This paper focuses on the Japanese animated series Haha o Tazunete Sanzenri, Akage no An & Tanoshi Mûmin Ikka, produced in the 1970s and 1990s, which offer idiosyncratic adaptations of classic children’s books in 50–52 episodes of 25 min.
The slowness and accuracy of these adaptations is discussed as a specific form of seriality, an ‘unlimited seriality’ that fits into television programming in an unwieldy way.
It is seen as a product of an esthetics of anime and limited animation described by Thomas Lamarre and other authors, which creates a different form of movement and a complex interplay of movement and stillness, which also affects an unsegmented televisual narrative form of constant advancement.
…A typical and defining example of this would be the 1974 anime series Arupusu no Shōjo Haiji which as Heidi made it as one of the first animated programmes from Japan to German television in the 1970s.
It will point to a close coupling of esthetics and narration that produces its own temporality, which can be captured with terms and approaches of so-called limited animation. Limited animation is at the same time thought of as the starting point of an ‘unlimited seriality’, as an intensification of the serial or as a purist form of serial narration. Limited animation, however, also contains stasis, a stretching of time and interruptions, as the following 3 examples will make clear.