Padding in Anime & Manga.
- Battle Royale fans who read the novel and the manga notice how the latter version's pacing crawled after volume ten. Whereas the initial ten volumes covered 500+ pages of the novel pretty swiftly, the last five stretched the novel's final 100 pages to sometimes annoying extremes. Volumes 11 and 12 could've been condensed into one volume, as they contained six chapters of exposition between Kayoko and Sugimura that only needed two chapters of sufficient detail, and a ridiculous Dragon Ball Z-style fight between Sugimura and Kiriyama that dragged for WAY too long. Volume thirteen contained an unnecessary flashback for Souma, and the final battle between Kiriyama and Shogo/Shuya/Noriko within volumes 14 and 15 was practically frozen in time near the end. One entire chapter was Shuya basically struggling with his decision to shoot Kiriyama in self-defense, and this is presented as a tribute to every character who died earlier in the story. Without the padding, the manga could have easily ended at volume thirteen without sacrificing important details.
- However, even the volumes before 10 aren't free from this label. The death by cyanide poisoning in one of the earlier volumes goes on for at least 10 pages, with such devotion to graphic detail.
- Black Clover: The beginning arcs of the anime have this in spades. The first chapter was expanded to last through three episodes, including an entire episode to a flashback that is one page long in the manga. Episode four also adds about 4 minutes of Asta and Yuno walking around the city.
- In the same regard, the modsouls from the Bount Arc of Bleach have been kept in the anime purely to slow it down. Their scenes have been tacked on in the hopes that the anime won't overtake the manga again.
- The recap that starts nearly every episode wouldn't be padding if they bothered to change it. The recap of the Hueco Mundo arc in Episode 190 takes over half the episode, and is mostly composed of clips from Ichigo vs. Ulquiorra and Ichigo vs. Grimmjow.
- Then there's Komamura's fight with Poww. After releasing his Bankai, Komamura immediately finishes the fight with one attack. In the anime, it takes three minutes of Poww attacking it to no effect before he goes in for the kill.
- Cardcaptor Sakura downplays this. While each episode does contain a scepter-summoning sequence and some card-using sequences that follow the same mold, they are always somewhat different — if only because Sakura never uses the same costume twice, not even if she has to disguise twice in the same episode.
- Chargeman Ken!, despite being in a 10 minutes timeslot, frequently uses this. In addition to the Transformation Sequence used every episode, redundant scenes are a common sight. In particular, episode 35 begins with a Show Within a Show mostly irrelevant to the plot that lasts for almost a minute and features an unusually long explosion.
- Digimon Adventure had the infamous episode 40, where all the Digimon started the episode in their Baby 2/In-Training stages and evolved up to their Ultimate/Mega levels. Nope, no split-screen, no scene shortening - each one of the 8 main Digimon had their transformation sequences shown entirely, one after the other, therefore making Stock Footage occupy half of the episode's running time.
- A similar thing happens in Digimon Adventure 02, in the episode with Shakkoumon's debut. There's also an episode where digivolving has been blocked, so we're treated to the full extended Transformation Sequence... and we're shown it doesn't work by having it played in reverse (to be fair, only half of it.) So, they decide to try again! Cue the whole transformation sequence and then half of it in reverse again!
- A major problem Digimon Adventure tri. has. Outside of the Evolution sequences and fights, much of the movies' time is taken up by the characters angsting, engaging in mundane activities, and, in the fifth installment, telling scary stories while so many plot threads remain unaddressed.
- Digimon Frontier is very fond of showing the whole Transformation Sequence. If you're very unlucky you'll get everyone's one after another instead of the usual five-way split-screen.
- Dragon Ball was infamous for all the padding in the manga scenes used to prevent them from overtaking the source material, up to and including flashbacks to earlier in the episode. This first became noticeable in the 22nd World Tournament arc in Dragon Ball, where half an episode would have additional pre-fight scenes and the actual fights would be padded with additional-but-inconsequential fight sequences and constant cuts to Bulma in the crowd. The absolute worst was the Namek Arc in Dragon Ball Z with constant cuts to other characters, several of which weren't vital to the current storyline such as Chi-Chi on Earth or the dead Ginyu Force on King Kai's Planet. Toei Animation also resorted to unnecessary flashbacks and even padding out the Previously on… segments, sometimes to over three minutes! Tellingly, this was the closest the anime got to overtaking the manga during their production.
- Whether a scene was padding or not plays into arguments about characters' power levels within the fan community, as often the anime filler features fights, boasts, and battle power readings that didn't exist in the original manga that tend to throw out what was previously established, leading to many completely disregarding those scenes for the sake of debate.
- To give some idea of how bad this series was about this and filler, Z was Re-Cut into Dragon Ball Z Kai in 2009, which literally cut the number of episodes in half.
- And if you think the number of episodes of Kai is still too much, Dragon Ball Z Abridged took this even further by cutting the first 194 episodes into 60 episodes (three of which are split into 3-parters, with Episode 60 getting an epilogue). This was done by cutting off a lot of the padding and filler, and with the exception of Episode 44, always using multiple episodes from Z when creating an Abridged one, which lasts a sixth of the time.
- In the Frieza arc, Frieza launched an attack at the planet Namek that caused it to be extremely close to imploding, about 5 minutes away. 5 minutes which lasted ten episodes. Not that this was unique to the anime; it was ludicrous in the manga as well! Parodied in DBZ Abridged, where Goku asks Frieza if he even knows what a "minute" is.
- Fans point to the battle against the Hungry Wolf Knights in anime of Fairy Tail during the Grand Magic Games arc as a major offender of this. In the manga, the fight is over fairly quickly but the anime spreads it out over four episodes. Nobody bought them as credible antagonists and it's clear they were filling time for Natsu and co. while the final event of the games was ongoing, delaying fights people wanted to see and causing Arc Fatigue.
- Weird "horror" manga Fourteen is terrible at this. Something as simple as a man heading home and opening his door can take a few pages.
- The 1999 adaptation of Hunter × Hunter stretched out material from the manga so much that a lot of arcs were twice as long. While it did lead to some nice Adaptation Expansion in some cases, it often resulted in a slower pace that made it easier for Arc Fatigue to set in. It gets especially bad during the Greed Island OVAs, where Gon's fight with Genthru lasts several episodes that are filled with exposition.
- The anime adaptation of Magic Knight Rayearth filled a lot of the time with extra Character Development and world exploration, but there are many examples of blatant padding as the trio unnecessarily rehashes conversations they've already had and/or show flashbacks of things that, in some instances, happened in just the last episode. There's also a lengthy recap at the beginning of each episode where the narrator reminds viewers why the girls have been summoned to Cephiro.
- Similarly, the Naruto anime does this when it doesn't just decide to fill out episodes with nothing at all. For example, when Suigetsu joined Sasuke in the manga they went to the Land of Waves to get Zabuza's BFS which was right where they expected it to be and it only took up a few pages. But in the anime someone else took it, and the two spend the episode retrieving it, eventually making a game out of it (as well as spending a rather amusing scene in a restaurant). This also serves the purpose of demonstrating Suigetsu's abilities much earlier than in the manga (where he doesn't get to properly demonstrate his power for nearly fifty chapters). The same thing happened with the other two members of their team but with flashbacks. Earlier in the anime series, during the attempted rescue of Gaara, there were flashbacks to things that had been covered in previous and recent flashbacks, as well as flashbacks to things that had happened five real-time minutes earlier. While this is done in an attempt to not outpace the manga, it gets painful during fight scenes.
- The War arc has taken Padding through so many turns of the dial that listing all the examples would take up several times as much space as this entire page. The most notable example is the rampant Obito flashbacks plaguing his reveal, Naruto's attempt to redeem him, and his team-up with Kakashi; said flashbacks are extremely repetitive and pad out several panels to several episodes, and the reveal's flashback padding actually derailed to show an entire arc of Kakashi's and Yamato's post-Rin-death history.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion had to scrap some episodes due to similarity to a Real Life terrorist attack, then replace those episodes while staying within their original budget. Part of their solution was long scenes that required little or no animation.
- Episode 17 cuts back to the panning shot of Shinji's school courtyard no less than four times, always followed by an extended lingering shot of the Class 2-A sign. Several other shortcuts were also used in the episode to limit the amount of movement and character designs that had to be used in non-action scenes.
- There are probably more examples from the series, but the scene that is the prime candidate for padding is the infamous Kaworu Nagisa death scene. After Shinji grabs Kaworu using the hand of Unit 01, there is a single photograph that stretches on for a solid sixty-five seconds while Beethoven's Ninth plays in the background. The story goes that most Japanese people watching this thought their televisions had frozen.
- Asuka and Rei in the elevator at NERV, in episode 22. Just one solid frame of them standing there for a little over a minute. The only time that anyone ever moves is when Asuka blinks. Once. However, it's Played for Drama, building up the tension for the moment she goes off in Rei's face.
- Other Magical Girl series, such as Ojamajo Doremi, often abbreviate the transformation sequences, run several in parallel, or even do them off-screen to save time. This is usually a sign the creators actually care about the story they're telling.
- One Piece uses padding for similar reasons to Bleach, often so that each episode covers only a chapter's worth of manga material(if not less), and often shows what characters who weren't featured in the original chapter were doing at the time, even if they accomplish nothing significant.
- The 1:1 manga-to-anime ratio started becoming a regular occurrence when the crew got separated after the Sabaody arc. The animators apparently decided to ditch all attempts at making filler arcs. This is partly because there's no opportunity to insert a random island in the middle of the ocean, the typical way of doing a filler arc.
- The padding became most obvious to the viewers when you reached the Marineford arc, with the excessive use of pan shots over background characters and the overuse of having to sit through Buggy's irrelevant comedy acts. Fishman Island was also quite a slow burn, but then it rose to new heights in the Dressrosa arc, which has already been accused of Arc Fatigue in the manga. There's a lot of opportunity to kill time with background characters and travel time, and one episode features the exact same shot of Pica stomping a portion of the city several times, almost to the point of a Running Gag.
- During the Wano arc, the initial Gum Gum Sumo Slap clash between Luffy and Urashima where they're stuck in a tug-of-war trying to shove each other's hand, and then flail their arms around trying to stay in the ring after the force of the clash pushed them back, is particularly infamous. Viewers will often point to this as the defining moment that showcases everything wrong with Toei Animation's efforts to drag out the series; turning a brief clash that only takes up a few panels of the manga into a tremendously stretched-out sequence in the anime that goes on for several minutes.
- Pretty Cure goes both ways depending on how long this week's plot takes. It's not uncommon that one episode of Yes! Pretty Cure 5GoGo will make you sit through several minutes of Stock Footage of the girls transforming, and then the next episode will have the girls all shout "Metamorphose!" in unison, followed immediately by a few representative half-second clips and no mention at all of the power of hope or the light of the future.
- Filler arcs aside, the Reborn! (2004) anime falls victim to padding during its adaptation of the Future Arc. Tsuna and company are stuck in the future for well over 100 episodes not because the arc in the manga is that long, but because the animators chose to do excessively long recaps at the start of each episode in addition to a 2-3-minute comedy omake at the end of each episode. Add in the openings and endings and you'll get episodes that barely even reach the 10-12 minute mark of new storyline material. Some episodes didn't even truly start until well past the 7-minute mark because the recap was just THAT LONG.
- Most Magical Girl shows in the Sailor Moon mold. Sailor Moon itself often killed upwards of about three minutes an episode on endlessly recycled Stock Footage of transformation sequences and magical attacks. It wasn't as excessive as many of the imitations would go, the worst of which was probably Wedding Peach. Sailor Moon did get better as the show went on, though. Usagi's transformation sequence in the final season was short compared to her others and everyone else rarely transformed on screen unless they were the focus of the episode or the transformation being seen was plot important. The Outers were rarely shown transforming once they got their Super upgrades, and Saturn was never shown ever in any season transforming. The other main source of padding is the other four senshi yelling X's name in despair or to show their support, usually Usagi's.
- In Saki, this is used In-Universe in Saki Biyori. The girls of Shindouji's mahjong club start a "round robin journal", that members of the club take turns writing in. Hitomi Ezaki, having missed half the mahjong club's meeting because of a Class Representative meeting, is running out of ideas and decides to fill in the blank space with a "Mister Shindou" mascot character, which eventually becomes the star of a comic strip. Club President Mairu Shirouzu's initial reaction to seeing the drawing of the mascot taking up almost half a page likely mirrors that of many viewers to padding.Mairu: I would've preferred blank space.
- Space Thunder Kids might have some kind of plot buried in all those fight scenes, but not many viewers care to look for it.
- Steamboy has a plot that makes a pretty good point about the role of science in the world and warfare... then pretty much spends about a third of the movie with the latter, and stretches it out by a good 40 or so minutes. One of the criticisms launched to Steamboy was the massive Ending Fatigue. About a third of the movie is dedicated solely to its action-packed climax. While interesting to watch with all the Technology Porn going on, a lot of people started to get bored when one battle led to another, another machine exploded only for two more to take its place, more and more steam clouds part to reveal more machines joining the battle... the animators and designers really got a little too carried away.
- In the Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann manga, Kamina's "Giga Drill Breaker" takes up a whole chapter. The anime gave it about half a minute. Granted, this is possibly the most epic case of padding ever made, but it's still padding nonetheless.
- Transformers: Energon and Cybertron both suffered heavily from overuse of Stock Footage, although eventually Cybertron had characters (the ones that weren't transforming) commenting while the sequence was going on.
- Padding was perhaps Transformers: Energons biggest problem. The first quarter of the series is fairly well-paced and flows well but once the Transformers go into space, the pacing falls apart. At one point 10 whole episodes are spent with Unicron dying and coming back to life over and over again. Even then there still wasn't enough plot to cover the set number of episodes so there was one last arc filled with combiners and repaints put before the final episode.
- The Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE- anime has one full minute of staring between Shaoran and a particular foe.
- Lampshaded in the Hayao Miyazaki segment on TCM. It's explained that much of Japanese cinematography centers around long dramatic scenes, while Americans would be "going for popcorn."
- Voltron had over half a dozen pieces of stock footage. Two of them (forming Voltron and forming Blazing Sword) happen in pretty much every episode. How many of the others (generally related to getting the pilots to the lions, launching the lions, getting the lions to the battlefield, and breaking out various other stock footage weapons that invariably don't work) get used is a function of how much time the studio had to use up to get the episode to the desired length after all the actual plot-related scenes were finished.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!: A lot of the duels suffer from this, which generally also makes them less epic than if they just focused on the duels and saved everything else for after the damn card games... In particular, the Battle City Arc is full of padding. The duel between Yugi and Kaiba, for instance, is six episodes long, one of which is dedicated to nothing but Osiris/Slifer and Obelisk destroying each other. Also, duels tend to be stretched out longer compared to the original manga.
