When in doubt… Recycle!
Episode 21: Inside Naraku
(奈落の体内へ Naraku no tainai e)
Chapters covered: 530 through half of 534
Shinichi Sakuma earned a very bad reputation for his second rate animation direction for the first Inuyasha anime. To his credit, he's improved for Final Act, but then you have episodes like this week's…
First, the good: This week was pretty panel-for-panel with a few exceptions. There was also budget-breaking use of CG animation for Spider Naraku and it looked very nice
The bad: Important lines regarding Naraku's plans for the future from chapter 530 were omitted.
The ugly: 3 minutes of footage from the original anime. If you look closely, you can see that even a scene from "Owarinae Yume" (Inuyasha OP3) was included. It must take a special level of desperation to do that. Probably makes sense when you waste half of an episode's budget on computer generated animation.
Next week should cover at least through the end of chapter 538. Atsuo Tobe returns to animation direction and from what I see in the preview, we may be in for a treat. At least, I hope so…
On the issue of pacing, things look very stable at an average 4 to 4.5 chapters per episode.