Trivia / Berserk (2016)

• Acting for Two: Toa Yukinari voices both Casca and her demon child, leading to at least one instance where she's playing both sides of the (admittedly, nonverbal) "conversation".
• Meme Acknowledgment: On March 18, 2017, Guts voice actor Kaiji Tang tweeted a picture of a frying pan, crediting it as the Dragonslayer's "VA" in a shout-out to the CLANG meme.
• The Original Darrin: Shinji Ogawa, who voiced Void in Berserk: The Golden Age Arc, passed away in 2015. As a result, the role of Void returned to Unshō Ishizuka.
• The Other Darrin: The English dub went for a new cast done by Bang Zoom! Entertainment instead of the original cast from NYAV Post. It's unknown why but the only cast members to return to voice the same characters from any of the previous dubs in any form were Christopher Corey Smith as the king of Midland, Jamieson Price as the Skull Knight (albeit under a pseudonym) and Gina Bowes as Charlotte, who had voiced the role in the second and third movies.
• Role Reprise: In addition to replacing Shinji Ogawa as the voice of Void, Unshō Ishizuka comes back to voice The Narrator.
• Schedule Slip: Episode 21 was followed by a clip show, and on June 9th when episode 22 was supposed to air, the broadcast was delayed four hours on account of "production issues".
• Sequel Gap: The first anime adaptation to continue the story past the Golden Age Arc since 1998, making for a gap of about 18 years! Even if you count the video games, it still comes some 12 years after 2004's Berserk: Millennium Falcon Hen Seima Senki no Shō.
• Troubled Production: According to a July 7th 2017 article by Callum May (The Canipa Effect) on ANN, the show was plagued by behind-the-scenes production difficulties. May's English article is based on information from a Japanese article in the January 2017 issue of CG World Magazine, which Kim Morissey (Frog-kun) translated for him.
  • The idea of making a 3D Berserk anime came from producer Tetsuro Satomi of LIDENFILMS. He reached out to Studio GEMBA, which was established in 2006 as a subsidiary of Digital Frontier. They had previously done supporting work on various shows, but they'd never handled principal animation production for a show before. The president and staff of GEMBA were concerned that Satomi's proposal was a very tall order, but ultimately they agreed to do it as a joint project, with LIDENFILMS producing and studio Millepensee creating the 2D.
  • The director chosen for the Berserk project was Shin Itagaki, who was more well-known for directing lighter fare such as the Rapid-Fire Comedy Quirky Work Teekyuu. He had at least directed Devil May Cry: The Animated Series (2007), so he wasn't a complete stranger to bloody, demon-slaying action. Nevertheless, he had never directed a 3D anime before, and his determination to replicate the unique and highly detailed aesthetic of the original manga held up the start of production, since his vision ran up against the limited capabilities of Studio GEMBA. Production began in the spring of 2015, when they created the first teaser, but it was not until the project was formally announced in December of that year that Itagaki and the staff actually reached a compromise about what the show would look like. Because he wasn't satisfied with the more realistic first version and wanted to get more of a stylized 2D look, they had to scrap all of the assets they had created for the trailer, and in January 2016 they started making 150 new character models from scratch. They started animating in March—just four months before the show was set to air—and things got worse. It turned out that their hardware couldn't handle rendering the highly detailed character models they had created, and since they didn't have time to work out a better solution, their only choice was to simplify the models. They also had to scrap their plans to use a system called Global Illumination to enhance the 3D backgrounds.
  • Itagaki's request for "touch-up lines" to fill in shadows also created problems. The hatching texture was added in by Millepensee, and the lines were automatically tracked onto the models by Adobe After Effects, but they had to manually apply the texture to any reflective metallic objects like weapons and armor, which made up a huge portion of the assets. Meanwhile the show's overworked technical director, Keita Mizuhashi, had his work cut out for him trying to troubleshoot all sorts of issues. The fact that most of these problems involved multiple teams who weren't working under the same roof made his job that much harder.
  • Ultimately, says May, the overly ambitious proposal combined with Itagaki's perfectionism and the lack of time to work out the technical issues turned the anime into a production nightmare, and the visuals suffered as a result.

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