Mangaka-san to Assistant-san to

When I saw one of the typical seasonal anime charts, this series intrigued me, so I checked out its manga.  Less than 24 hours later I'd caught up to where the scanlations were, and enjoyed every page.

I just got around to watching the anime, and it was pretty good.  It stayed true to the manga, which for comedies is something that studios kind of ignore.  The voices worked for each character, too, so no problems there.

Then I sat there and thought about it.  Given that the length of each individual episode was 13 minutes, and that it was a 12-episode series that was as true to the manga as possible, it made me think.  Particularly, that the project of animating this manga got put on the studio, and they didn't really want to do it.  So they put in the bare minimum effort, making a 12-episode show with short episodes, and in making it as true to the manga as they could, ensured that people would at least enjoy it.

My issue isn't the adaptation.  It was great.  But therein lies the problem: it could have been so much better.  The short episodes always felt as though they ended abruptly.  As a viewer, I was just getting going with each episode's viewing experience when the episode ended.  Also, looking over the chapters of manga, it looks like they picked and chose random chapters to animate, leaning more towards getting things that people who'd read the manga would expect.  It's clear they weren't trying to make a bad production of it, but at the same time...  I keep coming back to the word "effort", and pairing it with such descriptors as "minimal".

Moral of the story: just stick to reading manga?  That does seem to be the more enjoyable option these days anyway, since 90% of anime these days is moeblobs and fanservice.  It's kind of why I've stopped watching anime each season.  The only sure bets are comedies, but even then, you have to weed out the fanservicey ones.