Tokyo. Starfall Animation.
The atmosphere inside the office was suffocating, punctuated by the occasional heavy sigh.
"We finally got the chance to produce our own anime, and the sales turned out to be this bad."
"I bet the president wants to strangle the director right about now."
"Can you blame him? He funded this project out of his own pocket."
"From here on out, we're probably going back to subcontracting work."
...
Inside the president's office.
Yuta Shido was sighing too, though his reasons were a little different from everyone else's.
"Waking up in another world was weird enough, but I didn't expect to land in a pile of debt the second I got here."
This was Tokyo in a parallel world. The date was January 10th, 2006, and his current identity was the president of Starfall Animation.
Five years ago, the original owner of this body graduated high school and joined an animation studio as a production assistant. He was sharp enough that within two years, he had been promoted to production manager. Unfortunately, not long after his promotion, the studio went under.
Other companies came knocking with job offers, but the original owner turned them all down. Instead, he borrowed a sum of money, pulled together a crew, and started his own company, which was the Starfall Animation of today.
At first, the company could only take on subcontracting jobs. After two years of that grind, the ambitious original owner decided it was time to produce their own anime.
A few days ago, Starfall's first original production, Heartbeat House, went on sale. Its disc sales had barely cleared six hundred copies.
Generally speaking, a title needed to sell around three thousand copies just to break even. Six hundred was a catastrophic loss, especially in 2006, when the disc market hadn't even started to shrink yet. Most of the blame fell on the director, but that director had already skipped town.
And even if he hadn't, there was no way to pin the financial losses on him anyway.
That said, the original owner wasn't entirely blameless either. His share of the responsibility was just comparatively smaller.
"Trash studio!"
"Trash Yuta Shido!"
"What possessed you to fund an anime out of your own pocket?"
"Making anime is a death sentence!"
Yuta grumbled to himself under his breath.
Of course, talk was cheap. In all likelihood, he was going to keep making anime regardless.
Setting aside the fact that he was currently the president of Starfall Animation, his identity before transmigrating had been that of a key animator and part-time singer back in the US. He could draw, he knew a bit about music, and beyond that, he was pretty much useless.
If someone told him to leave the anime industry, he genuinely wouldn't know what else to do.
Besides, this was a parallel world and the year was still 2006. The possibilities were endless.
"Starfall is hanging by a thread. I need to figure out how to stabilize things first."
"Ideally, I'd land a new project right away."
"But for a tiny studio like this, there's no way we're getting a prime contract. I'll have to put together a proposal and attract investors myself."
A prime contract meant serving as the lead production studio for an entire series.
In most cases, the studio producing the anime wasn't necessarily the one funding it. In fact, very few studios ever fully self-funded a production, because a single 24 minute episode typically cost between ten and twelve million yen.
On top of that, in the current year of 2006, a standard anime ran over twenty episodes. Not many companies had the resources for that.
Heartbeat House was an exception. It was a disc-only release that never aired on television, so the episode length was flexible at roughly ten minutes each, and only six episodes were produced in total.
Six episodes at around ten minutes apiece didn't require an enormous budget. Even if the original "Yuta" couldn't cover it himself, he could borrow enough to make it work.
Of course, that was precisely the problem.
Because he could borrow the money, the failure of Heartbeat House had only deepened his debt.
Fully self-funded anime productions rarely succeeded, and even the ones that did tended to be small-scale affairs. This time, Yuta had no intention of going that route. Besides, he was already drowning in debt and couldn't scrape together the production costs even if he wanted to.
He needed investors. And if he wanted to attract investors, the first step, at the very least, was to put together a solid proposal. An anime proposal typically included the title, genre, synopsis, and a budget outline.
Since this was meant to attract investment, all Yuta needed was a preliminary proposal. It didn't have to be overly detailed, but it did need to clearly communicate what kind of anime he was planning to make.
"Now, let me think about which anime I should rip o... I mean, which anime should I produce first."
Before transmigrating, he had been a key animator and part-time singer, not a producer or a screenwriter. Asking him to create an original proposal guaranteed to land investment for a studio in Starfall's current state was completely beyond him.
Playing the role of a courier who delivers the goods from another world was far more realistic.
However, Yuta noticed a very serious problem.
Something must have gone wrong during the transmigration process, because out of the thousands of anime he had watched in his previous life, the only ones he could recall with crystal clarity were the tearjerkers.
Tearjerker anime had a tendency to become classics, and classics were the kind of shows people rewatched eight or ten times over. But in Yuta's case, the situation was extreme.
For every single tearjerker, he could remember each frame and every last detail with perfect precision. Meanwhile, for any other genre, even critically acclaimed hits with blockbuster sales, he could only recall the broad strokes.
"Guess I'm making tearjerkers, then."
"Don't blame me for being ruthless, folks. A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do."
Yuta let out a sigh, then quickly opened a Word document on his computer and typed out a few letters on the keyboard: Clannad.
Clannad, produced by Kyoto Animation and adapted from Key's visual novel of the same name. Two seasons in total, with twenty-two episodes each if you excluded the bonus episodes.
Given Starfall's current situation, any pitch for investment had to rule out the big-budget spectacles. A slice-of-life anime would be the safest bet.
There were plenty of slice-of-life options out there, but the current year was 2006.
The art style of anime from the mid-2000s was noticeably different from anything after 2010. Transplanting a post-2010 anime into 2006 would look too far ahead of its time, and there was no telling whether audiences would accept it. It made far more sense to pick from tearjerker anime in the slice-of-life genre that already had proven sales during this era.
Once he narrowed the scope like that, there was barely any need to deliberate. The most fitting choice was unmistakably Clannad. On top of everything else, this anime was considered one of the most definitive slice-of-life masterpieces by countless fans.
Even in 2021, it still stood at the very peak of the tearjerker genre. If Starfall could successfully produce this series, the studio's reputation would skyrocket, and finding investors for future projects would no longer be an issue.
With his target locked in, Yuta dove into the proposal. His efficiency was off the charts.
Someone knocked on the office door.
Without looking up, Yuta called out, "Come in."
The door swung open and a young woman stepped inside.
Yuta glanced up and saw that it was Rika Zenba, one of the production assistants.
She was petite in build, and her face looked very youthful. In reality, she was already twenty-one, only two years younger than Yuta.
Once inside the president's office, she spoke up.
"President, we got a call from Crescent Publishing. They want to know if we're interested in taking on some subcontracting work."
"Pass."
Yuta refused without a second thought.
"An animation studio that only takes outsourced work is like an eagle that has forgotten how to fly."
"Huh?" Rika blinked, completely thrown off.
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