Return of the King: Google buys youtube

In case anyone out there was wondering, the reason for the previous prolonged absence is one simply of technology. In short, my home computer had a little motherboard issue, and while I wait for the 4th attempt at a replacement taking over a month (let’s just say I’m glad I’m a fedora-sporting Bluetooth-wearing Amex-using douche, otherwise I’d have been f-ed over by some unscrupulous internet sellers passing off OEM parts as new), I decided to pick up a notebook computer to use. No, I’m not that kind of money stuffed jerk who can just “do that”, but rather I am preparing on finishing up the graduate degree in a far away place and will need something more portable in the near future. Besides, with B&H right here, how can you not?

Some updated information:
-If anyone has tried to e-mail me via the e-mail listed on this site, chances are I haven’t seen it because by simply putting that e-mail address out there, it’s getting spammed like crazy. Don’t call me I’ll call you.
-I will now be resuming regular postings.
-I will be at Otakon.
-I got Invited to Sitacon, but am not sure if I can make it.
-No computer means no i-pod updates so I haven’t listened to any other podcasts since about early May.

That’s all for the basic info. …well here are some things you maybe didn’t know:
-I’ve eaten kaiten sushi at 2 different places in the past 2 days.
-My next door neighbor is a senior exec at Kodansha.
-I can’t drink diet soda because of an allergy.
-Harmony Gold still hasn’t sent me a copy of the DVD where I interview Tommy Yune.
-I think the Litepanels Micro is the best on-cam light ever.
-We interviewed TM Revolution for あ!PoN, but... there’s an issue about that which is gonna hold that up.
-I got all teary-eyed at the end of Maison Ikkoku.
-I recently had some nice conversations with actress Kato Ai and her boyfriend the F1 Driver. They declined appearing on あ!PoN.


Now to begin the speculation into anime business, or; Why we’ll win in the end, but that’s a long way off.

Recently, the largest juggernauts of the media and software business world have been rocked back and forth with some major news about this that or the other seriously negative economic development.

Case in point Google’s recent admission that Youtube was basically the largest “impulse buy” in the history of money. Lots of people realized that their plan looked suspiciously like some underpants gnomes we all know;

Step 1: Buy You Tube
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!

At one point or another, every business that has failed has someone within the power structure pop their head up and say “Hey, what’s step 2?” It is usually at such a point where the stockholders make an assessment and then pull the plug on an otherwise unprofitable quagmire. It remains to be seen whether Google will take that oft trodden path or be second only to the Bush administration in moving forward into a world of epic fail with no discernible “step 2.”

Now those in the business world were not surprised at this development, but what was felt was a profound sense of disappointment. Google had defied the odds up to this point, and now it’s all going to come crashing down as something unsustainable in some horrible Enron-esque scenario which involves global warming and killer butterflies.

What does this have to do with anime? Well if you look at what happened to Geneon, you’re looking at a picture perfect example of the underpants gnomes business plan at work. Although what’s most tragic is that “step 2” in this case was known on the Japanese end, but what they didn’t know was that it wouldn’t work:

Step 1: Buy your way into the U.S. home media market.
Step 2: It will be Just like the Japanese home media market in security, but a massive bonanza because Americans buy everything.
Step 3: Profit!

Now look closely at Step 1-2. Notice the term “home media market” and not “anime market.” This is important, since the “anime market” encompasses everything from animation production to merchandise licensing. But that’s not where Geneon put its chips down. They put them solely down on home media, which was the worst possible place to put them.

The rest of this is wrote. Dominoes fall, and soon the only players left in the anime on dvd game will be those who can treat it as a loss leader, such as Bandai, 4Kids, Funimation, Manga, and who knows maybe a broadcaster will get into the mix. Time and time again the industry will blame fansubbers, and time and time again the industry will be right. But I’ve mentioned that all before.

So now anime is in a state where it can no longer count on the vast American market, full of people who love anime, to even support basic licenses that they could once count on for revenue.

What will they do? They’ll adapt of course. Anime is once again leading the way in terms of media development. We’ll see a long dry spell for sure, helped by general economic downturns in both regions at the same time (not something that has ever really happened before), but entertainment and the people’s need for it will always be there. As long as that need is there, someone will be there to fill it, and someone will make a buck off of that… which is good because this anime stuff is pretty expensive to make.




NEXT TIME: I'll try to sound like less of a broken record.


yeh

Go (away) Speed Racer, Go.

Yes, "Lost in Translation" really was terrible.

Much like the way they’ve taken total control of this country’s political process, the “old guard” of baby boomers who insist on doing things their antiquated way, will not let go of the entertainment empires that some of them so desperately hold on to in an attempt to convince themselves that they’re still relevant (or the notion that somehow they still don’t have enough money). At the same time in order to garner even a small modicum of success, younger players in the game are forced to play follow the leader and present creative empty calories as true cinematic work, either out of fear or greed (In Sophia's case however, she is just bad at it).

There’s a lot the American movie mechanism doesn’t know about Japan for that previously stated reason, they’re basically still stuck in decades past when it comes to what they think. Herein is a conundrum I am having then with reconciling the Speed Racer movie. Is it a blunt over-hyped Hollywood special effects blundering remake of a classic American TV show? Or is it actually a blunt over-hyped Hollywood special effects blundering remake of a Japanese Anime? Don’t kid yourself, because the answer to this question will only be known in the long term, as that long term will also be where the effects of said answer will be felt. “Anime” as a part of modern culture which has finally entrenched itself in American life, may just bee seen as only a tiny blip in cultural evolution by 2012, with Speed Racer part of the centerpiece of epic fail that destroyed its fragile foothold. Then again, this celluloid turd might not harm anime much and just go take its place in the ever growing group of shitty Hollywood remakes of TV shows (those shows were never really the way anyone remembers them, and the aforementioned old guard just likes to make them because it helps them feel relevant again, and hold on to their money by minimizing risk on something that's actually new. Could you imagine if someone today had tried to make the movie Alien in today's Hollywood? It would have been sidelined so fast by studio execs anxious to get Sigourney cast as Jane in a remake of The Jetsons alongside Will Ferrell as George and Lindsay Lohan as Judy, featuring cgi Scooby Doo as that stupid talking dog).

What the anime market doesn’t need right now are Hollywood remakes like this, and the disastrous results that they may bring. As with many things that come out of Hollywood, there is a right way and a wrong way to treat a property, but it is also important to remember that this difference between right and wrong rarely has any bearing on profitability, since the brain dead Uwe Boll is still out there making more money. It is hoped that the scenario of shitty movies being able to bring in any kind of profit will finally be behind us one day far in the future, BUT the anime market as it is now can not afford this to tarnish an already weak position, forcing anime back out of the American market back into obscurity. This scenario would make the entire scope of anime fandom in America just an asterisk in VH1’s undoubtedly already planned “I love the 00’s.”

We’ll have to hope for a few things if we really want to keep this market from shrinking back to the size it was at the beginning. The Speed Racer movie has to come and go, and the word “anime” should be distanced from it as much as possible. More importantly, we must hope that this does not usher in some morbid parade of the carcasses of truly good anime as remake after remake, starting with Voltron and going all the way through Lupan III and Ninja Scroll ending with a cinematic abortion that would be Michael Bay Presents: Ghost in the Shell. In the heyday of Anime as a consumer good, surviving such an onslaught might have been possible, but in these days of an anime market devalued by digital fansubs, it’s an economic execution with far reaching effects (no Michael, not those kind of “effects”).


-TAO

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.”

ニューヨーク IS ゴー！

The New York Comic Con

In the spirit of getting stuff out there, I do feel obliged to write a bit about the New York Comic Con, and what the developments that we see at this event may mean for the fandom.

When looking at the fandom, we must remember that it’s a business. Try as they might, the “true otaku” who have such love for anime, manga, music, and art, never seem to be able to out-reason the fact that what they love live and breathe is a essentially a consumer product, and so for more to be made business has to get done. The NYCC is a place for those business interests to show off their creation to the ever growing crowd of people who are interested in buying them. But enough of me sounding like a broken record, let’s talk about the con.

There was a serious amount of anime at this show, and Stan Lee announcing the fruit of his labor with VIZ, and TM Revolution a part of the headline programming, it was a bit difficult to tell if anime itself had arrived as one of three legs that keep up mainstream commercial American popculture. What those three legs are in fact is entirely debatable, so I’m not going to try to define them here.

Anime news consisted of some serious announcements from Viz and Yen Press. But conspicuously absent was the soon to be dead ADVision or Media Blasters, and now that CPM is just a ghost while AnimEigo stays cryogenically frozen next to the dead carcass of Geneon, there are few of the old guard left to represent the home media market. Home media used to be the only dependable anime could make some decent money in international markets, but no more. The new generation who think of fansubs an some sort of indelible “right” have made sure that the Japanese companies that work so hard to make the anime that they love, won’t make a dime in the international market. So the first to fall are of course the home media companies that have no big parents to lean on, or no other divisions bringing in sales to the point where DVD can be looked at as a loss leader (which in anime, that’s all it can be).


One of the major things to avoid this from happening to them in the publishing world, Viz is going to publish Shonen Jump in English and Japanese to avoid the dreaded “lag time” in which crappy scanlations are made by people who honestly and mistakenly think they know enough Japanese to accurately get the point across as good as a professional translator, with an editorial staff. Will this work? Probably not. The age of the target is such that it may be hard to get them to regularly buy something that doesn’t contain high fructose corn syrup. The trick will be to get the thing out on time, every time, and not quit after the first 18 months of sales are abysmal. Then there’s the price point, which will have to hit the bull’s-eye right off the bat. Too high and even a price drop won’t get readers to pick it up again, and too low will have your sales numbers in a nice place, while revenue is nonexistent. Let’s not kid ourselves, Viz is a Japanese company and the old notion of the Japanese doing things for the long haul will need to come into play here or we’re looking at epic fail.

Of course Stan Lee was there with Viz to talk about Ultimo, their new collab with an American creativity but done in the much nicer and more appealing manga style that younger readers almost demand when looking for new illustrated media. I'm pretty sure I was in the room when the idea for this thing came about back in 2004 during the TAF Preview show in LA where Stan was a major guest and schmoozed the room talking to people. Funny how sometimes you know what's going to happen but circumstances (or one idiot in particular) keep you outside looking in.

Also Yen Press is doing something. But I wasn’t paying much attention.

The NYCC is a hybrid of modern entertainment, and the old type of convention, but much more of it is that modern part. The actual comic dealers (you know the ones that give you dirty looks and aren’t nice to talk to and look shady) were thankfully relegated to a small corner of the massive floor, which could be avoided. The thing is that the comic companies (even the smaller ones) were there to promote brands, not sell stock, and that’s what a modern show has become. Not a place where you get some washed up scifi actor to sign an old toy or something, but a place where masses of people would be exposed to sneak peaks of upcoming massive projects. What’s good about this? The younger crowd shows up. And that’s the only way a show is going to survive is if it reaches the younger crowd that wouldn’t be caught dead at an old style “comic convention” in some dank hotel ballroom where you come and go in less than one day.

That’s not to say the little guy was squeezed out of this one. For one thing, there was a podcast area that was free for podcasters if you got in your request fast enough (it was in an unsellable corner of the floor anyway). This gives an air of fan legitimacy to the con by being able to allow for independent perspectives to come in and do their thing unhindered. There was an artist alley that would rival Otakon’s in size, and surpass it a million fold in quality of art, especially original art, which is what an artist’s alley should be in my opinion, and not a stunt double for the dealer’s room where you can order a pencil sketch of gender swapped Harry Potter characters make out with Naruto and Sasuke and half the cast of Fruits Basket or whatever you sick little freaks who have DA accounts do. No, this artist’s alley was actually worth it, as it had a much nicer mix of style and art, being that this was a more general show.

Of course TM Revolution was there. He’s nice, and very friendly. We talked with him a bit, and hopefully SONY Music is going to let us play what we recorded (audio only). They can be guarded about that since TMR is kinda old but he still has to impress teenyboppers, and when we talked he was fine, but he did look like he just crossed half the world on 15 cups of coffee. I really like him tho. He’s not like some rock star full of himself, and to go through all of that and still be in a good mood, there’s a better man than I.

In the end, ticket sales were in a happy place, dealers sold plenty of goods (except for those old comic guys… they must be kicking themselves for going to this thing), I got to see the Shaw Brothers action figures which are coming out soon, and I told the people who make the costumes for Hellboy 2 that it was a crappy first movie and looks like it’s going to be an even more crappy second, “now get the hell out from behind the Ninja Consultant’s booth.” And yeah, I had a golden ticket this time too, but I gave it to a guy from Kodansha I wanted to impress.

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!

What You Don’t Know Can Make You Look Dumb:

Something I have been meaning to write down for a while now, is a scathing indictment of the ignorance of American Otaku when it comes to transferring what they have learned from anime into what is and is not permissible in Japanese society. But rather than simply start a war of egotistical posturing, I shall instead look to the formula pioneered by David Letterman and condense my thoughts into:
A top 5 list of things that shatter American Otaku’s views once they visit Japan.

1) Anime isn’t anime: In Japanese “anime” still refers to all things animated whether it be Full Metal Alchemist, Wallace and Grommet, or Fantastic Planet. Otaku-no-Video is not a documentary, and even if it were that time in history has long since passed. You will not find a 24 hour anime convention, nor will you find “anime” labeled with the specific connotations that have come to so strongly define it in America. Thusly in Japan it is viewed as simply another consumer product in the entertainment world, and not a lifestyle. This thusly effects the domestic attitudes towards anime productions, and the retail of licensed goods.

2) You’re a gaijin: No, that’s not awesome, nor is it something that you want to draw attention to. It is not to say that one should be ashamed, but aware of. No matter how well spoken you are, absolutely nothing will trump that physicality which will effect everything else you can and can not do. Conversely, if you are of Japanese, Chinese, or Korean decent, then you are going to be the one they go to first to try and talk to, even if you don’t speak a word. This is not a culture where differences are celebrated, and for Americans putting that grade-school E Pluribus Unum indoctrination out of the way when one reacts to every day situations that confront those notions, is quite a task indeed.

3) Anime ≠ Documentary: Yes there is much that you can learn about Japanese culture, both traditional and contemporary by watching their entertainment. However, acting like an anime character in public is not something that would ever help your situation out, no matter where you are, no matter what you’re doing, no matter what anime character you think is OK to imitate (even KareKano isn't real, and no one else can see that imaginary sweat bead). Individuality as a concept is something that always takes a back seat to a notion of “the greater good” in the land of the rising sun. This may be because there has never been much of an “internal struggle” between competing groups within Japan itself for its entire history. After the recent post war period where unity was maintained as the key to winning a very real struggle to get enough to eat, this notion is very entrenched, and even the most rebellious Japanese youth does so with the confines of “the greater god” (look at the fact that School uniforms are still in widespread use). What this means to the visiting Otaku is that when you think your “inalienable rights” are being impeded when you get those dirty looks or polite requests to move along, it’s not an affront to your individuality or “free speech,” it’s that you obviously don’t know how to properly comport yourself in public in Japan. There is a difference between putting away fear of embarrassment and ignorantly crossing social boundaries.

4) Beer in the Vending Machines: If they had beer vending machines here in New York (we basically do, they’re called “bodegas”) but regardless, I don’t think I would drink less, but I would drink more responsibly. Life in Japan in general places much more responsibility for one’s self in one’s own hands, and so the notions of extreme behavior being acceptable so long as it violates no law, is practically nonexistent outside the Karaoke club. That’s not to say Japan does not have its nanny-state-isms, because they do. But they are some of the most advanced nanny-state formulas on the planet, relying on very long term policies and subsidies held in place with the ever present Japanese social glue, shame. Simply stated, a lot of the activities and methods of communication a young person engage in, in America are simply not done by their Japanese counterparts simply by the mere notion of “well you could, but why would you want to?”

On a side note, Japanese beer is a good way to represent the country itself. You take it from every region north to south, and it’s the same. No matter which beer it is, it’s always the same style and same taste. That’s one image the world sees of Japan, one big pile of sameness. But dig a little deeper and you’ll discover saké. Saké is found throughout Japan as well, but that is about all beer and saké have in common. Move even one prefecture over and the saké becomes something totally different, and that’s Japan to the Japanese. Still constant, but very different from one end to the other... But they’ll never admit that to you.

5) Tokyo Sucks: Hey, I am a big city fan and I love Tokyo. But if you are young, and looking for Japan, Tokyo is the last place you want to bother with. It’s for business people, let them do business there, but for you my otaku friend there are other places with are nicer to look at, and cheaper to stay in. You can get your anime fix just about anywhere, so consider anything from Sapporo to Fukuoka as worth checking out.

Now if you’re going to Japan for a week, this list really only applies on a very basic level and there’s nothing here for you that a good guidebook can’t do better for you on. But if you’re going to be buying your own groceries, commuting to work/classes, and wandering into places where the Japanese haven’t seen a foreigner since the Dutch, then these things will become apparent as you experience them, and the only thing this list will help you do, is recognize them the first time they happen.

My final tip only applies specifically to Americans, and that is when you plan your trip, don’t fly on any American air carrier. You know they suck, the suck hard. So get on JAL or Malaysia Airlines, or Air Canada, Cathay Pacific, or even British airways or whatever, just don’t bother with an American carrier, because you’ll really be sorry if you do.

A Response to Justin Sevakis:

Better late than never.

In the infamous words of Rockwell, “I got a feeling somebody’s watching me.” Although the comments may indicate otherwise, it does seem that a number of people do actually read this ongoing muse into anime as an entertainment market, and as such is the case I believe it my duty to make it worth reading.

Not so recently (late November 2007), Justin Sevakis wrote Editorial: An Open Letter to the Industry over at ANN, where he is Director of New Media. In contemplating a response there were a few key points that were very interesting and carried with them many more industry related aspects than they may have appeared on the surface, to an audience on the outside looking in. After mistakenly thinking I had sufficiently addressed the heart of those issues back on a few audio podcasts I may or may not have made it into (I don't check up on these things), I believe that the indelible written word is the only forum for this expression that is truly appropriate.

Justin Sevakis's article is not going to be reproduced here, as doing so would cause this entry to reach a level of tl;dr approaching biblical proportions. Each section of Justin’s piece has a title and it is that title that is listed in red at the head of each section of my response to it.


Editorial: An Open Letter to the Industry
Link to Article

Justin’s opening simply sets the stage of what being in the fandom used to be in terms of obtaining anime. It was a time when anime (and almost all international media for that matter) could only exist in a physical form subject to the same rules that govern any commercial commodity whether it be shoes, bread, MRI machines, or heroin. Those commercial maxims are simply those of production and distribution, and for a long time their effects dictated market growth extending into and past the DIC era of anime exposure and the basic creation of an actual anime specific market.

Then came a market boom. At first it was truly a boom in the traditional sense, that of product sales, and because the only product that could be both easily licensed and easily produced was home video, that’s where those boom sales were to be found. Eventually this made the consumer market grow, and people wanted modern anime and more of it as well. Strong home media sales were the only thing that allowed anime on TV specifically labeled as anime. More shows got on TV, there was still no internet to get to the viewers first, and anime became a more expensive media commodity. When Toonami/Adult Swim and Tokyo Pop combined to create almost the perfect storm of more than doubling the size of the anime market in a single year, the speculation passes an event horizon which can only be seen in hindsight.

Yes the market grew huge, convention attendance soared, and moreover there were tons of cosplayers there. To add to the frenzy, a staggeringly large number of cosplayers were appearing as characters from titles that were not even licensed in America yet. What does that mean? If you are the Japanese, you start thinking that for every attendee, you are going to see DVD sales, and you are thinking this because that’s what history has shown. This is where Justin fails to take into account the very real impact of the market mirage created by this growing fandom, which gave the impression of a safe investment and a strong belief that these immense asking prices for licenses were justifiable. It’s not as if 100% of the license price was simply the Japanese thinking they had the greatest thing since sliced bread or simply wanting to make a big quick buck (though there can be no denying that is as equally responsible) but a signifigant portion was simply a genuine assumption that a very large fan community support a consumer market on a certain level. After all, this is a very solid conclusion to draw and is still something that rings quite true outside the entertainment media industry.

What happened instead was the perfect market killer otaku was born, with a combination of otaku aspects that are individually very good for a market, but in specific combinations absolutely deadly. This new otaku was consumed not only with a simple desire to absorb as much anime as was possible, but a willingness and eventual demand that the anime they watched was as close to its original form as possible. That acceptance of “that which is subtitled” combined with a distorted picture of how markets and licensing work fueled by youth and willful ignorance, and a final notion that watching anime as a basic right and not a consumer good (a notion amplified by aspects of American lifestyle such as car-culture, consumerism, over-eating and a ridiculous belief that Youtube videos are protected by the first amendment) meant that the attitude of wanting anime and wanting it now would be tempered neither by the natural obstacle of needing an English Dub, or an awareness that such activities are damaging to the market. Investors, producers, and media labels walked onto what looked like a very solid foundation of a growing fanbase with large amounts of brand awareness, only to have it turn out to be quicksand. Fool them once shame on one, fool them twice and shame on the other.


HOW DID WE GET HERE?
Link to Article

Once technology made it possible for video footage to be taken straight off the airwaves, then entirely put into software which allowed for rapid subtitling without the previous need for extra hardware (production), and then made available via the internet in place of needing to have a physical piece of media (distribution). In the previous sentence “made available” is very appropriate while “sent via the internet” would be a tremendous misstatement. To explain, “sending” requires a “sender” and specific recipient, much like VHS fansubbers were contacted by a party whishing to receive something by providing direct or indirect means of fulfilling that request, the fansubber then undertook to allocate specific resources to send which was requested on a media capable of containing it. I am of course describing the days of padded envelopes and Maxell tapes. Days now long past and about as alien to the modern anime fan as a modern person relying on passenger pidgins to send e-mail.

When everything changed in the world of fansubs and moved away from the need for physical media, these very real rules of production and distribution were effectively taken out of the fandom equation. Their absence completely rewrote the laws of physics for the universe of American fandom on a scale so vast the only analogy I can possibly think of is one in which biology ceased to be a factor in human existence and we never again needed to eat, sleep, breathe, age, and so on. For the first time, an anime fan could find a fansubber, get the anime episodes they wanted, watch them, and then throw them away (delete) them, all while the fansubber themselves slept through the entire process.

To summarize, “how we got here”: An expanding market brought in loads of people, but almost no consumers, and nobody figured it out until it was too late (“consumers” in the traditional sense, meaning people who buy things).

Now because of this, I must take extreme issue with the almost complete absolution that Saint Sevakis gives to these modern fans, suggesting that their activities are something as natural as hurricanes in the Caribbean and those in the industry and something a well run industry should be able to deal with without batting an eye. He completely dismisses the fact that this development is known to be detrimental on all levels of the media production and licensing business and is simply a manifestation of the otaku public’s inability to control itself. The counter analogy Justin gives to Arthur Smith’s i-phone comparison is wrong in every respect, even by the standards he sets up in his own article. I will try to explain why I feel this way as succinctly as possible since this is already getting a tad long:
Earlier the article states that Anime was a consumer good, provided by fansubbers using a traditional set of maxims which govern all consumer goods while otaku watched anime via tapes that required storage space and money, and this was done out of pure necessity as there was no alternative. Enter digital fansubs and the market explosion in America, and all of a sudden the rules and limitations no longer apply for better or for worse, all the while otaku keep doing what they do best, watch anime. What’s wrong with this picture? The technology making getting fansubs as easy as checking e-mail is beyond any industry’s control. This is not the industry putting a box of i-phones on the street unattended and then being surprised they’re gone. It is a radical change in what it means for anime to be a consumer product, all brought about by that external force. The more correct analogy would be the Apple store being smashed into by a truck and chronic grand-scale looting commencing; all the while the owners, managers, investors, third party manufacturers, A&TT, and the police all look on, powerless to stop it from happening. Or perhaps a better analogy would be one that uses actual technology as the external factor, such as if all of a sudden Star-Trek transporters became a reality and all you had to do was push a button and an i-phone appeared in your house, never mind that it was beamed out from the store that you didn’t break into.

From a media perspective, it would be like someone leeching the satellite feed of the final episode of an immensely TV series (MASH, Seinfeld, Sopranos, whatever), then airing that episode before it was scheduled to go on TV, on a pirate station or the internet or both, without commercials. Well that’s stealing, because the company that made that episode, (that paid the editors, office workers, gaffers bla bla bla) , needs to make the investment back by selling advertising based on a guarantee. A guarantee to advertisers that a a relatively certain approximate number of households will watch the program with that advertising, and that guarantee is legally protected and has been the source of fierce contention since the days Gilbert & Sullivan wrote HMS Pinafore. If you actually think advertising isn’t an important part of every piece of consumer media that gets made, then after watching “Good Night and Good Luck” come find me and I’ll punch you in the face just to make sure you got the point.

As is correctly pointed out Justin’s opening, getting the anime to the market first, effectively makes a license worthless, and from an anime company’s perspective (yes anime comes from companies, not from farms where it’s grown on trees) if what you make is going to be made worthless by people you can’t stop, then why bother… since the domestic TV ad sales and merchandising isn’t going to support your efforts alone?

It is important to note, that one download of an anime is not one lost DVD sale but there was a ratio for X amount of fansubs there were going to be Y amount of home media sales. But this external factor changed that and while convention attendance and anime fandom grew larger, that ratio shrank and DVD sales didn’t even stay level while more and more people entered into the anime market. Media giants like Viacom and Warner are still struggling with this and have no real solution, and a tiny anime company with 21 employees is supposed to be able to deal with this global phenomenon?


GETTING OUT OF THE RUT
Link to Article

This “rut” came from the surrounding market growing up around a traditional industry which up until that time had worked well. I think that what’s happening with anime is a very good barometer for where general media is headed in the near future. This is where Justin Sevakis proves he most certainly does know just about everything there is to know about the mechanics of the media industry as a whole. Though I have to say the reason fansubbers fansub anime doesn’t come from some selfless proletariatism (that dies with VHS), no it’s the internet points.

Regardless of who is to blame and what is to be said, Justin’s piece nails it on the head that two tings remain constant. First, the anime fan will satisfy their craving (or simple curious interest) via the path of least resistance. Even though downloaders offer up the most sanctimonious self-excusing dribble such as the “well I wouldn’t buy the DVD anyway and it’s just replacing the function of what TV would do” line (even though no ad revenue can be realized by the production company so they can't make more anime) and these same people completely obliterate any validity to that notion by showing up to conventions dressed as characters from that very same show, or review that show on a blog, or recommend that show in a podcast, etc, completely feeding into that false inflation of the market, all the while eroding the viability of the show as a viable license. This will most certainly continue as long as there is a mechanism which allows it to operate. Secondly, the only way for the industry to continue in a way that will allow for sustained productions and further growth, is to make fansubs and their downloaging, obsolete and unnecessary. Correctly noted is the fact that no matter how many carriers an anime channel can get on, if the only offerings are an existing home media library or mostly acquisitions from a single production studio which are not up to date, the channel will have little viability in sustaining sales, or advert sales.

Coming up with the magic pill is not an easy task seeing as how no other aspect of consumer media has been posed with the same life or death situation, nor have they come up with an existing solution. Anime companies make anime, not trail-blaze the technology of media delivery.

DRAGGING THEIR FEET
Link to Article

Nobody’s dragging anything really, it’s just that this could not have come at a worse time. The entire American home media business is in decline, and that’s partly because the entire American economy is crap thanks to another 8 years of a Bush Whitehouse. Japan’s economy isn’t that great either, making it a time to tighten belts and refrain from investments with questionable ROI. A few entries ago I extolled to the public that the ICv2 Panel at NYAF simply gave the Japanese the impression that if the “big bad internet” went away, this giant market would support those geysers of DVD sales that the licensing agents out in LA assured them were a slam dunk (hey they got their commission so what does it matter now amiright?).

Yes making a co-pro is almost impossible. I have been involved with two (One with the Shiden production and Micronauts with Mego, Takara, and Geneon Japan though we approached Aniplex first but SONY couldn't play nice with Takara because of Mego's bad blood... long story. It’s always one side arguing that they know what the market wants more than the other), and so far it hasn’t happened in the true sense of the word. Appropriately noted is the more practical solution to minimize the time between a TV licensed anime’s airdates between the Japan and America, and to find a delivery system that can get subtitled anime to American audiences that can somehow be monetized. The problem is that aside from embryonic concepts from the start-ups Node Science, and RayV TV, (which both seem great), there’s nothing out there that the anime companies wouldn’t have to invent and then maintain themselves, making the overhead of such a system prohibitive.

As far as what we’ll see in the future, after checking out some of the announcements and sneak peaks at the NYAF, I am happy to say that I don’t think we’re in for a Soujitz sponsored moé flood. It really does look like in general things are getting darker and more action oriented like Death Note and Ninja Scroll. But since what I am responding to was written before the NYAF, it’s fair to assume that such a moé flood has been a genuine fear since the TAF of 2006.

LAST CHANCE
Link to Article

We are looking at a last chance of sorts. Something needs to come along and prove that investing ten or twenty million dollars making an anime series is still worth it, or that perhaps smaller investments for shorter productions will be a bankable commodity in the future.

Perhaps what we are living in is nothing but the aftereffect of a kind of vampire byte from the evolutionary force of entertainment culture. Perhaps east is east and west is west, and although the twain have met in both the best of times and the worst of times, no matter how bad or good those meetings are they are destined never to last. Anime may well have no choice but to go back to the rollercoaster of American interest ups and downs, as this latest influx of anime simply serves to change our own domestic American entertainment product into something that this and future generations will respond to, but more importantly, that domestic media companies can control. If this is true, then things like Teen Titans were the primordial walking fish that would later evolve into Avatar, an early hominid of what may become a new anime-born, uniquely American entertainment era.

There’s a fork in the road, and it seems like no one is at the wheel.

-

T.A.O.

Rose Tinted Aviators:

“New York not just City… It big state!”

I would like to take an opportunity to delve into some of the issues specifically covered in Fast Karate for the Gentleman’s Episode from 02/13/08; “Tell It To The Judge (My Gun Is The Judge).” I have to say that my i-pod is a bit backed up and so I was just getting around to listening to that on a long train ride yesterday.

I won’t be doing a ton of background on the subject, so I would encourage anyone to go and listen to Dave and Joel’s Fast Karate for the Gentleman show from Feb 13. However the main points will reveal themselves as this entry continues, and if you can’t figure things out, then go look it up on the interwebs or something because I don’t care.

As pointed out, “Angel Cop” is probably the most extreme example of this type of gonzo-ultra-violent action anime production which can still stay within realm of a basic appreciation of American anime fandom in general. Like it or hate it, Angel Cop still has its place in the early days of the “third age” of anime in America for better or for worse.

What was ignored in their critique however, is the commercial impact of that title. Much as modern otaku would rather it didn’t, at least the first volume of Angel Cop sold incredibly well, while volume two did very well for being a #2 in a series. Manga smartened up relatively quickly and soon put the whole thing on one tape, editing out the bits where there was too much talking and not enough splatter. If I recall correctly there wasn’t a subtitled version of this single release made available, and that of course was because the customers buying this thing weren’t anime fans at all, but just a mix of various youth cultures looking for “Akira Part 2” or at least something as “awesome as Ninja Scroll.” As far as sales went, this title was smoking and sold out more often than just about any other release out there at the time. The two separate outcomes of this popularity were one positive and one negative. First, this made anime (or at the time still commonly “Japanimation”) an attractive area for retailers who saw these spiking sales, and secondly the subject matter of the title served only to confirm the pre-existing notions of mainstream media that “anime” was nothing more than borderline pornographic blood-soaked horrific manifestations of sick individuals for strict relegation to the adults-only area of less than reputable entertainment media retail establishments. Thankfully, that effect was short lived, but the economic effects of Angel Cop are ones that were indeed important up to perhaps even the present day.

The next release from Marv’s Manga Entertainment label to push these boundries was Mad Bull 34, an insane romp through a fictional New York City police duo’s crime fighting (and crime committing) adventures, so full of impossible gunfights, even more impossible decapitations, and a plotline so outrageous that even well over a decade later it continues to be unintentionally funny. Looking at this turd, it’s very difficult to imagine how anyone would imagine New York in such a way as this… that is until you realize that this was made in Japan.

The average Japanese has no idea what the rest of the world is like beyond smatterings of popular culture, pressure molded into preconceived notions of how things are “supposed to be.” You ask an anime Otaku over there what America is, and you’ll get a strange picture of New York on one end, LA on the other, and somewhere in the middle is Chicago, Disney World, and nothing else. One reason for this is that suburban sprawl and car-culture simply do not exist in Japan. The average commuter takes a very well maintained and highly developed public transportation system to work and has no need for a car. Ever. This kind of lifestyle simply leads to a notion that the majority of the population is clustered around major urban centers and things like the sprawling developments of Long Island and Indiana simply can’t exist, and therefore no one lives in such areas. When going to undergrad in New York, I ended up in that “upstate” part of it, where I encountered many a stranded Japanese exchange student stuck in places like Albany, Buffalo, or Plattsburg, all of whom simply saw the name “New York” and figured they’d be living in the Empire State Building and walking to see the Statue of Liberty in Central Park (yeah I know… but they didn’t). Another one of them came up with the following revelation only after getting over here; “New York, it not just city! It Big state!” (Yes that’s a quote).

Even here in the city itself, there are plenty of very jaded and disenfranchised Japanese, who simply assumed that New York was just Tokyo with white people. What’s interesting in this particular instance is that Japanese women ex-pats seem to be light-years more prepared than their male counterparts. I am personally chalking this up to the fact that a great many Japanese women here have no intention of returning to a culture and economy where one becomes a pariah for passing 30 without having kids, and the best job you could hope for had the letters “O” and “L” in the job description. One friend of mine even brought her Japanese “NYC Preparedness” book with her, and in it was a graphic illustration of the differences between the Tokyo Met Police, and the NYPD. You didn’t have to know a word of Japanese to figure that as far as this book was concerned “The NYPD is NOT your FRIEND, DO NOT APPROACH” ...a rather accurate depiction I am afraid.

So maybe it’s no wonder that something like Mad Bull 34 is more than a possibility when coming from an insulated, over self-policing, borderline xenophobic culture with a fascination of violence stemming from historical amnesia so strong that contemporary college students know the kami kaze only as that rainstorm that prevented Genghis Khan’s army from taking over Kyushu and not that whole crashing planes into ships thing. Yes Mad Bull 34 is the product of such a morbid violence fascination combined with an immense (or perhaps willful) ignorance in both the fields of American life, and mechanics of firearms. This latter ignorance is prevalent even in some of the greater works of anime such as the works of Kenichi Sonoda where Bean Bandit can somehow stop 9mm auto fire from 2 feet away simply with the mass of his forearms (no it wasn’t the bullet proof jacket thing) and come away with nothing more than what looks like wounds from an airsoft. Yes my friends, it has long been known that anime involving guns has operated in a world where most physics do not exist and “recoil” is something heard only in ancient legends.

But that’s ok. As any otaku will tell you, when physics intrudes into an otherwise enjoyable anime, it ruins the fun, and many a title has been embraced by the fans while still thumbing its nose at one Isaac Newton. So what makes Mad Bull 34 different? It’s that other deficiency, the one about not knowing America, or more specifically New York. The program does its best to try to look sort of authentic by incorporating background images from actual location photos (hey Dave, that grocery store they rob in the beginning is that Key Food on 5^th Ave and Baltic over by where the Ninja Consultants used to live), and that seems only to make worse the amazingly comedic criminal types that are presented such as roller skating armed robbers that dawn day-glo hockey masks, or crazy gangs of slash-happy cop-killer lesbians with pink hair which would only seem genuinely believable as criminals to a Japanese audience. Remember this is the same country where you are supposedly a tough guy if you drive around in one of these:

After laughing at the owner of one of those things in the parking lot of a Sizeria, I have to say that the only thing I am now scared of in Japan are the ごきぶり.

Decapitation by 12gage might be believable if this were happening in some sort of future world, which is what allowed Angel Cop to get away with similar jaw dropping stupidity. But in Mad Bull 34, that’s just too much to ask for, and with the exception to the plebeians of Cyberpunk from a decade ago (I’m not calling Cyberpunk plebeian, just saying it has a whole section of wannabes), or unless you are looking for “Akira part 2”, there is no need to actually watch this program.

However this is not the end of what Mad Bull 34 was. We must remember that it if not for the rapid growth of the Anime market in the U.S. that this thing would have stayed buried in Japan along with things like Devil Hunter Yoko, Burn Up, The Humanoid, and all that other fodder that lead the way into the international market and have probably been seen by more Americans at this point than Japanese. It had straddled that portion of the timeline where releases went from catering to a general youth crowd and labels simply saw otaku as a minimized fringe group which although they spent the highest ratio of dollars per person on releases there were simply not enough of them and acquitted as such, to an era where the habitual anime buyer would become a dominant market force made possible by a rapid proliferation of anime on American TV for the first time marketed and presented as “anime” and not just another program. Mad Bull 34 was one of the last of the anime properties brought over for exactly the same jaw dropping graphic depictions aimed at the non-otaku anime buyer of the mid 1990’s who was only after explosions and nudity. If you are reading this, you are not, nor were you ever, part of that group no matter how much you wish otherwise.

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.