Chapter 327: New Work
The sixth episode of Attack on Titan Season Two had conquered the vast majority of its fan base that night.
The plot itself was extraordinary. But the plot was not the complete explanation for what the episode had produced in its audience.
The BGM. The visual performance. The storyboard work in the transformation sequence. The specific quality of the music that had underscored Reiner’s internal monologue before the reveal.
All of it working together with the plot had pushed the emotional experience of the episode to a level that the plot alone, presented in any other medium, could not have reached.
This was the core advantage animation held over manga and prose as a storytelling form.
A novel that failed at the plot level was simply a bad novel. A manga with average plotting could sustain readership if the artist was skilled enough in character expression and panel composition.
Animation could take a plot that was already exceptional and, through the layering of music, visual performance, and storyboard direction, convert it into something that touched its audience at a level purely narrative communication could not access.
Attack on Titan, Demon Slayer, and One-Punch Man had all existed in Rei’s previous life as manga with solid but not extraordinary popularity. Nothing in their serialisation performance had suggested they would become global cultural phenomena.
What had made them global phenomena was encountering production teams capable of realising them fully as animation. The music. The movement. The specific choices made about what to show and how long to hold a shot and where to place a cut.
The original animated adaptations of Bleach, Naruto, and One Piece had demonstrated what happened when the reverse was true. Battle scenes cut for budget. Frame rates so low that action sequences were nearly incomprehensible.
Repetitive animation loops reused across episodes. Error compilations that had become their own comedy genre online. Works that had been diminished rather than elevated by their animated adaptations.
Rei had ensured that none of his work would follow that path. The production standards at Illumination Production Company did not permit it.
The response to the episode’s reception from within Illumination Production Company arrived in the mood of the staff the following morning.
Rei had anticipated the fan reaction. He had known for two seasons which moment in the story would produce it and had been building toward it with the production team accordingly. The certainty he carried about the episode’s quality was long-established.
For the production staff, the fan response was something different. They had known intellectually which part of the series they were working toward. They had understood that the Reiner and Bertholdt reveal was the episode the second season had been constructed to reach.
The actual experience of watching the fan community receive it: the comparisons to Demon Slayer episode nineteen, the declarations that this was the best single episode in the history of Japanese animation, the tens of thousands of posts processing the shock and emotion of it: this was not something they had known in advance.
The reason the staff had joined Illumination Production Company was the compensation. Rei paid at a level the industry did not otherwise offer, and the project bonuses were real.
But compensation was not the complete explanation for why people worked at the level this production team worked at. There was something else, adjacent to professional pride, that existed in people who had devoted their careers to animation and needed to believe that the work they were producing was genuinely exceptional.
Tonight had answered that need completely.
Rei walked into the building the following morning and felt the mood before anyone spoke to him.
Rei’s primary purpose in coming to Illumination Production Company that morning was not to check on the third season of Attack on Titan or supervise the Spirited Away production.
He walked into Himari’s office and placed a large bag of documents on her desk.
Himari coughed a few times.
She held back the complaints that had formed in her throat before they could become words.
There was no point complaining about a freak. He was a freak. That was the complete analysis.
"This is the setting collection for the new work, Bleach," Rei said, without preamble. "A long-running anime, conservatively estimated at two to three hundred episodes. Expected serialisation of four to five years. I plan to use it to fill the market gap after Attack on Titan concludes."
"Two... two to three hundred episodes?"
To Himari’s knowledge, the longest work Shirogane-sensei had produced so far was Hunter x Hunter, which had run slightly over a hundred episodes.
Attack on Titan had not received the final season script yet, but based on the structural shape of the story it would not exceed seventy or eighty episodes. And Rei’s new work was opening with a capacity of two hundred episodes as a conservative estimate.
"I understand," Himari said.
She did not add anything further.
Rei held forty-nine percent of the company’s shares and had placed her in the chairman position. This arrangement did not mean she could negotiate with him in any practical sense. The most valuable asset the entire company possessed was Rei’s presence as a shareholder and creative source.
Of the thousand employees currently on staff, more than ninety percent had moved to Illumination Production Company specifically because of the name attached to it.
The opportunity to work on projects that were both commercially successful and genuinely respected, that won recognition and produced results the people who worked on them could be proud of: that was what had drawn the talent here and what kept it here. Rei could do as he chose.
The company was currently managing five or six concurrent anime projects with the schedule filled through next year and into the year after. This was a real constraint.
It was also a manageable constraint.
"I will call a department heads meeting tomorrow to assess which personnel can be transferred from existing production teams," Himari said. "What production standard are you planning for Bleach?"
"The company’s highest standard," Rei said.
Himari understood what this meant immediately.
Animation quality on the level of Attack on Titan and Demon Slayer. Production cost per episode at a minimum of 140 million yen. An investment per production minute that already exceeded the per-minute cost of ninety-five percent of Japan’s theatrical film releases.
Against the peers who promoted their productions as major works on the basis of a 60 million yen per episode budget, this was a different category of commitment.
But this was Shirogane-sensei.
Wealthy. Decisive. And without a single loss-making anime project across the entire history of his career. For any project he had been involved in, the higher the investment, the higher the return had been.
The correlation was not accidental. The quality of what higher investment produced attracted the audience that generated the returns.
Two to three hundred episodes at 140 million yen per episode. A total production investment potentially exceeding 40 billion yen if the series reached its full projected length.
Himari looked at the image visible through the transparent cover of the document bag Rei had placed on her desk.
A boy. Black clothing. An oversized, cleaver-shaped sword. Character design aesthetic that carried a specific quality of stylishness she had not seen in any of Rei’s previous works: sharper, more fashionable, closer to the visual language of high-end illustration than of conventional shonen manga.
A long-running masterpiece, she thought.
