@Zephray:
I'm just hoping for no breaks in between seasons. Since they're dubbing it now, I think it's fair to assume that there won't be a huge break, if any. It would be great to get Brook only a few months after Enies lobby.
I know the pacing is a bit dragged for thriller bark, but I'm still looking forward to it. I've never seen the anime of it. Anyone care to report animation and pacing quality?
Pacing quality for TB, for me, was "decent". TB suffered from mainly random filler and dragging out small moments from the manga, like Oars waking up, using up a bit of time to show zombies getting food for Oars, or 1/3 of an episode dedicated to the "Weak Trio" running away and comically fending off zombies (Usopp vs. Zebraroo zombie comes to mind). And some episodes would really take advantage of really milking the atmosphere w/ "creepy" panning shots. I also wanna say that this arc introduced "implied filler" such as actually showing Brook going to the kitchen to get salt and subsequently, milk. The fights were not overly dragged and were relatively short and sweet. Overall, TB's pacing is still very enjoyable for me.
Now art and animation is a bit of a mixed bag. Some episodes looked sloppily put together, but iirc, it was mostly for pure filler stuff so no harm no foul imo. TB is actually one of my personal favorite arcs in terms of art and animation for a majority of the arc. It was during this arc where I really started paying attention to the different art and animation styles 'cause they were very obvious here (and for me, I loved it…others might find it distracting). Some episodes were given the Movie 7 treatment, some the Movie 8 treatment, and some the Movie 6/9 treatment. Imo, many, many key moments were done w/ great justice in this arc...except for Luffy's Gum Gum Storm (if you know what I mean...it just looked too small when compared to the manga version). It's times like this, that I'm REALLY bummed we don't get BDs for OP here, 'cause I would've loved this arc in pure HD (despite some of the hiccup moments).