Summary

• The 8-minute-long ment for Kizumonogatari: Koyomi Vamp can now be found online.
• Aniplex's YouTube channel ed the ad on the same day the movie arrived in cinemas.
• SHAFT, known for its unusual art style and direction, lives up to its reputation with the longest ad in Japanese TV history.

The 8-minute-long ment for Kizumonogatari: Koyomi Vamp, which was originally broadcast on New Year's Day in Japan, can now be found online. Boasted to be "the longest ad in Japanese TV history", fans of the Monogatari series can judge for themselves, now that it can be found on YouTube. Conveniently, it appeared online the same day the movie arrived in cinemas, though the ad celebrates more than that.

The video, which can be found on Aniplex's YouTube channel, is exactly 8:01 minutes long. While it's hard to imagine any company willing to brave the wrath of viewers by boasting of an ad's length, it is perfectly in character for SHAFT, which plays up its reputation as the "weird" anime studio.

Celebrating the New Year with such a bizarre claim to fame is right up its alley.

Playful Studio Draws Eyes With Audacious Ad

Produced by SHAFT, based on the light novels by NISIO ISIN

The ad was originally broadcast on New Year's Day in Japan. While the existence of a 480-second commercial made news overseas, it seemed unlikely international audiences would get to see the video for themselves, until Aniplex put it online. The ad itself is essentially a montage, showing various scenes that will appear in Koyomi Vamp. Its date, January 12, is also the same day the movie hits Japanese cinemas, making it a sort of celebratory gift for a successful release. It is also considered an anniversary celebration of the movie Kizumonogatari Part 1: Tekketsu, which came out in 2016.

Koyomi Vamp is a compilation movie that edits and takes scenes from SHAFT's earlier trilogy - Tekketsu, Nekketsu, and Reiketsu - which released from 2016 to 2017, and streamlines it into a single viewing experience. In either form, Kizumonogatari is a prequel to the rest of the Monogatari series, which received its animated adaptation beginning in 2009. It follows Koyomi Araragi, who chooses to protect the vampire Kiss-Shot from a trio of hunters. The events of this trilogy set up the rest of the series. SHAFT has adapted the entirety of the novel series, ending with Zoku Owarimonogatari in 2019.

SHAFT had its heyday in the 2010s, where it garnered a reputation for selecting unusual stories to adapt, and then doing so with an unusual art style and direction that often used flat colors, mixed media, and fake film effects, which were used to full effect across the Monogatari franchise, whose own bizarre take on the supernatural and equally bizarre characters seemed a fit for the studio. Kizumonogatari: Koyomi Vamp shows that SHAFT still clearly retains its propensity for pranks, as only its staff would be wild enough to celebrate its newest movie with an overly-long ad on New Year's.

Source: YouTube (Aniplex), Anime News Network