While Yuta was busy worrying, Aoi had already finished skimming through Kaito's proposal.
The anime was titled Love Academy, and the name alone gave off the immediate impression of riding the coattails of First Love Island.
The genre tags were "bishoujo," "school," "romance," and "lighthearted."
However, despite calling itself a romance, it was essentially a harem anime.
The plot mainly consisted of the male protagonist transferring to a new school due to family circumstances and then pursuing the various beautiful girls he encountered there.
Aoi could not stop frowning as she read.
It was not that harem anime disgusted her.
Rather, the issue was something else entirely.
This genre might have a strong market at the moment, but to her it felt formulaic, or to put it more bluntly, mediocre.
Arcane could put together a proposal like this on their own, and then hand the lead production contract to a more capable studio. Would that not be the better option?
She shook her head inwardly, set the proposal down, and picked up the one Yuta had provided, reading through it in silence.
Kaito had been waiting for Aoi to ask him questions. It never crossed his mind that she would skip right past him without a single inquiry and go straight to reading Yuta's proposal instead.
'What is going on? Did my proposal hold no appeal for her whatsoever? That should not be the case.'
"Wait a moment!"
A very serious problem suddenly dawned on him.
Lumen was pitching a harem anime. If the person reviewing the investment had been Department Head Ogami, or really any other man, the interest would have been guaranteed. Combined with Lumen's track record, this investment should have been in the bag.
But the person handling the review this time was a woman. Did this woman truly understand the appeal of harem anime?
No, that was not even the right question.
This woman most likely came from the Fuji family. What could she possibly know about anime at all?
"Um, Miss Fuji..." Kaito felt the need to offer some explanation.
However, before he could get a word out, Aoi cut him off. "My apologies, but please let me finish reading this proposal first."
The words died on Kaito's lips, leaving him visibly frustrated. But since she had said as much, all he could do was hold his tongue for the time being.
Aoi read on in silence, and before long she looked up at Yuta with a hint of surprise. "Your project is also a bishoujo anime?"
"Hm?"
Kaito, who had not given Yuta a second thought until now, could not help glancing over at him.
Yuta nodded and then elaborated. "It is a bishoujo anime, yes, but our series follows a pure love storyline for the protagonist. The heart of the story is really about emotional healing. To sum it up, it is a tale that is cheerful on the surface with an undercurrent of sadness running through it."
Aoi made no comment and continued reading.
The anime was titled Clannad, and the genre tags were "bishoujo," "school," "slice-of-life," and "healing."
As for the synopsis, the gist was that the male protagonist had become a delinquent due to his troubled family life. One day, he encountered a girl standing frozen at the bottom of the hill leading up to school. Their meeting marked the beginning of a profound change in his life.
"Is this anime an original work? It is not adapted from a visual novel?" she asked, unable to contain her curiosity.
A delinquent boy meets a beautiful girl and his life changes forever.
That was practically the textbook opening for a visual novel. Of course, bishoujo anime in general already carried strong visual novel undertones. Clannad simply leaned into those elements a bit more heavily.
Yuta thought for a moment before answering. "It is indeed an original work. However, visual novels are quite popular right now, so I thought it would be wise to incorporate more elements from that space."
During the first half of the 2000s, visual novels had been genuinely booming in Japan. The strong market for bishoujo anime owed much to this trend.
The market for visual novels would gradually shrink in the latter half of the decade, but this was 2006, right at the turning point. Nobody could have foreseen what was coming.
Aoi did not question his explanation. She nodded and continued reading. After the synopsis came the budget outline, followed by a rough plot description that was essentially a story overview.
The anime's plot progressed through a series of arcs, one after another. However, unlike a typical episodic structure, these arcs ran in parallel yet were connected by a single main storyline. The earlier and later arcs were not unrelated, and their order could not simply be rearranged at will.
Following the overview, three full episode scripts were attached.
Aoi read with growing focus, and gradually she found herself drawn in completely. She even caught herself thinking that she wanted to see this turned into an anime immediately.
This proposal was something special.
At the very least, Arcane might not have been able to produce something like it on their own.
If this anime was executed well, it could become a classic.
That was what she believed.
She took a deep breath, flipped back to the beginning of the proposal, and addressed Yuta.
"President Shido, I would like to know what your projected sales figures are for this anime, and what your goals are."
Yuta paused for a moment, then answered. "My projected sales are above ten thousand copies, naturally. As for my goal, I want to make this anime a classic. The kind of work that, even ten or twenty years from now, can still move people to tears."
Before Aoi could even respond, Kaito jumped in from the other side of the table. "President Shido, just because Miss Fuji is young does not mean you can get away with feeding her fantasies. You think ten thousand copies is that easy? And we all know what Starfall is capable of. Do you honestly believe your studio can produce an anime that sells ten thousand?"
He was rattled. The man was clearly rattled.
Yuta spared Kaito a glance and replied evenly. "Ten thousand is certainly no easy feat. At the very least, the anime would need to become a hit. But I have confidence in this project, and I have confidence in myself and in Starfall."
Kaito let out a dry laugh at that.
"Every one of us in this business believes in our own work. I imagine you were brimming with confidence when you made Heartbeat House too, right? Why else would you have funded it entirely out of your own pocket? And how did that turn out? I heard Heartbeat House sold just over six hundred copies. Is that correct?"
Yuta's brow tightened, and he countered,
"Heartbeat House and this project are completely different."
"How are they different? Is this proposal somehow better than what you had for Heartbeat House? No offense, but no matter how good a proposal looks on paper, a studio still needs the capability to back it up. And Starfall simply does not have that capability. Besides, I do not think your proposal is all that impressive to begin with." Kaito held nothing back.
"You have not even read his proposal. How can you claim it is no good?" Aoi suddenly interjected.
Kaito blinked in surprise but recovered quickly. "How can I not tell? It is a bishoujo anime, so just make a bishoujo anime. Why complicate things by adding healing elements? And if the tone is supposed to be cheerful, why insist on weaving sadness into it? Does he not realize that cheerful is easy but pulling off sadness is incredibly hard? One misstep and the whole thing just becomes awkward. Once the audience reception collapses, you can forget about sales entirely."
Yuta had to admit the man had a point. If this were not his own proposal, built on a work he knew inside and out, he might have actually been convinced. After all, it was true that lighthearted comedy was far easier to execute than genuine emotional weight.
Tearjerker anime had the potential to become timeless classics, but if the emotional beats felt forced, the backlash could be brutal. A perfect example was The Day I Became a God from 2020, which had been marketed as a major tearjerker only to get torn apart by audiences.
If even Yuta himself had nearly been swayed by that argument, Aoi was probably in an even more precarious position.
Things were not looking good at all.
_______________________
Support me at patreon.com/CulturedOne and read 30 Advanced Chapters