Of course, being willing to take a break isn’t the only advantage that these newer series have. Filler just isn’t a problem when the anime is allowed to take some time off and give the manga some time to get ahead. The result is one of the most faithful adaptations of a beloved shonen manga series. The same is true for Attack on Titan, which actually took a five-year break after its first season before coming back for Season 2 to ensure that it didn’t catch up with its manga. And practically the only filler episodes are meant to catch viewers up on events of prior seasons after a long break. It has continued like this ever since, and now it’s on its fifth season, with 110 episodes and consistently excellent animation and art. Its second season came a year later and was 25 episodes. My Hero Academia began in 2016 and its first season was just 13 episodes. The big thing that’s different in shows like My Hero Academia, Attack on Titan, Demon Slayer, and Jujutsu Kaisen is that their studios are willing to take a break.
One Piece is still going strong, Bleach’s anime ended abruptly in 2012, and Naruto ended in 2017, giving way to its spin-off series Boruto, but since then, no three series have really cemented themselves as a new “Big 3.” Despite that though, the landscape of shonen anime is stronger than ever thanks to a shift in how they’re made.Īnd really, it’s not even a radical change. To be fair, Dragon Ball Super's art and animation got much better towards the end of the series. For an example of that, one doesn’t have to look much further than Dragon Ball Super. The often plodding pacing has not been the only issue either, as the Big 3 and other shonen anime were also rife with inconsistent animation and art. But in the anime, the sword gets stolen, and the whole episode becomes about Suigetsu trying to get the sword from the people who took it, leading the anime to cover literally a fraction of a single chapter with an entire episode. Oftentimes, filler will be used as padding! To use an example from Naruto Shippuden, there’s a part in the manga where a character named Suigetsu collects a sword from a grave. Padding is when an anime episode adds in fluff to pad out the episode run time, slowing down progress with excessive recaps, flashbacks to scenes that just happened not even two episodes ago, re-using animations to make fights last longer, or just doing anything to stretch sequences of events longer than they need to be. But at least for shows that are already complete, you can pretty easily find out which episodes are skippable and just ignore them if you want to. But for the most part, they’re generally pretty boring and feel utterly inconsequential by their very nature.įiller can be a huge bummer when you’re following a weekly on-going show and have to wait sometimes upwards of 20 weeks before the story gets back on track. Filler arcs aren’t automatically terrible, and there actually are some examples of fun filler arcs or episodes that either offer up some truly funny moments or shine a light on characters that don’t get much of a spotlight in the canonical story.
This is achieved primarily in two ways: filler and padding.Ī filler arc is an anime original arc that is designed to tell a story that can exist in its own little bubble, not affecting anything outside of it and thereby not getting in the way of the actual canonical story.
Neither of these outcomes are ideal, so generally what happens is that anime studios will do their best to try and slow down the progress of the anime. This frequency of episodes presents a big problem for a show that’s based on a manga series that is also still in-progress: What do you do when the show inevitably catches up to the source material? You either have to create a completely separate continuity, like what Game of Thrones or the original Fullmetal Alchemist anime had to do when they ran into this problem, or you just have to cut the series short.