Quote:
Originally Posted by TMSIDR
I doubt that a show like K-On! would even survive three years between seasons so for this long pause Haruhi did quite well. I also think that KyoAni really chose the right episodes for the first "season", because I think the second season was not so well-received because the novel material wasn't as good (beside the Endless Eight stretching^^). I read the Sigh novel after I watched the episodes and KyoAni really improved it. I enjoyed the Melancholy novel on the other hand and I watched the anime episodes about 4-5 times before reading it.
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One of KyoAni's best strengths, when they do it correctly, is adapting a work faithfully, but still taking advantage of the change in medium. When this is done well, you get the uncommon situation of a fan enjoying the adaptation more than the original, even if they experienced the original first.
There is a lot of bias invested into the first version of an adaptation that one sees. This is why so many fansub watchers hate English dubs, and why so many fans of books and manga hate their movie or television series adaptations. Sure, there are some bad adaptations and dubs, but "horrible" adaptations and dubs are far less common than one thinks. Often people who "never read the book or the manga", or who "saw it first on Adult Swim" still prefer the adaptation even after later seeing/reading the original.
What KyoAni does so well (when they do it) is keep the best that the source material has to offer, but don't make themselves slaves to that source material when it wouldn't work in an anime format. Best examples of this are easily Live Alive and Day of Sagittarius. In the former, they took the vague details present in the original novel chapter and leveraged Aya Hirano's star power and the fans' predilection for snappy music, bumped the animation budget a bit, and managed to very successfully hide the thinnest plot in the novels in one of the series' most popular episodes. In the latter, they managed to turn some necessarily dry novel material into a rousing tribute to Space Battleship Yamato and "Gun**m", while keeping the simple but effective plot and character advancement.
And since novel sources are almost by definition more detailed than their television/movie adaptations, the adaptation-first fans get a treat when they pick up the novel and find new things in it to tickle their fancy. It's win-win.