Yo-kai Watch (anime)

The is a Japanese comedy-action-adventure animated series based on the Yo-kai Watch franchise, which is aimed primarily towards children. It ran from January 8, 2014 to March 30, 2018 in Japan, for 214 episodes and three feature-length movies.

On February 15, 2019, It was announced that a revival of the series, now known as ''[https://yokaiwatch.fandom.com/wiki/Yo-kai_Watch! Yo-kai Watch!]'' will begin airing on April 5, 2019 with Nate, now with a Yo-kai Watch Elda along with the other Yo-kai he befriended with Jibanyan, Komasan, & the other Yo-kai now with Yo-kai Ark.

The anime primarily focuses on Nathan Adams, who meets Whisper after he was sealed away in a capsule for 190 years. Along the way, he meets Jibanyan and goes on to find other Yo-kai that are known behind various daily occurrences. This adaptation is very loosely based on the video game and manga, as they take place in separate continuities.

The anime series has proved to be very popular in Japan, especially at the time when Yo-kai Watch 2 started to become popular. It has also managed to capture the attention of all age groups, with it's slice-of-life humor and creative writing.

The series would see a western release on October 5, 2015 in Disney XD, in the United States and eventually in other countries later on.

Information
The Yo-kai Watch anime is based on the video games, and the manga to a lesser extent. Throughout the run, almost all of the Yo-kai and characters were present with some of them getting an episode dedicated to the Yo-kai or separate segments focused on other Yo-kai, most notably revolving around Komasan.

Episodes are split into multiple parts which is similar to that of Western children cartoons; however, the parts are usually in uneven times with each other, some even played as "cold opens" before the opening theme.

The anime is directed by Shinji Ushiro, and produced by Yoshikazu Kuretani and Kiyofumi Kajiwara. The story is written by Yoichi Kato and the music is arranged by Ken'ichirō Saigō. The episodes were produced at OLM.

Throughout the original Japanese series run, it has managed to run for three seasons in the span of almost four years. New episodes were regularly aired every week on Fridays on the Japanese television TV Tokyo. However, some episodes air at different dates.

Seasons
The animated series of Yo-kai Watch has managed to ramp up to 214 episodes, which are all split into three seasons in the original adaptation. Each of them ran for around seventy episodes.

Season 2
The Second Japanese season started on July 10, 2015 from EP077 that introduced Hailey Anne and Usapyon.

Korean Dub
The Korean dub began running on on October 28, 2014. In this dub, the characters and settings are localized to take place in South Korea. The series spanned four seasons and wrapped up on October 16, 2018, and is likely to be followed up by Yo-kai Watch Shadowside soon.

A numerous amount of segments and episodes were cut from the series' run, most often due to obscene content and explicit references to Japanese culture/folklore.

At one point in 2015, the series began rerunning on.

Asian-English Dub
An Asian-English version of the series aired on Teletoon in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand in 2015. Unlike the Western-English dub, it keeps almost all of the Japanese signage and edits while the dialogue retains all of the verbal tics, Japanese names, and Japanese opening/ending themes.

The dub is produced entirely uncut over the Japanese visuals, with the networks it airs on making edits as they are needed to comply to local standards and laws. It is known to have aired at least 100 episodes, but due to the shutdown of Toonami Asia, it is currently on hiatus.

English Dub
The anime series has went on to air on Disney XD in the United States on October 5, 2015, a month before the North American release date of Yo-kai Watch video game. It also airs on the Canadian channel Teletoon.

In addition to airing on Disney XD, episodes were released on the official Yo-kai Watch YouTube channel every Thursday. The anime also aired on the Disney XD block on Disney Channel at December 18, 2015, which marks the first Disney XD series to air on another channel that isn't an original program.

The anime also broadcasted across channels in European, Middle Eastern and African territories starting from Spring 2016, after the anime became a success in North America.

Recast
On December 16, 2017, confirmed that he would no longer be participating in any Yo-kai Watch-related projects, even though he didn't state any reasons.

Three days later,, who is best known for voicing Whisper confirmed that all of the Yo-kai Watch anime voice actors were recast due to budget cuts. This led to the fans worrying about the voice actors sounding not as they want it to be and Yo-kai Watch Blasters having to handle a longer delay.

When Blasters was announced, it was confirmed that the original voice actors reprised their roles after months of no news and that the anime series would have a new cast, with taking over. Sometime before Season 3 premiered on Disney XD in the United States, some of the new voice actors shared their roles all over social media.

Reaction & Reception
The voice actor recast for the Yo-kai Watch anime series proved to be somewhat controversial in the fandom. While some of the fans took a liking to the new voice, others didn't like them at all. The most notable example is Whisper, whose voice sounds the most different from his last English dub portrayal.

The negative reception piled up even more when the dub edits started to degrade in quality, such as blanking out signs rather than translating some of them, leaving Japanese-language errors present in various scenes and censoring out Usapyon's Invader Mode. None of those were present in the European dubs, as they were handled by a different company.

Some of the episodes were also reordered for unknown reasons, and as of now, several segments have been presumed to be skipped. The reordering has proved to be controversial, to the point of the official Twitter account poking fun at it.

English Re-Dub
An additional English dub began broadcast on Cartoon Network's South African feeds on April 13, 2019, starting from Season 3 at EP077 and serving as a continuation to the previous episodes of the American dub, using localized names and anime-only terms from earlier seasons.

Unlike the American version's third season but like that of the European dubs, it appears to be uncut in its order and dubbing with edits being applied by the network. Not a lot of details about the producers of the dub are known at the time. It's likely the dub was produced due to Viz Media Europe being unable to license the third season of the American dub.

Official English Subs
In Fall 2018, Animax Asia was announced to have bought the rights to further episodes of Yo-kai Watch (as well as Yo-kai Watch Shadowside) and will pick the series back up in the first quarter of 2019. The first Subbed episode will premiere April 24 2019

Sequel
The series has a sequel in the form of Yo-kai Watch Shadowside, which started airing in Japan on April 13, 2018. It focuses on the adventures of Natsume, Keisuke, Touma, and Akinori.