Zaizen Jotaro TV vs. DVD Part 2: Can Anything Make Episode 1 Better?

It's Part 2 of the comparison between the Zaizen Jotaro anime's original TV airing & its improved animation for the DVD release. Last time we looked mostly at Episode 3, with a quick look at a fix from Episode 9, but the episode that has the most changes is obviously Episode 1.

I want one of these...  Right now!

Being the first episode it likely suffered from the weakest animation in the entire show & needed the most fixing, & the inclusion of the "TV O.A." version of Episode 1 in the set, where it gets an entire disc all to itself, is meant to show the differences between the two. Honestly, though, the changes are focused around two specific scenes: The ridiculous truck escape scene (read my Zaizen Jotaro review for an explanation of said scene) and the final scene where Zaizen meets up with the government official he had been hunting down. So let's get straight to the truck scene:

The scene starts with Zaizen buying a brand-new car, and the most-obvious change is that the car has gone from being animated to being all CG. Also, shadows have been added to the car as well as the car in the top-left corner, not to mention some softer lighting to indicate a setting sun, which we'll get to later.

Zaizen Jotaro TV vs. DVD Part 1: Exactly How Improved is the Animation?

I just talked about the Zaizen Jotaro manga in my second "JManga 13" post, but let's take a small detour and go back to the anime. When I reviewed the anime back in October I mentioned that the show did receive a DVD release in Japan called the "Special Box", and one of the big bonuses of that DVD release was that the animation had been improved. They even included a "Bonus Disc" that was made up of nothing but the original TV "O.A./On-Air" version of Episode 1, so that you could see how improved the animation was. I really wanted this boxset due to how much I enjoyed the show and how astronomically unlikely it is this show will ever see a North American release, but the price tag of 25,000 Yen (or close to $300 USD) kept me far away... Until now.

I didn't know about this until recently, but Japanese online storefront Rakuten has opened up an international site, the Rakuten Global Market, which is literally Rakuten but with an English translation. It can be a rough translation, though, but if you search using the original Japanese kanji, hiragana, & katakana you should be fine. Anyway, to finish up the boring part of this post, I accidentally came across a seller who was selling a brand-new, shrink-wrapped copy of the Zaizen Jotaro Special Box for roughly $80-$85, and with EMS shipping it all came to $105... Anyway you look at it, I got a deal. So, what's up with the DVD release? Is the animation truly improved?

For this comparison, we'll be looking at screenshots from Episodes 1, 3, & 9, though Episode 1 will be saved for Part 2, since the original version was included on the DVDs, and that can only mean more fixes than usual. The other episodes' TV versions will be coming from the fansubs/raws I watched, so ignore the image quality for the most part. Remember, this is about what we see, not how it looks, per se. For each pair of screenshots, the TV version will be on top, and the DVD version will be on bottom, so let's get started with Episode 3!

Naikaku Kenryoku Hanzai Kyousei Torishimarikan Zaizen Jotaro: Say His Name, Say His Name...

This next review is one that I have wanted to do since I started this blog, but since only seven episodes had been fansubbed  I wasn't able to properly review it. A few months back subtitle files for the remaining four episodes, taken from the bootleg DVDs, were released, but the raw videos that they go with were still impossible to get. Luckily, I found out recently that a batch containing every episode, including the raw videos for those last four, was released. Needless to say, I got those four episodes, and here it is: My review for an anime that, in my opinion, is horrifically underrated and incorrectly considered one of the worst anime in existence... Though those haters certainly had a valid reason for hating the show.

Naikaku Kenryoku Hanzai Kyousei Torishimarikan/Government Crime Investigation Agent Zaizen Jotaro debuted in the now-defunct Comic Bunch Magazine back in 2004 and ran until 2007, totaling 17 volumes. It was the creation of writer Ken Kitashiba, who has written other detective manga before and was apparently an actual police officer before that, and artist Yasuhiro Watanabe, who was once an assistant to Tetsuo Hara and has done mostly baseball manga. From July to September of 2006. Trans-Arts, TV Asahi, and Universal Pictures Japan (now known as Geneon Universal) created an 11-episode TV anime based on the manga. When the anime debuted it was summarily trashed and hated by the general non-Japanese anime community for being ridiculously unrealistic, having horrific animation, and it was generally considered to be nothing but a show to watch for Mystery Science Theater 3000-esque laughs. It must be stated, though, that seemingly 99% of these opinions came solely from watching the first episode and nothing more. I'll get into episode 1 in particular later in the review, but I must say that these reviews are mostly invalid due to them being based solely off of the first episode, as the rest of the show is in fact an fun, if not exactly realistic, journey into dirty politics & business and how a group of people aim to stop it.