Review of Black Butler: Emerald Witch Arc

Sigh. I am basing this review off of my experience from reading the manga and watching it become "alive" through animation. This is one of my favorite arcs in the manga, but the anime adaptation really disappointed me. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed watching the show, but there were too many little things that really began to bug me as I continued watching the show. The most obvious downfall of this arc, which is even obvious in the manga, is that this arc is very short. You could argue that the number of chapters for this arc is similar to others, but trulythis arc is one of the shortest, and is followed by one of the longest. And this is what really irks me, but I'll explain later.

The first red flag for this anime were the lengths of the opening and ending songs. Almost exclusively, these songs only account for three minutes of the twenty four minute run time. But for this season, they total to four minutes, on twenty three minute epsiodes. Now this may not seem like a big deal... but it becomes a problem later on when the show continuously makes these time shortcuts throughout the series. For example, in episode nine, the recap is almost five minutes of previous episodes content, and with the four minutes of op/ed and minute of ending content, the episode really only had fourteen minutes of actual content. It makes watching the show so much less enjoyable.

Second, the animation. Don't get me wrong, it was beautiful. But the story boards were exact copies of the manga panels, like I kid you not, for example, episode nine, followed the same panels of chapters 100 and 101. To a T. At this point what is the point of the adaptation if nothing is being changed, if there are no new additions to it. An anime that does not use its won storyboards and shamelessly uses the manga as a base for each scene can never surpass the original work. Like why even animate it at that point? Ugh. it bothers me so much because I genuinely love the story and this arc, but the anime didn't bring anything to the table except my frustration.

And now this is what really gets me. Because the content for this arc was so small, the anime team decided to use so many recaps that it easily bores the audience (who just watched the episode the previous week). Furthermore, this destroys the rewatch value because who would want to rewatch recaps? especially if you just watched the full episode previously (also I could just read the manga, it takes way less time and has the exact same effect as watching the anime). I wish the anime was either eight episodes (aka shorter with less recaps) or that they included some of the next arcs content and ended in a cliffhanger. And this is what actually angers me. Because I do not see it possible to animate the next arc into just 12 episodes due to the amount of content that needs to be covered (the arc itself is only around twenty chapters, with a massive cliffhanger that makes moving to the next arc almost seamless)

Ugh anyways, I still liked this arc of the story, but the shameless recaps and longer op/ed as well as the poor storyboarding disappoints me.