Last night, there was a bit of confusion in Wonderduck’s comments on Clannad. Turns out he’s not the only one confused. A whole lot of fans are, including myself. However, I’ve been sorting through some of the comments and website articles (since I can’t read Japanese) and here is what I’ve found.
There has not been an official announcement of a second Melancholy series. Everyone is assuming one’s underway because of a comment made by one of the seiyuu that they were in discussions for licensing a second season, and everyone figured by now it had to be a done deal and they were working on it. Rumors have been flying that it would begin in fall 2007, but there’s been no official announcement, to the best of my knowledge..
Lucky Star is definately Kyoto’s next series; it’s announced and on the fall TV schedule. What comes after that (Kyoto only doing one series at a time) is the big question mark. Apparently, Clannad (TV series) is in production, and may be the next series shown. Where the confusion really starts is that apparently Toei is also doing Clannad, but they’re doing a movie. The two projects are independant, and do not tell exactly the same story. From Animé News Network:
Japanese TV station BS-i has announced a Clannad anime series based on the visual novel game by Key. The Japanese homepage is available here, with additional information to be released on the 20th.
The ANN summary of KyoAni’s version sounds weird:
Tomoya Okazaki is a third year student labelled as a delinquent. Everything seems to be unchanging for his school life until he meets Nagisa, and Tomoya finds that his life is about to change. He starts to have dreams of a bleak world and meets a girl who has the ability to fuse junk together in order to create things, and doing so, creates a body out of junk for him. He is then reborn into this empty world and follows around the girl, the only two existences who are “alive”.
From the “What’s the story behind this?” category: While searching for information on a second season of Melancholy, I found this note for the manga.
This is actually the second manga adaptation of the novel. The first attempt, illustrated by Makoto Mizuno and released the first tankoubon on 2004-09-01, has been disowned by Kadokawa Shoten and was removed from its official catalog.
It must have sucked something fierce…..
The situation with CLANNAD is pretty much the same as what happened with AIR two years ago, in that the TV anime adaptation is being done by KyoAni independently of Toei’s movie version. Since the CLANNAD movie has its theatrical release scheduled for September 15 I’d assume that the TV anime will air during the summer season for the sake of marketing synergy and all that (AIR TV aired during Winter 2005 and the movie hit theaters in March, so there’s definitely a precedent).
You’re right that Haruhi season two hasn’t been officially confirmed, but haruhi.tv (the official Japanese TV series site) pulled a viral marketing stunt back in December which strongly suggested that it’s a matter of when, not if.
Regarding the 1st Haruhi manga, I gather that it didn’t pay much attention to the storyline… as in, ‘threw it out the window completely.’ Which, if you think about it, is like using the characters from Hamlet, and using them to tell a comedy.