High Guardian Spice is probably the most controversial animated series on the Crunchyroll platform till date. Originally, it was planned to be released in 2019, however, it was surrounded by so many problems that it kept getting delayed, and in Oct 2021, Crunchyroll quietly released the series on their platform.
As expected, when the series started airing on Crunchyroll, it didn’t get that much positive feedback. Also, lack of a strong script writing, and good animation didn’t help it either. As of writing, the series has a rating of 2.5/5 on Crunchyroll.
Recently, the creator of the show, Raye Rodriguez revealed in a series of Tweets on why the High Guardian Spice did not perform well?
High Guardian Spice had a very small budget. We were the first show of a non-union studio. If you’re mad at the animation quality, it was the budget. BG art? Budget. Writing?? Budget. We literally started storyboarding the first episode before the first script was finished.
So when we inevitably ran into problems (all productions do), we didn’t have the time or money to slow down and fix them. We had to barrel forward and make due with what we had.
People compare HGS to anime because it’s on CR, but it isn’t anime, it’s a cartoon made with the same pipeline as any other American cartoon. Our budget was comparable to a CN show, which are usually 11-minutes long, are comedy-centered and have much simpler BGs and characters.
Really the best show to compare HGS to is Onyx Equinox, our sister show and the only other show made at the same studio as HGS. OE had the advantage of learning from mistakes made on HGS and being union, but it was a lot of the same team and same pipeline.
What we were trying to make was incredibly ambitious for what we were working with and we did the best we could. Maybe in another timeline HGS would have gotten the budget & schedule it needed to reach its full potential.
Instead of piling on to the HGS is trash campaign, maybe think about what happened behind the scenes to make it that way, have empathy for the real human beings who did their best working on it & think critically about who started this hate campaign in the first place
But it seems like not every one is convinced with this explanation, as one of the Twitter user explained that bad writing doesn’t correlate with the budget.
how does bad writing correlate to a budget?
the writing’s either good or it isn’t— budget plays no part in the underlying skill of the writers hired
it sounds like you’re trying to find a scapegoat because you know the product’s shit, but don’t want to accept responsibility for it
Another Twitter user said:
One of these things is not like the other. Bad writing isn’t a budget issue. Good stories have come from things with literally no budget and david cage somehow gets to keep making games so it’s definitely a failure of the writer.
In your opinion, what was the main cause of High Guarding Spice animated series’s downfall? Let us know your opinion in the comment section.
Source: Twitter
