Really, everything is in the title. Why is it that the anime for Higurashi works fairly well even though it goes through the chapters faster than Umineko goes through its own episodes? What specific things could have been done to make Umineko work like Higurashi worked. Discuss.
I’d say the main thing is the kind of story they are. With Higurashi you can cut out most of the characterization details and mystery and still have something worth watching, because the horror and overall narrative are more than engaging enough to make for a great watch.
With Umineko it felt like they didn’t really have an idea of what they were looking at, so they tried to appeal to the same crowd. It doesn’t work. The main plot gets a fraction of the attention necessary to have it be engaging and interesting and they instead focused on entirely different things. Things like Maria creepy faces. Things that really do not connect to what makes Umineko worth experiencing.
Ultimately the things that make Umineko unique are too important to the story as a whole to get shafted like that and still have it be a worthwhile watch on its own. It also notably has a MUCH bigger cast of characters that ALL have a decent amount of focus on them around the same time. Higurashi did okay focusing only on the main characters with additional characters getting little screentime / focus when the story focuses on them, but that doesn’t really work in Umineko. A lot of Umineko’s cast is established before even the first thrilling hook happens.
Of course the fact that the Umineko anime’s sound direction is utter shit is a problem of its own.
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While I haven’t read Umineko Chiru yet, I have read Higurashi to completion, as well as the Umineko Question arcs. I’ve also seen the entire anime for both stories.
I think it very much comes down to pacing. Umineko is full of mystery, character details, clues, important information, ect; while Higurashi (while still very much being a mystery) leans more towards the horror and suspense genres. As such, it’s much easier to cut entire segments from the VN and still tell a complete story… Higurashi is just way less dense when it comes down to it. I honestly believe that the Umineko anime would have been a success if they had adapted Arcs 1-3 in 26 episodes (leaving Arc 4 to be adapted in a possible season 2) and allowed the plot to breathe a little instead of rushing everything so quickly.
And of course, there’s the fact that Studio DEEN is pretty incompetent in general. Looking at their library of anime, Higurashi being a great show is very much the anomaly, with both their adaptions of Fate/Stay night as well as Tsukihime basically being memes for how to NOT adapt a VN to screen. But I digress.
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There’s also the fact that the Higurashi question arcs have a lot of ‘slice of life’ scenes, many of which are, well, not exactly crucial to the story.
But yeah, they really didn’t seem to know what kind of audience to aim the Umineko anime at.
Like, what is this? Please tell me.
(The marketing of the PS3 game fell into this trap, too. Look how sexy Umineko is! …Only, not really. But unlike the anime, the PS3 port was actually good.)
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I’m sorry but when compared to the source material, both WtC anime are different flavors of shit.
Even on their own, they aren’t very good. The Higurashi anime is exceedingly edgy with an over emphasis on “killer lolis and yuri xdxdcdxddxd!!” And the Umineko anime shafts its identity to become a low quality shounen version of Death Note with no ending.
So yes, neither of them are good
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I think that @Karifean hit most of the things that makes the two series different but I think there’s one other thing that separates the two series: Emotional connection.
Like Kari said you can easily cut out most of the characterizations and the mystery in Higurashi and still have a good show and I think that’s because of how the first episode work. We quickly learn about Keiichi’s connection to his friends which makes it really easy to emphazise with him when we see them starting to act weird.
But I’d argue that the first episode of Higurashi is a good place to show Deen’s greatest failing, that they don’t (at least at the time) understand how to build character. It’s been a while since I watched the anime so I might remember it incorrectly but compare Satsuko’s and Rika’s introduction in the VN/manga with the anime and you’ll understand what I mean.
VN/manga: Introduced when Keiichi spots Satsuko’s trap while still falling for another, introducing Satsuko’s prankster nature, Rika’s gentle teasing (the way she pats his head) and his relationship to both of them.
Anime: Introduced during the picnic where they show Keiichi’s teasing, little sister, relationship with Satsuko as well as Rika’s maturity and pretty much nothing else.
This is actually why I don’t actually like the anime that much despite it being considered a classic. Because it often fails at showing those nuances in character, mostly for all the wrong reasons. Since it hasn’t been released yet I won’t go too much into it but the ending of Meakashi is a good example of this. By simply leaving out a few lines of dialogue towards the climax, the emotional reaction from the viewer/reader is completely different since we don’t have the same connection and understanding of the main character. One of them is tragic, the other is not.
Umineko, on the other hand, is all about those connections which is one of the reasons why Deen completely failed in the Anime.
One of the things that amaze me in the VN during the first twilight in Ep 1 is how much you actually care about those who have been murdered. Despite only learning about them for a few hours you actually know quite a lot about them, their personalities, their problems and their relationships to everyone around them (which is why Battler’s introduction of them during lunch is so important as we quickly learn of his impression and relation to them only for them to show their true colors during their discussions about the inheritence). So when you read the cousins reactions upon seeing the crime scene it feels completely genuine.
The anime on the other hand completely ignores those relationships, having to brute-force their way until the murders, so it fails to create a emotional connection to anything that happens. It also completely fails at understanding one of the things that makes Umineko pretty unique, the mystery/fantasy aspects, and instead shows more of the fantasy side of things instead of making it more ambiguous.
So not only don’t we have any reason to care about the characters we also don’t have any real way to fight back against Beatrice since we saw fantasy scenes even before we were introduced to the Metaworld.
There are many things wrong with both series but I’d say that the biggest difference between them is: One of them understands what it’s trying to be and succeeds at that, the other doesn’t and instead fails at everything. But at the same time, none of them are truly good shows, one was just interesting and unique enough, at the time, to become popular.
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So, this is interesting. I watched Higurashi when it aired and it has pretty much been my favourite anime ever since. I’m watching it back now whilst playing along with the VNs and… It juuust about manages to hit the right emotional beats and include the most important moments to patch together something resembling the VNs, but it’s nowhere near good in comparison. I also have to wonder, if I’d first watched Higurashi now, I’d’ve loved it so much, seeing as I was very young back when I first did.
Still, I watched Umineko (with much excitement) when it aired too, not having played the VNs, and even then was thoroughly unimpressed. It was a mess. Like, DEEN really did not seem to know what they were doing. With Higurashi, they mostly seem to have understood at least the point of each scene and piece of dialogue so as to string together the most important threads, whereas Umineko gives the impression they had no such understanding.
I’ve always put Umineko’s failing down to it just being too Much. Too long, too expansive a story and cast, too deeply-entrenched and explored themes for such a timespan. But it’s clear to me now they also didn’t seem to have any vision with the show.
Even with Higurashi, I notice moments that should’ve been carried over, important sentences missing from otherwise-included strings of dialogue, or scenes that take a completely different tone in the anime and leave me scratching my head. But, especially with their getting a whole two-cour show to animate the last two arcs of Kai, they had the time and basic understanding to just about map out the important parts of the story, if without any of the nuance or depth the length of the VN gives.
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I agree with people who say characterization and pacing are the primary culprits that sabotaged the Umineko anime- Umineko is just too dense with characters to be adapted like Higurashi was. Not that the Higurashi anime was a masterpiece or anything either, to be honest. However, it was just the right level of sensational violence and confusion to hook a lot of viewers.
However, and, this is really the unfortunate part, Higurashi has a second season that really steps up its game. Not only is it, at the very least, complete, but the second season also tries to rectify the mistakes of the first, with more emphasis on character interactions and a very different tone. However, this second season only had all these tweaks in it thanks to the unexpected popularity of the first season. Umineko never had a chance- not only did the first season sell poorly, but unlike Higurashi, Umineko’s arcs must not be separated from their context. You cannot simply add Episodes in Umineko, which is one of the reasons the PSP ports of Umineko didn’t sell as well as Kizuna. Umineko’s arcs require a continuity that Higurashi’s didn’t, and the Umineko anime also failed to adequately build that continuity.
I also believe a large portion of the blame falls on series director Chiaki Kon. Higurashi was her debut work, so she pulled out all the stops, and it shows. However lackluster of an adaptation it may be, you can’t deny the direction is stylish, unique, and extremely visceral. It’s part of the reason the show gets so many people hooked despite not having nearly as good character writing as the VN. With Umineko, though… well, she’d already make a name for herself with the huge success of both Higurashi and Junjou Romantica, and now she has to do yet another weird When They Cry spinofff? I think she probably just didn’t try nearly as hard. (I’ve also heard she was tremendously busy during this time, but I can’t find any website that shows everything she worked on around 2009 so I can’t confirm or deny that.)
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I would say that one thing I have noticed when it comes to VN adaptations in general is that the more important the point of view of narration is in the story and how much internal narration there is from the characters, the less well it is adapted. For example, in the Fate adaptations they can never really get Shirou right, or a few scenes in UBW in particular down because of this.
This is also a problem in Umineko due to it also having high amounts of importance in the narration as well as large amounts of internal monologue for the characters. Naturally, this makes it very hard to move to a different medium. This isn’t to say its impossible, after all the Umineko manga is also very good but it does have a much different feel as a result of it.
However, I would also say that Umineko does suffer from some unique limitations when it comes to adapting it to another medium, especially a non-text based medium and that comes with the Red and Blue truth. Its never really expounded upon how basic statements in it are differentiated from the speech, so it makes it very hard to do in an animated format, and no matter what you do with it, its going to be awkward as a result of it.
Furthermore, it suffered because of the fact that the entire game was not out by the date of it’s release, which resulted in a lot of the issues with some scenes in particular and things being fucked for actually solving it. After all, the people who were directing the anime had no idea what the solution was, so how could they properly foreshadow it? Naturally this could have been solved by a bit of intervention on Ryuukishi’s part, but I’m not quite sure how much influence he had over the production, if any. And going by the general quality, I would say he had next to none.
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But isn’t Death Note from Shonen Jump in the first place?
Kuhuhuhuhu…
At the risk of getting sidetracked, I’d like to say that Death Note really isn’t some stand out work in Shonen. It follows many similar beats as a lot of the more “typical” works form it’s subset and I don’t really understand the people who say otherwise.
Ah! Right! Back on topic!
Um… @Karifean seems to sum up my thoughts on the matter, if what @MrDent is saying is true then I think that’s also a likely element and @Restkastel also brought up a good point about the lack of narration making it hard to understand certain characters.
Goddammit, you guys stole my post…
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I guess since I made the thread I should put up my own thoughts.
First off I agree with most of the points made above. Lack of characterization in Umineko due to there being an overabundance of characters. I’m not going to say, though, that this is an inherent problem. I feel like they simply skipped important scenes that could have been included which would have fleshed out many of the characters. The size of the cast is certainly a daunting problem but not an insurmountable one. I think most of the problem is that we just don’t care when people die. In Higurashi we care that Rena gets beaten to death by Keiichi. We just don’t care about the characters in Umineko. We lack any kind of investment and so we can’t excuse the missing detail by saying that at least it was enjoyable which I feel we can for Higurashi.
I agree that there are a lot of things in Higurashi that are skipped over from the vn due to time constraints which would have made the story more enjoyable. However, the fact is that the story holds up on its own and you don’t really feel like there is that much missing upon first watching the anime unless you already know that there is something that could have been said in such-and-such a place. We find ourselves drawn in and so little bits that might have improved the story/mystery are ignored because, gosh darn it we’re having fun here.
On another level I might have to disagree with @Restkastel just slightly here. Higurashi has a lot of narration. Granted we might say that the narration within Umineko (and who the narrator is) might be more important but I feel like the Higurashi anime managed to pull off internal monologue because we were interested in Keiichi as a person while we didn’t care about Battler nearly as much. I think that’s the main difference in the narration problem.
I guess the main problem is that the audience just completely disengages from the cast and, when things start getting weird, the plot because they just don’t give a damn about what is happening.
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Back again with some more in-depth thoughts: 1, 2 - particularly about how the Higurashi anime treats the characters and ultimately succeeds through how it does this.
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Rosa is clearly the designated MILF of Umineko
Deen is also shameless and will sexualize children so that’s mild.