Quote:
Originally Posted by thirdlc
Apparently, no. According to Director Ishihara, he thought he might not be able to animate the whole of Clannad (including After Story), and that's why he inserted a shot from the last episode of After Story into the Clannad OP. When he was storyboarding the OP, he didn't get a green light to After Story. Can this be called a split cour show?
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Hmm... this is an interesting point. I suppose it's possible that a lot more shows that we don't know about are planned tentatively as "split-cour" but then, when they see how the ratings and sales are looking, they pull the plug on part two, and no one ever knows the difference. In this case, clearly they had thought about it, but weren't sure if it would be approved (sort of "wait and see"). To be able to come back and air the second season so soon after the first (even six months isn't that long for anime production) basically means that the production just continued from the first into the second, and that couldn't have happened if they had already committed (for example) to a different show. (In which case, the second season would happen a while after whatever was already committed, which is what usually happens in the case of a non-split-cour "second season" announcement.)
One of the most unusual examples that I know of is Aria the Animation and Aria the Natural, where you had a one-cour show, a sequel announcement, and a second two-cour show less than three months later. Obviously, it must not have been long into the first season when the decision was made because it's a lot of work to get a show ready that quickly. But I don't think in that case they necessarily intended for it to be "split-cour"... just they decided to just keep the production going. I suppose, just like the Clannad example, it can only happen when all the main staff are available and not already committed to something else... which may not always be possible or the case.
So as for the specific example... I guess it's really debatable if it should count as split-cour. But given the fact that it had the same main staff and the two halves were essentially developed "back-to-back", I'd tend to think of that way even if the final decision hadn't been made before production began.