget and a longer series to better flesh out the story and satisfy fans. Toei’s 2002 Kanon anime is a weaker production than Kyoto Animation’s 2006 version, but the two adaptations had significantly different resources to work with. So rather than call Toei’s 2002 series inferior to the 2006 version, I think it’s more fair to simply say that the 2002 Kanon anime is as good as it could have been considering the circumstances that influenced its production.