This week, a studio that has a fair number of important works and a large number of works that are fairly divisive.
J.C. Staff was founded back in the late 80s, but they didn't start producing TV series until the mid-nineties, where it wasn't long until their first super-hit, Revolutionary Girl Utena. A few years later, they adapted the four-panel comic by Kiyohiko Azuma, Azumanga Daioh.
As they grew larger, they diversified their works into quite a few genres. Today, they are known for two groups of shows in particular. You can think of the two groups as being ends of a continuum, where a lot of the shows can fit into either group, but a lot of them are also sprinkled somewhere in between the two groups.
「ウテナ」 by クオーク
But first, let's go more in depth into Utena, which is a fairly important work. It came out in 1997 not long after Gainax's groundbreaking Neon Genesis Evangelion. And in many ways, Utena can be thought of the genre equivalent of Evangelion, subverting the shoujo genre in the same way Evangelion subverted mecha standards at the time as well as being incredibly cryptic and full of symbolism. But, Utena definitely beats Evangelion in the use of abstract symbols department.
「あずまんが大王 1年生」 by ひかる
Azumanga Daioh is a title that's recommended fairly often and is likely to be one of the first comedy series that someone new to anime is introduced to. It's pretty well-loved. Azumanga Daioh is generally assumed to be the genesis of the girls in high school doing stuff genre of manga and anime and a lot of people still measure newer works in that genre against Azumanga.
2005 was an important year for JC Staff, because it produced two shows that would sort of determine the types of shows it'd make for the next few years. The first of those is the first noitaminA show, Honey and Clover, which follows a group of students at an art college and their internal struggles. But this show sort of lead to a bunch of shows that attempted to portray serious relationships rather than your generic harem stuff. These are shows that include Nodame Cantabile, Kimikiss, or Aoi Hana.
「炎髪灼眼」 by 舘津テト
Their other 2005 show that got a lot of notice was Shakugan no Shana, whose titular character was kind of the prototype of for what would become the J.C. Staff textbook tsundere. The shows here include Zero no Tsukaima, Hayate the Combat Butler!!, and Toradora, which all feature a short tsundere girl voiced by Kugimiya Rie and contains your standard tsundere/shounen romance tropes.
It's worth stressing that these aren't the only two types of shows they make, but that when people think of JC Staff, they go to one of the Honey and Clover or Shakugan no Shana type shows. Stuff like Ookami-san and Index/Railgun would fall closer to the Shana type shows, while there are other shows like Kaichou wa Maid-sama, Taishou Yakyuu Musume, or Shigofumi who don't really fall neatly into one of those two piles.
They're definitely no Madhouse either. While they may go stuff outside their usual genres occasionally, their art remains largely the same and incredibly safe (as opposed to Madhouse who goes all out). Their most interesting art is usually with Kasai Kenichi's shows that often feature a beautiful watercolour style as opposed to the standard anime-looking stuff that JC Staff does the rest of the time.
NEXT TIME
Young boy, become a legend
