Galapagos Effect in My Manga? It’s more likely than you think.

How the Margaret Barbaree situation can show us potential problems for the future.

A three part series on why anime and manga stand to become less relevant to Americas, and why there’s nothing you can do about it.


Part I;

While the recent events in Florida conger up fond memories of the “good old days” when manga and anime were the spearhead of true counterculture, it is a reminder of an endemic habitual problem of cultural separation with manga (and the anime that is produced from it) across international borders.

In these “good old days” fan communities could hold a special solidarity together, one that could only come from the collective misunderstanding, cultural mistrust, and feelings of ignorant repugnancy from mainstream Middle America which was directed at those subversive perverted unchristian Japanese comics and cartoons. This kind of story is indelibly marked in any otaku who is old enough to have actually bought a VHS tape; Morally overzealous sheltering parent is appalled that a book in the library might contain a reference to something other than good ol’ 1950’s family values (sex, supernatural powers, profanity, etc) and flips her lid because the mere fact that it is a COMIC makes it deliberately aimed at 11 year olds and couldn’t possibly be geared towards another audience.

According to the story the complainant mother said her son “lost his mind” when he read the book, and “Now he’s in a home for extensive therapy.” I would have to say, that “losing your mind” isn’t exactly easy and the only singular events that can trigger such things usually involve traumatic brain injury or smoking lots of crack. The fact that he’s been put in an institutional environment (basically jail with therapists) to "repair the damage" and isolate him from the rest of the evil world leads one to believe that there is a very P.Z. Meyers explanation that can be assumed: Bible thumper mom + young sheltered son saw cartoon boobies = freak out of a Margaret Perrin GOD-WARRIOR magnitude. It reminds me of a time when at Anime Crash we got a letter from some Christian ministry in Texas admonishing us for selling the “occultist poison of Japanese animation” to young Christians. They really hated Sailor Moon for some reason.

Other facts that should tell people that the source of the problem in this case lies not with manga, but with this Margaret Barbaree person, is the fact that her unsupervised son surreptitiously removed this book from the general stacks of the library and then took it home. HE STOLE THE BOOK, he didn’t check it out. Now this woman has refused to return this stolen property and has taken to using deceptive political techniques to get people to sign petitions to “ban pornography in the library” which she then re-brands “ban all anime in the library” (yes she did call it anime). Granted the manga in question Gantz, is probably not what I would recommend for an 11 year old, but this lady has as much credibility in her anti-manga cause as if she wanted to ban Playboy because her son stole one from a news stand.

Part II;

Why the hell does this matter? Well it’s certainly not a harbinger of some sort of neocon movement where the tea-bagger birthers are going to storm the likes of Jim Hanley’s and the CBLDF and start burning things. The problem here is more abstract.

Japan is “turning Japanese,” to use the phrase. There have been political speeches, economic seminars, and countless articles written about the Galapagos Effect shaping Japan’s future. This has been recently highlighted by the article about Japan’s “Digital Homeless” concept (you can see my apartment in that photo there), where high-tech gadgetry mask a very low-tech culture and life-style. Where technological innovation and service innovation live in two separate universes are the ATM machines which can do everything from count your change to write all your transactions in your bank book for you, but that completely close when banking hours are over. Corporate offices where everyone works like crazy but then everyone takes lunch at the exact same time, bringing tasks in progress to a stand-still, and employees who are given extra medical insurance and told by their companies to get checked up to combat potential alcohol abuse, but the next day receive a memo telling them that not attending this week’s nomikai (drinking party) with the boss would be bad for their career. In Japan, there is no negative stigma to being 31 years old and living in your Mom’s basement, because if your family is rich enough to have a basement in the first place, you’re in great shape.

The Galapagos Effect is most prevalently felt in terms of the technology and development of products in Japan. Phones that do things no one but Tokyo kogals need, cars that get an extra 0.2 km per gallon but all look the same, and TV subscription services that think it’s much more important to have that extra bit-rate than to develop original programming and provide a website where subscribers can communicate with each other about why they like the shows that they like. In Japan, that’s progress, but to the rest of the world, that’s meaningless. Japan has given us extraordinary innovations like instant ramen and the air-bag, but the people who develop these things are the exception, not the rule.

There’s also the generation gap, which is incontestably the most pronounced in all of recorded history. The “graying of Japan” will effect three things more than anything else:
1) Public spending: Get ready to see a lot more money go to retrofitting infrastructure with elevators, escalators, and resting spaces, along with policy put in place regarding any new construction.
2) Japanese pharmaceuticals: That’s the new power industry of Japan. People with macular degeneration don’t give two craps about 1080p versus 1080i. The DO care about the ability to properly give-a-crap, in the quite literal sense. Get ready to see some deregulation in the laws which govern the sale of pharmaceutical products and advertising (which here in Japan are very very tight… so tight that it is ILLEGAL for a non-pharmacy store to sell… wait for it… aspirin). FYI another company that is going to get a bump from this are the beverage companies like Asahi, Suntory, and Kirin (have Suntory and Kirin merged yet?), because the “drinkable health supplement” market is not as tight as pharma and these companies know it.
3) Advertising: Pay attention, because that's to do with Part III.

To answer the earlier question however, the basic crux of the argument is that Japan is changing as all cultures do, but unlike other cultures, there seem to be no inroads for future influence to come from outside, and the previous few sources of outside influence are long past the possibility of resuscitation. English speaking ability among students is down, the rate of students studying abroad is down, no real immigration is happening, Japan is a political joke (going through prime ministers like sticks of pockey at an anime convention), it had to bend the rules to maintain status in the G-20, and there’s a general malaise that no matter what anyone does, the rest of the world all has it’s eyes on China. It’s like the older sibling who gets demotivated when the younger one shows up and gets all the “awww how cute” attention.

The economy and culture is changing into its own unique and very disconnected introverted species.

Part III:

OK, so why the hell does THAT matter? Well that matters because if you are outside Japan, you DON’T matter. Japanese advertisers have Japanese products to sell and Japanese TV ads to buy. Ads on TV pay the bills at the end of the day for anime. These ads are now catering to this new Galapagos Effected audience, who don’t necessarily have totally different tastes (yet) than the rest of the world, but definitely a different thought process and hierarchy of priorities. UniQlo the clothing retailer and designer is one of the biggest firms in Japan and just won the Porter Prize for innovation and profitability. But you won’t see them advertise on anime (much). That company has enough money to make their own anime series if they felt like it, but they don’t. That means anime titles are going to get developed which specifically can demonstrate that they can get viewers that advertisers are going after, and those viewers are responsive to certain advertising while other types are not effective. This dynamic has become dissimilar enough from other cultural groups outside Japan, that the actual content of the anime is becoming less appealing.

For Manga, it’s still sales that pays the bills, but that doesn’t mean they will stay relevant. How manga is consumed by people in Japan is well known (daily train rides, down time, and the ever present manga-kissa). These people are all going to have lifestyle trends that move towards the more detached, and just like the Galapagos Effect is internalizing sensibilities towards technology, ways of doing business, and politics, it is internalizing tastes in entertainment media including manga. Since many anime titles are developed from manga, this trend has quite the ripple effect.

Stories and ideas that make for good reading in Japan, will continue to diverge from the kinds of subjects that international audiences can resonate with. If you’re an American otaku, chances are the kinds of titles you like, will continue to be gradually less relevant. At the moment, there’s nothing you can do about it, and the reason is simple. You. Don’t. Matter.

I’ve said this before, but every time I see a thread like this it just makes me want to scream about how ridiculously introverted it is and then send angry e-mails to people at AWO about the same thing. You may consume and really love anime. You may even understand the tip of the iceberg of Japanese culture because of anime, but you are not helping anime. As a matter of fact, you’re actually doing the opposite, and it’s insulting. By watching fansubs or reading scanlations, you are taking away any chance these works of art ever had at finding an audience in America that can support the people who work to get these made. Once that fansub is out there, the property’s freshness seal is broken for all time. No going back.

America had its chance. Japanese companies licensed properties that American companies said in good faith that the titles would resonate with American audiences and they could expect $x amount of TV ad revenue, $x amount of home media sales revenue, and $x amount of value to be added to other licenses like merchandise. Each title is different and each title got valuated accordingly. To avoid self-contradiction I will maintain that often the home media rights were inflated in the heads of the American licensees and they were seemingly willing to pay exorbitant amounts for titles that needed lots of expensive localization and overhead which was all very unrealistic to be made back in the then current state of the market. On the whole however, these numbers were actually not that big, but they did depend on a high percentage of very involved fans accessing these products (or “productions” if that makes you feel better) through the channels that licensed them in order to make revenue that would then be shared with the licensor. Japanese companies would take the proformas given to them by the American licensees and add them to their accounts receivable, which is s short term asset, and a factor in many important ratios which indicate a company’s solvency, credit rating, and things that a company needs in general.

What happened was that bootleggers (or fansubbers, it’s the same thing) got copies of these products, they localized them, and then they distributed them before anyone could even come up with a reasonable number of how much they were worth. This made the value of any license, $0. Companies didn’t initially notice this, and so they licensed properties that had long since started their product life cycle in the American market, and thought they could provide royalties. Fansubbers, and people who watch fansubs who think they’re not hurting the industry, you are the reason that the Japanese publishers and production companies don’t care in the least if you like what they produce or not. They owe nothing to you, and you are the reason that an entire generation of Japanese media professionals believe they lost the American market and the potential sales that could have come from that… sales that would have earned enough money so that they didn’t have to fire their friends.

So if Japanese companies couldn’t be profitable in their licensing to the American market, and if every time they did licensing something they would have to write off losses, then they are going to do the next best thing. Ignore America. Ignore you in their business, ignore your input, and ignore what stories or genres you would like to see. They have no reason to care, and so now the Galapagos Effect has worked its way into anime even stronger.

The American market has lost any chance to have significant input in the kind of anime productions that get made outside of directly investing. Get used to being on the outside looking in. And if you want to see more anime and manga covering the topics you like, and in the style you like… go make your own if you have the time and money. Or manga will eventually be as alien to Americans as mayonnaise on pizza. Still different, still uniquely Japanese, but quite unappealing. Difference in and of itself does not exclusively create appeal.

Welcome to Japan. These aren't the droids you're looking for.

SHORT VERSION OF ALL THAT:

There's always been something different about anime and manga from American sensibilities and sometimes the mainstream still pitches a hissy: That's good.

Japan is becoming more introverted and the kinds of things that appeal to the Japanese market are not that relatable to the American market no matter what. Creating fewer titles that anyone in America will like/follow: That's Bad.

The American market contributed just about nothing in terms of revenue to anime companies, so despite how many anime fans there are outside Japan, it will not effect mow many of those unrelatable manga and anime titles get produced. That's really bad.

The only way to fix that is to make the American market a source of revenue so that it can have any clout in the evolution of manga and anime: That's Impossible.

This problem goes away if it can get a foothold in China, after-all, 1% of the Chinese market is all you would ever need to stick around and stay healthy (that would be 136 million individual sales by the way).  Will companies ever think that the Chinese market will be anything other than the Wild West any time soon?  ...no probably not.   Will that get in the way of making lots of money?  ...no probably not.  So there's hope here.

To Commenters:

FYI; This blog for some reason gets lots of Japanese (and now Chinese) Spam ever since this. So the comments were moderated, BUT lots of messages still end up in the que. If your comment and it doesn't show up, it's because I didn't notice it in there during a purge.

February

An unabashed expression of joy from witnessing the misfortunes of others.


If something bad is going to happen in your life, it’s going to be this reject month of the calendar. February sucks, and for those of us who can remember when Lincoln’s birthday and Washington’s birthday were two separate holidays, know that nothing is safe from the ravaging misfortune that this month shall visit upon those of whom fate has deemed worthy of punishment. There is of course, an upshot to all of this, and that is every once in a while, you get to escape unnoticed and watch these horrible things happen to someone else. With the month of darkness only 24 hours old, there has already been an abundance of schadenfreude (thought it seems that it would have its genesis in the previous month, but lets not get all wiki-nerd about dates and shit).

First entry, very a unprofessional piece (No, really. This is not going to have any kind of relevance to actual industry topics and will be written in the style of a retarded 11th grader. If you’d prefer the regular dry and uninteresting banter that this blog has come to embody, skip to the next color).

Someone Set Us Up the Baum. Or, karma is a bitch. For so many years the walking pimple of the internet Eric Bauman of Ebaum’s World has made money off of other people’s work with his little tag and watermark. For years the virus riddled poorly run website supplied n00bs with cheap thrills until they learned that only n00bs go to Ebaums World and then quickly jumped ship like rats on the Titanic. If you actually know nothing about what I am talking about - you fail the internet. To avoid the criminal penalties as such, please inform yourself by watching this fine documentary film. (Links to Youtube).

Now I am not opposed to shamelessly making money by breaking the unwritten rules of the internet, but only if it’s me. This guy makes the mistake of taking some .com investor money a while back, and now he and that site are now a footnote of a footnote in the great economic collapse of the Bush years. Ebaum being fired from Ebaum is such a nice thing to find out, but then to see the little jerk try to rise from the ashes with some Tuvalu hosted (that means .tv) forum for expressing his butt-hurt lowers your cholesterol just be reading it. It just shows how things come back to get you in the end if you are a dickwad (although that’s not really true at all if you do the math).

It’s not a problem until it happens to you. Or, Poor baby. (Article)
Big name studios get all boo-hoo over DVD profit margins being too low, after forcing prices into the crapper in the first place. It is simply amazing but not at all unexpected that every American industry under the sun which has a publicly traded company or two in it, is now banging on the door of the U.S. Government with their hands out asking for bailout money. Enter the elephant in the room of the movie business into the equation: Movies don’t make the same amount of money as they used to.

• Rather than rightfully placing the blame for this on the fact that all of cinema from America and the world hit the market almost all at once in such a new format, meaning sales of DVD titles were never going to even sustain a plateau at such levels.
• Rather than rightfully placing the blame for this on the fact that this massive dumping of movies and TV into the market would force prices to stabilize at an incredibly low level. Only to be jacked up at whiplash speed thanks to price minimums.
  
• Rather than rightfully placing the blame for this on the fact that Hollywood movies suck, and now have to compete with TV and world cinema at the exact same price.
• Rather than rightfully placing the blame for this on a distribution and retail system gone wildly out of control.

The industry has hired a bunch of professional winers analysts to tell government and the news media, that it’s the fault of Netflix and you the consumer. Yes, the same flawed logic that lead our primitive ancestors to believe the earth was flat, is being employed to bolster the notion that every time Netflix rents a movie, it’s a lost DVD sale for a studio. Yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking only renting the special extended edition of Critters 2... now what am I going to put on my DVD shelf? What makes the situation worse for the industry is actually Blue Ray. This format hit just a bit too early, trying to capitalize on DVD momentum, but instead ended up on stage right when the market’s collective buyer’s remorse started kicking in. Not only has this new format created some resentment amongst consumers by creating the feeling that now they have to buy the same movies again on this format, but lack of affordable players have caused a slow down with many consumers simply telling themselves “I’ll buy it when I get a Blu Ray machine” about currently released standard DVDs. Finally, add to this the fact that international markets don’t sell crap compared to the U.S., and the studios have no way to maintain the massive upshot of sales with the hookers and blow at the yearly sales conferences and all that (actually I never saw hookers and blow at these things but I did once drink moonshine out of a jar and eat pulled pork in the shape of Dumbo at a show in Nashville once). These corporations have to realize that such a level of sales are never sustainable, and the correct business strategy is to plan for such things, not to plan on such things.

There are imaginable but not yet attainable ways out of this, one of the most impending of which seems that in the future, the studios will cut out the middleman. That’s right, Circuit City was just the beginning, and soon even Best Buy and the biggest of the big DVD sellers Wal Mart will eventually no longer bump up DVD prices to twice of what they really should be, while at the same time putting studios in danger of financial ruin from the dreaded “return.” It’s not there yet, but eventually movies will be sold directly by the studios to the customers. Welcome this, for it is your new god.

Now I’d be in favor of a government bailout if it meant it spread in such a way as to go into development of an infrastructure for digital film delivery or direct studio to consumer sales, and also go into funding of original films (no remakes, franchises, or otherwise shitty regurgitations), not because of some artistic integrity bullcrap, but so that the bailout money doesn’t just get funneled back into the same broken system that says it needs bailing out in the first place.

However, since the first industry to get a bailout was also the first to ruin it for everyone else by giving out billions in bonuses and trying to sneak $70million corporate jets through the back door, I doubt the U.S. congress (some members of which actually believe the earth is only 6,000 years old) is going to feel like bailing out Hollywood producer types like the Weinsteins or Eisners. So better grab that copy of “Critters 2” on DVD, since like the Hummer and the no money down McMansion, it’s going extinct.


-

Failed Experiments.

Will VIZ lead us out of that dark night to a new era of anime?


Or are we in for another roller coaster ride down into a media famine? Well, I love this video. Aside from the obvious cuteness factor and art imitating life intelligence of this video, there’s a specific point which the video almost perfectly (and completely unintentionally) illustrates a point that I’ve made quite often and hopefully does it in a way that even the most hard core anti-business anime otaku out there. The case of the hard work that went into getting the little ball, became a wasted investment when the big ball was brought to the scene first. In the case of anime, the actual commercial licensed product is the little ball, made totally worthless by the larger more proliferated digital fansubs which are always first to the party. The license has to have value in order for anime to be a commercial success, and anime has to be a commercial success if more is going to be made. And I shall say once again, sans massive explanation why, that watching fansubs is NOT the same as being a TV audience, and fansubs are NOT simply stepping in to fill a gap left by an absence of anime on American television networks.

The reaction by the industry was at first the same as our little pigtailed preschooler with the political ambitions... to kill it. Kill the big blue ball and then your problems will go away. Well if killing it were at all possible then that might seem like the correct course, at least in some sort of blunt mathematical sense. But as surely as Anonymous has taught Scientology that which is born of the internet can not be killed by anything (other than its own inward desire to die), the big blue ball of digital fansubs delivered on the internet can not be stopped through confrontation but only by changing the environment to make them useless. Personally, I like having high quality video, with correct translations and not losing an entire collection should I have a hard drive failure. Sadly, your average 13 year old weebo not only doesn’t have the money that I have, but they also have no ability to comprehend how their sense of free entitlement and consumption habits are hurting an industry who’s product is very expensive to produce. Oranges grow on trees and you don’t get them for free most of the time, so anime is definitely going to have to fall under that same law of economics.

So this big blue ball won’t die, and the obvious way to keep the business alive, was for simultaneous delivery in both markets, which would make licenses commercially viable again and make broadcast of those anime programs truly profitable since there’d be no fansub out 6 months out before airing. Obvious tho’ this solution was, it was and remains not well loved. In addition what was no so obvious but essential, was how to figure out how to do any of that in a cost effective and sustainable way. Well VIZ has decided to take the first baby step, and considering who’s left in the schoolyard, if they had not started doing this, no one was going to.

The short of it is that VIZ is going to begin publishing manga in 2 languages at once in two markets (although I'd reccomed prepairing to ship gobs of the new English mag over to the E.U. and U.K. as well, with such a strong GBP and Euro that could really help keep the ship up). Should this work, we may see some interest in VIZ’s Japanese parent co. in delivering animation to both markets the same way and reaping the benefits directly by collecting the advertising revenue and not just selling a broadcast license (better to own the goose than a single golden egg). By the way if anyone from VIZ is reading this, I have over 12 years experience as an executive in consumer media, distribution, and licensing, I speak Japanese and I love to travel.

As someone who currently has the task of representing several series here in the U.S. (one of them is even from Production IG), I can tell you that it’s not an easy sell anymore. There is an immense cost and large amount of time needed to get something out there that will please American media distribution (notice I didn’t say the fans. You have to make a distributor be it home media or a TV company, want it first before you get a chance to make the fans want it). Time and money are things media companies that try to make a sustainable business out of Japanese animation simply do not have when it comes to competing with free fansubs. Manga being print media seems to have avoided the kind of fatal blow that scanlations could have been and may be a very good place to start this new world order of anime business. Because if anime stops being a business, then pretty soon all titles will be thought of as “old school.”

Convention Season

For those who have been doing this long enough to remember when “Anime USA” was just a glorified Halloween party, you may remember a time when the “anime convention” was quite a different animal. As has been said before, there is a feeling of nostalgia that many in my situation feel for the “old conventions” which is genuine but also to a large extent more or less fabricated by those of us who look back to a bygone era through rose tinted non-digital photographs.

Obligatory Apollo Smile photo for Daryl Surat

Left to Right: Marvin Gleicher of Manga Ent., Mike Pascuzzi of CPM (later of Media Blasters), Apollo Smile, Scott Mauriello of Anime Crash, and Chris Parente of Anime Crash (owner and senior partner).

You found this blog because you Googled "Apollo Smile" didn't you...

As “con season” approaches, the massive amount of things going on seem to almost overload one’s ability to plan for a fun filled unabashed wallowing in fandom turning thoughts of summer into a “left behind” scenario of pseudo-panic. The old names that have survived have evolved into such teaming masses of attendees, that a theme-park feel (complete with long lines and annoying people from Middle America) has asserted itself as an inescapable pervasive entity firmly entrenched over many years of quite surprising growth. This massive proliferation of mass attendance at conventions with long-standing histories and the appearance of many smaller satellite conventions themselves is almost exclusive to anime. Looking at other events, one sees the same thing twenty years later as they do now with long running shows such as i-con or Big Apple Comic, which seem to operate as if forgotten by time.


The question which occurs at this point is does the door swing both ways? Is it possible to see a rapid decline in the same recent tradition of rapid growth enjoyed by anime conventions? It is important to note, that unlike other consumer based conventions, which revolve around specifically printed media, or meeting individuals like authors and actors, the anime convention has gone from a gathering who’s main goal was perhaps to watch anime titles that were new to the public or otherwise hard to find, to an event where the antics of the fandom itself are the main backbone of programming. Conventions have become large social events but the need to provide what they used to provide outside social activities, such as anime screenings, rare dealer’s room merchandise, and so on have all been proliferated via the internet and so a central event to provide such things is now unnecessary. This leaves anime conventions as nothing more than themed social gatherings, unless some other type of activity starts happening there. For a while it appeared as if actual anime business was going to start happening at the larger ones, but the way things are going now, it’s more likely that all that licensing that was supposed to happen is going to go scurrying back to MIP where it’s always lived. In fact, the devaluing of anime as a license which comes from fansubbing will probably lead to a decreased ability of conventions being able to afford the kinds of facilities that they have used in the past (Geneon won’t be buying all that floor space this time will they now?), based on the fact that exhibitor companies won’t be spending as much as they used to simply because of their shrinking revenues from the abysmal DVD downturn from which there is no end in sight.

In addition to all that, enter now the new animal. Sleek, for-profit, professionally run destination events like New York Anime Festival and Comic Con, which can change revenue formats from door-based to exhibitor based in a single year if they have to. Anime and Japanese pop-culture in general has become such an important part of American entertainment that Comic Con gets TM Revolution as a major guest. American comic shows used to be (and many in the old style still are) like kryptonite to an Otaku, and a celebration of everything that drove us away from the tacky, badly drawn domestic entertainment media we loathe. But that’s now a thing of the past in more areas large enough to support this new kind of corporate convention event, where content is king and paid employees rarely drop the ball.

Anime Convention Trifecta now in play, and completed with the last of the three kinds of anime conventions, the “hotel con.” I often vacillate between not liking these things because they are exercises only in frivolity and do not advance the fandom as a whole or the industry much, and thinking they are a very important component of the continuing development of a market and lifestyle that is ever evolving. I often think that if cataclysmic change rocks the convention world, that these humble little conventions will be the true survivors and keep alive the kinds of things that seem almost second nature to a conventioneer.


There is now a divergence, based around different groups who in reality would rather not share convention space with other groups. The upcoming convention in Providence RI that restricts entry to those only over 21 is one of the new breed of boutique conventions that serves a specific group within a fandom that is so large, normal demographic rules now apply, and the forced unity that was made prevalent simply because of a feeling of being surrounded on all sides by a community that failed to understand the otaku appeal, is no longer omnipresent and so the disunity that comes with all things at this level is forcing this new evolutionary step.



In most of the outcomes the possible rippling effect that the downturn of the U.S. Market might have on anime, the convention is probably going to be one of the last segments to feel the negative effects, which would mean a decrease in available material, but would that translate into a marked decrease in actual attendance? That alone is probably not going to be able to cause such an effect, but if coupled with a potential downturn in the popularity in general of anime in a post-Naruto world (it can’t go on forever) and the possibility for a non-profit large con to experience a single year of epic fail from poor planning, make a Bermuda Triangle that conventions as we know them today will have to navigate through in order to continue doing what they do.

I am still waiting for the American convention that restricts cosplay to one specific area... (they already do that back in the source country... you know the one I mean).

This is Not New

It seems to have reached a crisis level, and is the talk of the world of American anime economics, the notion that there is an impending collapse of the anime market in the U.S. in general, because of very poor DVD sales.

So fansubs can be seen to hurt a license, but also help it by creating brand awareness. “Brand awareness” however, is totally worthless if it can not be translated into sales of consumer goods of any kind. In many cases the ability of a property to make money in other fields of licensing is killed by fansub proliferation. It is a form of “bootlegging” in a way, not quite different from another segment of Asian entertainment that went through something similar over two decades ago in the 1980’s; Kung Fu.

One of the most pirated genres out there is the martial arts film. Now what’s important to realize that the audiences for anime and for martial arts films have only the slightest bit of overlapping (Fred Perry), and are mostly made up of groups that have nothing to do with each other. However a comparison of historical context is still worth something.

Like a combination of Adult Swim titles, Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon set off a huge explosion in interest in martial arts both as an activity/sport and as entertainment. There was also a new technology coming out at that time as well, one that the industry said would ruin the viability of all video entertainment, and that was the brand spanking newfangled contraption known as the VCR. At the point that martial arts became popular, the primary delivery method for such media was shifting from the cinema to the home. By the early 80’s there are back rooms in small shops pumping out bootleg versions of every Gordon Liu and Chan Seng chop saki basher to be sold on the street, in mail order catalogues, or at conventions.

The result of this was a large market for such material, but a market with standards which would make legitimate operation of media companies almost impossible based on the levels of pricing and sales would support. At the same time, there was a little known phenomenon that got around the language barrier, and that was Hong Kong colonial law. It stated that any cinematic media made in Hong Kong had to have an English version made as well. This is why all those old English dubs of kung fu flicks are done by drunken Australian sailors. Without this, the spread of kung fu in America would have been seriously hampered by a need for subtitling and a general audience not ready to accept anything in a subtitled form. That, coupled with the ethics of a martial arts movie consumer making fansubbers look like media boy scouts, brought a rapid growth of material with an underdeveloped legitimate infrastructure.

After a while of legit and bootlegs warring with each other on the video shelves things seemed to collapse when production could no longer be sustained due to the inability of the money generated in the U.S. make it back to the studios to finance ever more expensive productions. Throw in a change in tastes in the domestic audience, and you have a dark age for the genre. We are now out of that dark age as Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon has become the Akira of a new era of martial arts as entertainment, but one that still has quite visible scars.

Now what does this remind you of? Let’s run down the list:
• Entertainment from Asia in high demand.
• New Technology circumventing the industrial infrastructure.
• Language barrier overcome without use of commercial means.
• Production of more original content stymied by lack of revenue.

The main difference is that the unlicensed copies of media in anime are being distributed for free, even further damaging the market since the information gathered about the market based on taking a free product is almost worthless and can not help companies make plans for the future.

The recent developments over at ADV are sending ripples throughout the industry and the questions about the future that are being raised now, are very different than those from just 6 months ago. Some questions are bleaker than before, others smack of the denial and ignorance running throughout fandom which simply serves to feed the burning anger and frustration of guys like me.

Like Ancient Rome, American fandom has sucked in the resources from the producers and have built a massive city, all without producing a single thing in return to help further that production. Simply “liking it” does not mean a thing if it operates outside the areas which provide economic subsistence. Like Ancient Rome, anime in America is surrounded on all sides and has no way to pay its own army. Like Ancient Rome, anime in America may see a long dark age before technology or a new method of international collaboration bring us into the light. We have seen it with martial-arts an era ago, and history may be about to repeat itself.

T.A.O.

PS:
AWO used this incident in their latest episode in their news section, very cool. I can now declare victory, in that I have been mentioned twice in a row on AWO and not once has Daryl uttered "Apollo Smile" not even once, as my bluetooth deception master plan is finally complete!

Where do babies come from?

While anime continues dealing with a core demographic which is growing ever younger, the amount of general ignorance of the basic methods of production and the finance of the anime we hold so dear is bound to manifest itself more often and in ways we the anime-enlightened (... ok "enlightened" my-ass, it's jaded not enlightened), find incredibly irritating and befuddling. Now to be fair, this kind of woeful lack of basic knowledge about an anime’s genesis has been around a long time and is not specifically exclusive to one specific age group. Listening to the various podcasts out there one can find misstatements and assumptions taken as fact from even the most (seemingly) experienced fan podcast with a large following. I sometimes find myself listening along and then reaching a comment or two, which by the commenter’s standards might seem a feasible occurrence or reasonable thing to say.  But when it collides with the hard wall of factual reality it will just jump out as something so detached, that I have to count to ten and do 3 miles on the treadmill to avoid going into a Berserk-style slicefest on my i-pod out of sheer frustration induced rage.

So what is one to do about this seemingly spreading phenomenon? In all reality, there is nothing we can do but continue to extol the unattractive truth for those who wish to listen and learn. In doing so, I don’t expect to make many new friends as I may be shattering little bubble-worlds and dashing on hard rocks of reality the hopes and dreams of many a school aged otaku (weebo) who think they will have a career as the next Miyazaki or something.  At the risk on engaging in the sort of behavior I recently wrote against in a previous post, I am going to go through the steps that I myself have gone through, as a small participant in the attempted production of an anime series, and detail the progress that those efforts made, getting almost to the finish line before exploding in a fire-storm of epic fail.

It was only a few years ago, when a Japanese producer had the idea to make another anime. Having so much experience in animation production, he was already more than a few steps ahead of absolute zero, and had this not been the case, such a project would have been over before it even got started. So remember kids anime production is one of those catch 22 businesses where in order to do it, you need to have already done it. The only way to get new blood into the fray is for it to attach itself in a remora-like fashion to what may or may not be a successful project lead by someone with previous experience. This is a tough industry to get into and an even tougher one in which to achieve recurring success.

So this opportunity comes along because my “home team” as it were, had an existing distribution contract with a third party distributor that had an impressive sales network in North America, and was also attached to a former major player in the toy/merchandise business which still had the occasional multi-million home-run a few times every decade. That sounds unimpressive, but when one considers the position of the other side of this equation (the Japanese producers approaching us in this project) which was more or less the same, meaning that they had already approached the power players in their league and had been rebuffed, such a combination of underdogs begins to make more sense now no?

So the stage is set, both parties are looking to someone to come in, fill the gap that would make the production an attractive investment, and then present the whole tempting package to financiers. The problem was that while one of these two halves of this newfound partnership was a well oiled machine, the other was a disaster waiting to happen, but that contingent could hold it off if funding came in for the short term. This meant that the “bait on the hook” could only stay in the water so long before falling apart. Both sides realized that there was only a small window to get some interested parties to the table in any case, and the courting began.



It was one fish in a sea of many to be sure, but what set it apart was that it was one of the only potentials out there specifically designed launch in the U.S., Japan, Europe (including U.K.) and Australia at the same time. So because of this, the news coverage of this endeavor was substantial in Asia, and the United States when you consider the PR was done more or less shoestring pro-bono, and press events were held both in New York and Tokyo (and a little one in L.A.).



Moving forward, a full pilot episode complete with opening and closing sequences was made at a cost of just under a few million dollars. It was screened in the U.S. and Japan, all the while the courting of finance company representatives continued in both cities. A promotional video with the series creator was filmed (but never released until much later) at the Tokyo Anime Fare in 2004. Reps from America came to Tokyo and did the rounds, and Japanese MITI reps even flew from Tokyo to New York several times to see the “American partner.” Things were looking good, but it was obvious that everyone who was brought in for the first round could not seriously be expected to bring in any investment capital. That was ok though, just “strike one”, and we had a lot more time at the plate... or so we thought.



Then it happened, the main name behind the project, the writer and producer, died. So; we had a pilot, music score, script, actual entire first episode completely done, designs, English and Japanese tracks recorded and ready to go…. All we needed was a broadcast deal and we were otherwise good to go for any financing out there. But losing the man behind it all made that insignificant. The Japanese contingent fell apart almost instantly, and took with it all the arranged studio deals, animation and voice obligations, certain rights, and just about anything else needed to get off the ground.

あ!PON　Episode 009, Dedicated to Kimio Ikeda

We tried to keep the momentum going, but without a burning core, a star does die. So the efforts and the hope we put into this project were all, in the end... wasted. The concept finally ended after becoming only one, 30 minute anime episode. In case you’re wondering where I am in all of this, well I’m behind the camera for most of these.

So what does this have to do with what was written at the start of this entry? It’s about the lack of understanding of the general knowledge of the multi million and sometimes multi billion dollar anime industry which leads people to believe things that are totally wrong. . After 10 years, The Angry Otaku got the chance to help pitch an anime, made by a man who has been making Japanese productions for over 50 years. It was solid. It was written well. It had a 30 minute pilot and more behind it, yet ran right into the wall (one day I’ll fan-sub that episode and let the internets see it. Or if anyone wants to fan sub it before me, then send me your JLPT score, and if yours is higher than mine, then better you than me).


So there you have it, in a very long and drawn out way I have simply stated that making an actual anime is not easy, it’s actually damn near impossible. Even if you have the basics, the chances of success are still against you. It is the fear of economic failure which leads to this gauntlet of trials and tribulations a concept must go through before it is thrown into production, and then after all that it has to be a profitable one. The fact that anime even exists as successful commercial enterprise on an international level is almost phenomenal in itself.

For a great many anime fans out there to act as if it is some sort of natural resource and will continue to flow unobstructed into the world as long as there is salt in the ocean shows that their understanding of why productions are made in the first place is sorely lacking. Yes, there is a very real detachment that causes one to think of anime as something that just appears at a click of a mouse, but this detachment then feeds uninformed assumptions about why things happen in the anime industry. Such assumptions formed by the misapplication or general knowledge to a pin-hole camera glimpse into a world that they themselves truly know nothing about simply from lack of experience.

For these people to say that “such and such” a company is doing “X“ action because of “Y” reason often smacks of such uninformed presumptuousness that it puts me off not only to hear it being said, but to know that it is being taken as fact by many others out there who simply do not know that such reasoning is extraordinarily unlikely. I have often thought of taking these instances on individually, and take the real risk of sounding like an anime know-it-all in an effort to try and simply give a better understanding of the very real business that anime fans have built a lifestyle around. However, in the end it is much better simply to march forward under the banner of “ignorance is bliss” and keep anime production something that is so often mixed with the realm of idealized imagination by people who don’t want to see it as a sterile impersonal industry, but rather as something simply positive and fun, or in the most extreme cases so life affirming that it takes on an almost religious quality in its importance.

So remember, the creation and distribution of what we hold dear is a commercial enterprise, and as such, the various private entities that operate with that enterprise often do not act in a very forthcoming way with information about why bad things happen. This leads to the time-honored and perfectly normal behavior of people using speculation to form opinions, but know this; the difference between an informed and uninformed opinion is not always easy to spot, nor is the damage it can cause easy to undo. In this era of failing economics, industry belt-tightening, the collapse of the American home video market, and the negative reaction of Japanese companies who are just now finding out that the reason their properties are so popular will not positively effect their earnings (don’t forget, that’s going to come with a nice big side order of resentment), the fan base is going to be watched more carefully and may have its greatest effect yet on the future of anime production as a whole. I’m not saying that it’s a good idea to stick your head in the sand, but please don’t panic, at least not until you’ve reached your own, informed opinion.

Another Domino?

So NewType USA is put to bed and the question on the surface of it all, now becomes “did anyone see this coming?” Well I’d be lying if I said I pegged it for this exact place in time. But what about the questions below the surface? Mainly the question of whether this new development is a direct result of the shrinking anime industry in the U.S. (yes, an industry can shrink while the market grows, it’s a symptom of something very wrong), or would this have happened regardless of the downturn in home media of which Geneon’s exit seems to embody in a singularity? Well, if you have been reading this blog you know that the answer is complicated and you’re in for some serious analysis which may or may not contradict what you already think you know, or have read elsewhere.

To get that easy one out of the way, I guess I did see this coming, but I must admit I had this called for much earlier. Attending the NewType USA launch party at the Tribeca Grand way back when the magazine first hit, I knew then that this was going to be a long shot. The event was hosted by Taeko Baba of all people, and the mix-mash guest list did little to facilitate anything in terms of generating what the magazine would need, and what these launch events are supposed to do. I did manage to get a few minutes with the person that ADV hired to run the thing. He had been head-hunted from Time Warner and probably not cheaply, and it didn’t take long for him to start lamenting the problems stemming from the pressure ADV was putting on him to land major advertising accounts like Toyota, Coca-Cola, and so on but at the time, the only advertisers in an Anime magazine were going to be other anime companies and the occasional niche textile ad. The problem was not that their head honcho was in one of those pessimistic moods that usually indicate they were thinking of jumping ship, the problem was that this was the LAUNCH PARTY of the friggin thing, and this was already happening. He was gone after a few months right back to Time Warner, replaced with someone from within ADV. Based on the high cover price, the obvious lack of impartiality, and the fact that there was a gap between the owners and the real world, and the fact that Viz’s Animerica had exited the field not too long before (admittedly that was because Viz had problems and not a result of a shrinking market), I was betting that NewType USA was going to be a flash in the pan at best.

NewType USA lasted a lot longer than what one would call “flash-in-the-pan” but I think much of that was due to some extended life-support by mommy and daddy. Let’s be real here, having a publishing imprint makes you very attractive to possible investment companies from overseas, and if you’re ADV in the early 2000’s you’re not having too hard a time, things are going well and you can get a hand in a lot of cookie jars. But once you rapidly diversify in such a way, something else comes into play. As an illiterate moron I used to work with once put it, “you end up spread thin like Napoleon” and therein lies a very possible future where it can all come crashing down. If the tides turn against you while you’re engaged in other areas, you have very little time to adapt your way of doing things before it snowballs.

So combined with a downturn in the Anime Home Media business, the sorry state of the US Dollar taking away Canada’s status as a printer’s paradise, increased competition from the more impartial and less expensive Anime Insider and Otaku USA publications, and the average age of the target audience shrinking which means less disposable income, and you are going to have a hard time keeping sales of a printed media that charges the most for what ANN basically gives out for free, in the black. The idea that NewType USA operated as a loss leader is something I would argue went on for a while if not the entire time, and is only now approaching the level of causing a serious problem, so the valve is being shut off.

What doesn’t this mean? It doesn't mean we're seeing the beginning of the end. The company is not in a fatal situation. ADV saw the perfect storm heading towards a ship in their fleet, then turned it around and sent it back to port to be dismantled before it was too late. If this is proof of anything it’s an indication of cautious confidence that ADV can see a potential disaster on the horizon and take action to prevent it regardless of who’s ego is going to get bruised. Make no mistake, some belt-tightening is going to be seen across the board and this one closure isn’t the last of it, but the more lines you can keep in water, the better you will survive the coming tough times. Getting ready to exploit revenue generating avenues while knowing where to cut your losses and move on from is the hallmark of any entity that lasts, and this move is, I believe, indicative of that. The old cliché of “print is dead” will probably never fully come true in the next few decades, but it will surely become more commonplace. The kind of features and information delivered by magazines about anime, will still be a lucrative commodity, but the delivery system will not be traditional. So we are in that intermission wherein print will continue to exist, but the technology for providing this media via on-line services with revenue generated either via advertising or subscription services is something that is anticipated as a next evolutionary step, keeping everyone waiting in the wings. How long will this waiting last? Well that’s one question I won’t be tackling.

There’s a lot more I’d like to write but I want to try something behind the scenes here first.

No, not this Domino.