Maybe a dingo ate your common sense?

Nice one Australia.
As if that country hadn’t embarrassed itself enough by banning all pornography featuring boobs that weren’t “big enough” because somehow a 35 year old A-cup with a giant bush getting raw-dogged by some dude with a footlong (photo unavailable) is a simulation of child porn, Australia has taken its approach to limiting what’s done on the internet one step further beyond the previous “would make China proud” standard, to levels which demand their own series of words that haven been invented yet. Apparently, deliberately offensive internet content (or lulz of any kind) in Australia are so illegal, that they can threaten someone with some sort of criminal charges even if you don’t live/do anything what so ever there. This is no “you hurt my feelings” civil lawsuit, but a threat to begin a genuine criminal action by a government body against someone who violated an Australian law outside the country. It would be like Saudi Arabia issuing an arrest warrant for the owner of Dinosaur BBQ because they distribute pork products which is a serious crime in that country... even though Dinosaur BBQ is in NYC where sweet sweet BBQ is quite legal.


Australia isn’t the first country to have overreaching thought-police ruin someone’s day because some oversensitive troglodyte ended up all butt-hurt over something they heard/read/otherwise encountered. The UK, Canada, France, and too many other countries that you really shouldn’t expect this kind of behavior from, all now have the ability to throw you in jail, all based on someone’s reaction to your opinions. One would expect this kind of thing from super paranoid countries like China, Iran, Cuba, Thailand etc, but at least those countries don’t pretend to be enforcing human rights when they throw you in jail for speaking something against the party line (and that reminds me “Turkey’s Turkishness is balls, and Ataturk had none. ...there, now you’re a criminal in Turkey just for reading that).


Back to this particular case however, and again I am just at a loss here. The USA has offended everyone in the universe as well as a few people who don’t actually exist, there’s been a war criminal (more or less) allowed to freely go back about his Halliburton business, the country is just coming out of the dark ages of for-profit health-care for citizens, and has a disturbing amount of people in it who believe that the earth is 6,000 years old, dinosaur bones have been put here by god to test our faith, and global warming doesn’t matter because Jesus will be here next week to take all the “real Americans” safely away. Yet the Australian Department of who-gives-a-crap has decided to pick this battle to bring against the better, more successful version of what it could have been if they just stopped putting the queen on their money. (Yes, I'm saying America is better than Australia). Or is this just part of some clever attempt to keep Americans out of every other country with running water and toilet paper?


In this situation there is really nothing more to be said other than as someone living outside the USA, I am more than a little bit wanton to get the hell back under the rights and protections it offers. Imagine if some Chinese person was “offended” at Shampoo’s blatantly ching-chong racist-y sounding accent in Ranma 1/2? Or the patently offensive caricature-like depictions of black people that happen in manga all the time were deemed “hate speech” because someone saw it and got bent out of shape. These materials would not only banned from bookstores, but possessing them would get you in trouble, and forget about finding them online. The ED page that has caused this stir received a grand total of 20 complaints. Twenty people in all of Australia managed to cause an international fuss, and possible criminal charges against someone for hosting a website. If twenty people in a separate country with thought-police can create a situation like this, it won’t be too long before they make sure your manga is of to their standards of decency... watch what you bring through the airport over there.

Note to self, add one more reason to stay the hell off of that spider infested hell of an island.

ENEMY OF THE INTERNET

What Have I Become?

…A morning person. 1) not by choice. 2) not a very good one either. Living and working in Japan will almost certainly make you a morning person unless you are either a nightclub owner, cab driver, or the night-shift guy at the convenience store who not only has to man the counter but restock all the shelves while the store is open too (they never ever close… ever).

The 2010 Tokyo Anime Fair is coming up and although I’m registered I may or may not be there much. Why you may ask? Because I’ll actually be working at ***** as a consultant for the month of March, regarding some “stuff” they want to do. “Stuff” means it’s confidential and I can’t talk about it. Unfortunately I’ll be over at their actual offices and not at Tokyo Big Site, but… you never know. If anyone on my “cool” list out there (you know who you are) wants my free ticket, they can have it. Just get over here.

I should post more, but getting an MBA is taking a lot more time out of the day than I thought it would (for every hour you spend doing school stuff there are about 2 hours doing support and legwork for that school stuff… ever tried to figure out a WACC in your head? …no me neither). So, sorry for that.

Stare into the face of evil.

Living the Life:

It never ceases to amaze me what’s being done with Tokyo in the Otaku, and now mainstream (if you could call it that) culture. It’s kind of like what happens to the image of New York over here. Distorted into some sort of Shangri-La Mecca of the international culture scene and embodiment of all things U.S.A. The Texans get kind of upset when they’re judged by Japanese against the cultural standards of New York, and the same happens with Osaka people when you go all Tokyo on them.

Case in point this …thing. Oppai aside it really is both entertaining and incredible annoying. A whole generation of weaboo are going to see this and think this is like… everywhere in Japan, and then join JET or something and end up in bumblefuck where they haven’t seen a gaijin since the Dutch. The kind of people who fall for this sort of thing are really in a tunnel-vision kind of state and are usually sorely disappointed when the real world shows up with a hammer to shatter their LCD house. Notice I said “fall for” and not just “enjoy.” There’s a difference here that operates on the fundamental level of knowing that music video is a music video, and not a documentary. Some people actually can’t tell.

You could argue that the audience in this case is not really to blame, and this entire notion is a perpetuated myth deliberately reinforced my media companies who need it to be “true” in order to lend legitimacy to cultural phenomena they can control, package, and sell for a profit (hell that’s why I’m here… to do exactly that). But it still begs the question of necessity in terms of that particular direction. Once again, is art imitating life, or yada yada yada (click on that, I dare ya).

New Business is New Business:

Now with Taro Aso long gone and the dream of TARP manga money coming from the government, probably a good thing, the industry is going to have to find its way out of the current mess it’s in right now. A mess of their own making? …hardly, but a mess they are in none the less. OE isn’t really an option and they aren’t going to sell any more books/get people watch more anime any time soon (that’s IN Japan, we’ve already established the international markets are more or less worthless). So they can raise prices, expand into new types of media, expand into new types of completely unrelated business (cheese maybe?)… or become seriously smaller companies and deal with that. Honestly I don’t want to go into it any more… or do I? (There’s a reason I’ll be consulting somewhere for something).

Moving Forward:

After the tragic death of Yoshito Usui, creator of Crayon Shin-chan, the show was yanked off the air and there was a bit of ambiguity as to if the show would air the scheduled episodes, and/or produce new episodes. Thankfully, the show has continued and will continue into the future. Ending the show wouldn’t be a “first” in the world of manga and anime (Sazae-san is still going, along with Astro Boy and all that). But this would be the first time in recent memory someone’s kicked it while the original show is still going. Still slightly ballsy by Japanese standards.

Insider Trading:

A guy in my MBA Class is/was (on hiatus?) a project manager for Doraemon among other things, and says the thing aint what it used to be. Oh they’re still gonna make/air it for a bit, but it’s pretty much well on that long march into night if things don’t drastically change (FYI in the history of the universe, this "drastic change" has happened exactly never, so don’t hold your breath …no, Family Guy doesn’t count).

About Anime?

Been catching reruns of Oedo Rocket and Kochi Kame on TV. They’re fun. You should watch them.

About Japan:

You should learn Japanese. Go here. I did. It’s nice.

About the Internet:

This is a good podcast. You should subscribe. It’s about Japan.

Why I’m cool:

I can watch TV (like Shin-chan) on my cell phone for free. Also, I am pretty sure my accounting professor happens to somehow be related to a famous ninja clan.

Downward Spiral: Rise and Fall of Anime?

Yeah, I’m talking about you.


Hello Otaku readers, and others who shall not be named.


So CNN Go has run this “rise and fall” style list about anime as a viable contributor to popular entertainment. Notice I use the word “contributor” and not “product.” This is because this article glosses over any actual business or strategy issues which had to do with the stated outcome, and only puts emphasis on the cultural fan aspects of the back and forth between Japan and the rest of the world which always has a certain color tint to it in terms of which land mass you’re standing on. This is not to say that emphasis on the “fandom” aspects of pop culture development and distributive interpolation between otaku japonica and the rest of the world is misplaced, but rather is only one half of the delicious black and white cookie that is the anime universe we all seem to share space in… in one form or another.

In particular, it was point for year 2005, on the early shift of the style of commercial anime being made that had me raising the out of bounds flag. Not that it’s wrong in describing what happened, but it leaves out the necessary “why.” The “Densha Otoko” thing is something that seems to be a likely source of directional change if we apply a Hollywood style trend-chasing idiot flash in the pan mentality to the Japanese entertainment industry. But that’s not really how it works, one need only compare that popular anime with the hero with the yellow hair who wears orange and must increase his fighting ability under the tutelage of great masters in order to defeat his black haired blue wearing nemesis who has evil powers to save the girl he likes… no not that yellow haired orange clad fighter, the other one. The Japanese entertainment business is a business, and a Japanese business at that, meaning that Japanese business sensibilities are going to be what steers the wheel here and Japanese business sensibilities are quite the opposite from trend chasing, and much more in the “stick with what works” camp. Just look at how long the LDP was running things? (The "stick with what we think works" strategy at least)

Well then what’s with the change in focus? The answer is two fold. First; there really wasn’t a massive shift in the type of content being produced, only in how much of it was being dumped into the U.S. market, and second; the reason is YOU. Yes American otaku, I hate to do the bubble bursting again, (you've heard it here before) but you are NOT part of the anime market. Your existence means next to nothing to most IP producers here in Japan, and yet you keep thinking that somehow the fact that there is such a strong fandom in the U.S. has some sort of bearing on what happens in the boardrooms of Bandai or Pony Canyon or whoever is bankrolling the next project. Well at the risk of alienating any more American otaku, let me just say that you mean nothing to the anime industry and it’s your own damned fault. Why you may ask? Because you’re not profitable in the least. The American market has simply sucked up content at an astounding rate, without providing any net present value for the companies that outlay cash to produce them. It’s folly for me to think that I could actually convince some anime fan that in early 2008, watching fansubbed episodes of Gurren Lagann and then cosplaying as Kamina or Bachika is really an insult to Gainax and other Japanese companies, but believe me, that’s what it is and that’s what those companies feel with a high degree of impact. Here they are having made this product, ready to license it to the U.S., and you are in their face saying “I’ve already seen it and so don’t need to pay you or your licensee anything… thanks for the free show.”

So in short, the reason that anime has become so very Japanese-centric is because anime is Japanese, and only the domestic audience provides these companies with significant revenue (revenue as opposed to profits… revenue is what you use to pay your staff and keep the lights on). America in this instance, save for a few properties and Puffy Ami Yumi, is more or less worthless, since none of what the fans do in their media consumptions benefits the actual producers in the slightest. If the U.S. market could actually earn money, then you bet these producers would care about appealing to it. But since American fandom seems intent on pissing on the hard work of Japan, by watching fansubs and de-valuing licenses before they can ever be capitalized (like I have said before, if the core audience watches the title online before a broadcast license is in place, then that potential license becomes worthless since the core audience has already seen the piece and so any station airing it can not guarantee advertisers that a certain amount of people will watch, making that property worthless), then it will be a long time before Japan cares what works in the U.S.

The reason anime is declining in general even in its domestic market, is because the Japanese market itself isn’t what used to be. There are a few reasons for that, like JPY stagflation, prohibitive costs, change in lifestyle of the average Japanese citizen, but the main reason is the age-bulge. I’ve gone into this before, but the basic reality of it is that a ridiculously percentage of Japanese are now over 60, and it will just keep going up for a while. You know what people over 60 don’t do? Watch anime (except for Sazae-san, which I’m sure you’ve never heard of), and they don’t really buy manga either. They travel Japan, play golf if they’re able, and watch cooking shows and the “Go” channel (yes, there’s an entire cable channel dedicated to people playing that game). So much of the anime produced is for the outnumbered Japanese youth that see nothing but the bleakest of bleak economic futures where they will have to work to support mom, dad, grandma & grandpa x2, and god forbid any kids they might have… From SaiKano to Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 the future sucks if you’re under 30… or 40 for that matter, and a massive cataclysm might just make your life easier if you actually live through it.

Each generation has something that speaks for it. The fact is, that in the U.S. at the time, anime spoke for huge chunks of Gen X and Gen Y mostly because it simply was not the Hanna-Barbera Americanized crap that the baby boomers seemed to think would last forever. Not because anime had some universal appeal outside of Japanese cultural sensibilities. Akira was simply “cool” in the U.S. because it had very high quality animation, cool motor-cycles, and all kinds of action (like when that guy got shot a whole lot and there was blood everywhere… dude yeah… heh cool). The socio-political themes of late 1980’s Japan were completely lost on American audiences, but they were in Akira none the less. This is s symptom of anime that would last a decade, with each culture superimposing it’s own experiences and identities onto a medium which (at that time) lent itself so easily to that activity by having character designs and settings that were so ethnically and culturally ambiguous as to not give the slightest pause to totally immersing oneself into the story. That’s either not possible or necessary now, and the Hot-Topic Twilight crowd now seems to be where merchandisers and licensors want to go… leaving celluloid gravestones in their wake.




And now for something not so completely different:
Warning: Otaku-Fandom rant to be forthcoming.

Real anime fans out there, yes that includes even you weaboos, should be worried about this. The reason is that the Darwinian wheel of fandom spares nothing that shows weakness. Fringes of abhorrent behaviors of human society will always try to climb on board the weakest platforms of popular culture. One of the major casualties that we can look back on which has happened recently is the anthro or “furry” fandom. Here’s a fandom which, in the 1980’s was just another indie comic genre that had everything going for it. Now, it’s associated with everything from skunk fuckers to pedo-freaks. Anime is showing some dangerous cracks in the façade where this kind of thing is going to sneak in and ruin it for the rest of us. Much as I often agree with the guys over at Santoku Complex in defending fictional depictions of anything ever (since it’s fiction, so that’s that) I believe there IS a line that can’t be crossed.

For example, horror movie fans can watch whatever kind of slasher, chainsaw dismemberment movie they wish to, because it’s a movie, but putting that notion into practice, is not a good thing. So although I am a very staunch supporter of the rights of the individual to consume drawn/animated/CGI artwork of anything they choose, I have to draw the line when the type of people who advocate putting that into real practice jump on the fandom bandwagon proclaiming it as a manifestation of lifestyle. No. No no no. People who support the freedom of expression and common sense notions of a drawing being a drawing have to stop at some point when it comes to giving the inch that would become a mile to the actual pedos out there. The whole “Freedom-tan” notion and the organization behind it are an example of something that crosses the line, just a little. The reason is, that the reason they defend such properties is because they obviously believe in putting such notions into practice. No, not everyone there does... probably not even half the people there do, but there's going to be that 10% which is going to paint the other 90% in that light. To have this associated with Japanese pop-culture, is an insult and a serious problem when it comes to having anime and other japanese pop culture products being taken seriously as a commercial product.

First: no, you’re not Japanese, don’t think that adding “tan” to the end of your mascot/slogan/mission statement/whatever, gives you an insight into actual Japanese sensibilities. You don’t live in Japan, and by doing this you're really not gonna make many friends there because believe it or not, while tolerated, this kind of thing is regarded as more or less creepy, because you're never sure if these guys are gonna take that fandom one step too far into real life.

Second: The basic ideas of freedom here, is to allow for freedom of expression, such as those within the Constitution of the United States of America. While noble, this is by no means universal, and may not apply to you in the same way or at all, since you have a monarch on your money (UK, Canada, Australia, NZ ), or might be living down the street from a monarch like in Tokyo, Thailand, or Brunei. I can't fucking stand when some retarded American starts jumping up and down about "constitutional rights" when they're in another country... They don't apply you dumbass, and this attempt to superimpose them onto other countries with different cultural sensibilities and (more importantly) different laws based on those sensibilities, is the dictionary definition of "stupid American."

Third: While it is deplorable that someone would be prosecuted for having fictional depictions of anything which in practice is illegal (such as murder, terrorism, drug use, underage sex, dog-fighting, dolphin BBQ, etc) having actual film of that criminal act being committed, is simply having evidence of a crime that has been committed, and that leads straight to legal gray areas of all sorts. If you were trading real snuff films it might be the same.

I could go on forever, but the basic premise here is that anime fans had fought long and hard against mainstream media to make sure that commercial markets did not associate the genre with nothing but sex and violence. We succeeded and anime become (albeit an unsustainable) genre of entertainment. Now, that anime is showing weakness as a commercial property, pedophiles and skunk-fuckers are jumping all over small bits of the darkest depths of doujin manga and 2am anime and calling attention to it as if it was a validation of their genuine desire to have sex with 8 year olds. So far, the only defense against this kind of infiltration has been to make the genre profitable, creating a large group capable of drowning out these pedos so that they would go somewhere else. Now that anime is losing money, they’ve come in like a hoard of locusts to claim anime as some sort of champion of a pedophiliac lifestyle that should be accepted because they say so. That’s like an axe murderer asking for an acquittal because he genuinely “felt like” hacking someone to death and that desire is part of his personality that you shouldn’t impede. No sir, I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. However I may not agree with your philosophy of action and I will fight to the death should you attempt to practice such action on me... and my own freedom-tan will be right there with me.

If anyone out there has read the Japanese story of 蜘蛛の糸 (The Spider’s Thread... a good read if you're studying Japanese, not too much kanji) this is the situation anime fandom is in. We are climbing up a thread, up to a level where we can exist as a viable industry. On the thread up which we climb, come hoards of the deepest darkest souls that the underworld has to offer. Should the climber become too distracted by them, or fight them directly, they shall fall and be dragged down to the depths from whence they came. Anime otaku must simply keep climbing forward, even if it seems as if they are about to eclipse us, the forward climbing must not stop.




-

No I'm not dead... it's worse.

I have been in actual MBA grad-school here in Tokyo since the end of summer and what not. I actually haven't slept since then other than the few times from passing out over accounting records from exhaustion. If you're wondering, the school is called "Hitotsubashi" and if you're still wondering, then just google it. I'm now a member of Josui Kaikan, and will be attending the awarding of the Porter Prize. So yeah, I've been busy.

So in the world of anime, blah blah blah some stuff happened and yeah whatever. Listen people, Japanese Graduate University takes up all your time and then makes you borrow more from people you know and makes you its bitch. There was lots of stuff I wanted to post about, but just couldn't. There is lots of stuff I want to subtitle and get out there, but it's gonna take some more time. That's just the way it is. On the up-side, My campus is right next to Shogakukan HQ here in Tokyo and I go over there to study their business model sometimes. It's amazing what just dropping this school name can do.

So yes, there shall be posts again, but not until after finals. @_@.

地震, 地震, everwhere a 地震

OK, so 3 earthquakes in 6 days and all of a sudden these signs are everywhere around Shinjuku.



Yeah, that's just what I want to see the morning after my alarm clock was replaced with my apartment doing an impersonation of a martini shaker at 5am. Something that reminds me about the current anime based on the end of the world magnitude earthquake that the news keeps telling me we're overdue for.





Also, the Tokyo Toy Show video is not as awesome as to be acceptable to our standards.... (that may mean what you think it means), so it's coming from another source. Stand by.

Naruto 10th Anniversary video game preview

-






The next episode of Tokyo Mirror at Animepodcast.net will have game play footage of the upcoming Naruto Shippuden Game: ナルト : 龍刃記.

Tokyo Toy Show Preview

A bit of a preview:

One may die: The Akira live action that never was

So the other may live.

Well it’s not that messianic, but it seems official that the Akira live action film is totally DOA as of a little while ago. I think I can participate in the collective sigh of relief with much of the movie watching community to know that “Akira” will not go the way of Speed Racer, Dragon Ball, and Street Fighter, and descend into the collective utter crap-fest that is the cinematic evolutionary branch of “Hollywood Re-make.” Such a feeling however, must be tinted with a shade of regret for what might have been. Could an Akira live action be a good movie? Sure it could. Would it have been? Almost assuredly not. The only way to make it a good movie, would be to re-make it, shot for shot, with as much of the original story intact as possible. What would have happened though, is the inevitable “new vision” or “updating” or “tweaking for a new audience” that would have run roughshod over any actual script/technical advisers they had on the project… if any. I could see an ending where some Caucasian looking Kaneda modding his motorcycle A-Team style with rockets controlled by a PSP or some shit, for a final showdown with Tetsuo who doesn’t have psychic powers or a disgruntled anti-social youth culture mind set, rather he’s been taken over by some A.I. which runs all of future-mega-tokyo-robot-land and slowly turns him into a cyborg which allows him to do shit like fling garbage trucks at Kaneda while rolling down a highway all i-Robot style as he rides on his future-bike to the center of the city to finally free his kidnapped love interest who was invented for the movie and is played by played by Kristin Kreuk. And they wonder why people don’t bother going to movies anymore. Thank you “Legend of Chun Li.”

But whenever the noodly appendage closes a door, the great Flying Spaghetti Monster opens a can of awesome somewhere else. Futurama is finally getting the Family Guy treatment and is getting some new episodes made. I like Futureama a lot, but after feeling so fucked over (not as bad as “who is Cartman’s Father fucked over, but fucked over none the less) by the Family Guy “DVD Movie” (that shit was so bad I actually gave it away in front of a Best Buy to prevent someone from buying it and wasting their own money), I didn’t get that into the Futurama “movies” even though they were cleaver, a fun watch, and animated just fine. But, I am happy about this new development and hoping for Hulu distribution, even though from here in Tokyo I have to keep going to new lengths just to get around Hulu’s international filtering bullshit (FYI it works better if you… wait, no they’ll probably find out about that just that much faster if I spill the beans here). I know what you’re thinking and don’t even start.

The resurrection of Futurama is a positive outcome of an otherwise dismal development of producers being terrified of new and creative ideas in Entertainment, aka “Hollywood is out of Ideas,” which is so awesome when you see smart new films like “The Hangover” beat total shiat like “Land of the Lost.” It’s not that I want to see movie theaters go away, but they are the single only collective group which still enables the MPAA and their stifiling of the creative process. Labels and studios would gladly leave those fuck-wads in the dust if theater box office receipts dipped low enough to make them less relevant. The fact that the MPAA is a private and not a government organization will allow movie makers to drop their participation in the “voluntary” rating system without a single bit of interference.

But the “out of ideas” disease is unfortunately in full swing here in the land of Otaku culture as well, as we get ready for more reboots. One which I am particularly loathe to see is the Azumanga Daioh manga republication. It’s the same story… drawn again. This time however the art is disturbing much more on the Yotsuba side of things. Now artists can get better and one look at the early atrocities of Kozuke Fujishima when compared to later works, show that this is an almost universally good thing (except for Rumiko Takahashi who has gotten worse, and Masamune Shiro who went from meh to awesome to crazy). Not in this case however, where the signature style of what made Azumanga Azumanga are gone, only to be replaced with what looks like lazy practice drawing. The notion that time and money are going into something we’ve seen before and not something new. You can see Azuma’s poor excuse about pulling a George Lucas on the series on his personal site here (Japanese). Look for the new and improved Azumanga Daioh anime to have the airgun replaced with a walkie talkie in the matsuri scene, and for the character of Tomoe to be played by Jar Jar Binks.

If it sells books then great, but if the story is the same and the art has less detail, then I’d rather have something I haven’t read before.

Paris is Burning; The guilty plea of Christopher Handley

See it before it's declared Obscene.

The case of Christopher Handley has ended not unexpectedly, with results that put commercial artists, manga collectors, and everyone with an internet connection in the cross-hairs of a potential witch hunt perpetrated at the discretion of the self appointed people's puritan protectionist police on the front lines of what they like to call “the culture war” but what most of us who live here in reality call “you’re too old and can’t handle things in the outside world now go back inside, you’re missing ‘The Factor.’”

The guilty plea in this case is very much the worst possible outcome for members of the public, much worse than if he had been found guilty by a jury. Oh sure, the sentence is reduced and he isn’t facing the same severity as he would have if he had been convicted which is a real possibility since from what I hear he had some stuff nasty enough to make the admins over at Encyclopedia Dramatica look like members of the Bristol Pailin abstinence movement. With an uppity District Attorney waving federal charges and threatening the worst if he has to show grandma on the jury those nasty pictures and how poor little Chris’s ass has no chance of coming out of this unscathed, to expect a real fight was probably too optimistic looking back. So he may have received the best legal advice for his own individual case, but in reality it was the worst decision that could have been made. Because a guilty verdict has something that goes with it which a guilty plea does not: a chance to appeal. Appellate courts are great arenas for this kind of thing to be sorted out when it comes to legal vaguery being taken too far, and are now something that Handley will not have access to unless he can prove he was unduly influenced into taking a plea. My entire education in legal matters comes from watching every season of Law & Order 5 times and reading Fark way too much, and even I can tell that this guilty plea legitimizes a law which has “unconstitutional” written all over it. In the past, obscenity legislation of this type was used to criminalize possession of novels, and would always depend on the interpreting the meaning of “obscene” which means different things to different people, and therefore has no place in legal regulations of any kind. I don’t know what leverage they had on this Handley guy, but his guilty plea is really going to screw the next poor sucker they decide to make an example of (I am thinking a police raid on a furry convention).

So now we have a person, being treated like a criminal engaging in a criminal act with a criminal instrument, only it’s not really that, and somewhere someone is abusing an actual child, not a drawing of one. I am sure the police originally thought that they were going to find actual child pornography that this guy had, and when they didn’t, they decided to go for it and punish this guy anyway because cops aren’t about to use up their time and miss out on the reward of putting someone in jail, you can’t expect them to really be capable of proper behavior in legal matters. The blame for this most recent erosion of constitutional rights has got to land 50/50 on the idiots who actually wrote it, and Handley himself for selling out on a very important duty to set a legal precedent. When what is legal or not comes down to a matter of opinion, even if that opinion is a popular one and generally accepted, it is still opinion (I’m not taking about what is legally considered “expert” opinion). Since assessing the age of a cartoon character is both subjective, and technically impossible it can not be the basis for enforcement of a law. How old is Bart Simpson? He was in 4^th grade in 1987… so was I, yet I can buy beer and he can’t. You know why? Because he’s not real he’s an abstract concept, a fictional character. If I draw him getting shot, I won’t be booked for murder, and although the equivalent of this case’s imagery is unpleasant to think about, criminal proceedings for “abusing Bart Simpson” are just as ludicrous as a murder charge.


For further reading on some of the specifics of the case, Matt Thorn has compiled a linked list to not only some of the actual court documents in the case, but other opinions more informed than my own. Which you can find here.

Thanks to Sirkowski for not only pushing the boundaries of epic win in his delightfully offensive Miss Dynamite series, but also for clearly illustrating that when all that separates a sketch of regular internet jiggle, from part of a felony criminal enterprise is a word bubble, then there’s something wrong with the law.

Don't worry, she's not really 17... because she's not real.

Art by tekena1200.

Is Paris Burning? The departure of Central Park Media

The departure of CPM and the new “anime” world order (no, not those three).

So CPM exit stage-whatever can come as not really a surprise, since if you just look at their sales and acquisitions, and combine that with the fact that they were a home media company, and not a media-media company (I’ve written about that set of cosmic rules too many times already). I am actually surprised that this took as long as it did. Next on the block, I’d put Media Blasters, since they’re already being sued by Color West Inc, in what I can only assume is going to be a growing list of bills that don’t get paid. Rather than imploding, I see them moving to a much cheaper city/state, and dropping a lot of anime in favor of live action cult schlock. That scenario is no guarantee though, and they very well might go the way of the dodo within a year. Is this “early retirement” for CMP’s master and commander? It could be… but after talking to the JOD himself at this year’s TAF, there might be something to come from this yet. Time will tell, and the market will either be there or it won’t.

Next on the agenda is this thing. I can’t say anything about it… I want to care, I really do, but after the crap that was BGC 2040, and the swine flu celluloid abortions of both Dragon Ball and The Legend of Chun Li, I just can’t get excited about this project at all, no matter how much I love BGC. This live action project has some things going for it, and some things against it. So far, Hollywood isn’t involved, but this is a neutral aspect, since if they are going for a combined Western/Asian cast, you’ll probably want to have actors that can actually act… and if you’ve ever seen a Japanese or Korean movie with gaijin actors in it before, you know that it all too often looks like they just grabbed someone off the street. So if they want good actors, a Hollywood Studio might work its way into the project, and then the story, designs, and everything good about the concept will die right there as they demand changes for the post 9/11 American consumerist SUV driving movie theater audience that somehow manages to pump money into pieces of pure cinematic shit like Ghost Rider or Wanted. Seriously, who pays money to watch these things? Well as time goes by, we’ll see if this is even real (remember in 1999 there was all that “live action Ninja Scroll” talk… still waiting on that one).

So the holdouts are running out of ammo, and the Russian winter is closing in on the anime market as we know it. Some big boys will still be left, but most things are going to fundamentally change. It is the rebuilding of the decimated landscape and the form it will take which is going to have far reaching effects for years to come. In the absence of any kind of Martial Plan for the new way of doing things, there will be a few major directions we can see from our very early vantage point;
A new, old-world-order, where properties are rarely licensed and domestic productions continue to follow the American dumbed down style with few notable exceptions like Avatar and Teen Titans and so on. Previously, this kind of thing was spoon-fed to a captive audience, when fansubs were available to only an intrepid few who knew how many VHS tapes could fit in a Tyvec priority envelope. With fansubbers out there now doing their best to devalue a license the moment a show hits the air and take money away from the creators and rightful owners, it will be interesting to see if that ongoing will effect the popularity or potential of domestic American animation (once it pulls its head out of it’s ass and stops making pure shit). Or will we have a new version of media delivery which allows anime producers to circumvent the losses they currently incur with fansubbers devaluing their licenses, which will allow them to make more money to make better titles, and also actually take the American market into account. It is interesting to hear American otaku audiences complain about a lack of input and effect on the Japanese production companies, when it is this same otaku audience that is blatantly consuming the product while at the same time pumping exactly $0 back into the system. It’s a big market, but an unprofitable one, so why should producers cater to it?

There are a few factions that are racing to get their version of the next step in Anime market evolution across the finish line first. With dubbing into English now seen as more of an option rather than a requirement when courting a large enough American audience, the rules of the game have definitely changed. That’s why I would watch what Crunnchyroll (and other services like it that may pop up) does pretty closely. They have a shot at something, but it’s no slam dunk.

Omake:
Quick trip to FUKUOKA... it's a happenin' place.