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The Business of Anime
buckminster writes "Planet Tokyo's Talking Anime Business Blues is a great roundup and analysis of recent articles detailing the behind the scenes aspects of the anime business. By all accounts 99% of Japanese anime never makes it to America. Some of the arguments why might surprise you. There are still many in the industry who believe that fan subs are killing the anime market in the US."
Some of the arguments why might surprise you
I always thought it was the soccer moms against 8 tentacles in a vagina...
... but aren't the fansubs happening mostly because the anime isn't commercially available in the US? If so, then make it available, and the fansubs go away... Unless I am missing something?
loganavatar.com
im sorry but some shows would have even gotten popular if it wasnt for fansubs. Like for example Love hina, Azumango diaho, and Naruto owe all of there popularity in the USA due to Fan subbers who brought it to the community in america first!
"to be like god we make our own dolls to play with, but what does that make us, but dolls for god to play with?" Ikari,
Or D) Its their culture, and their shows / movies... not ours. While some Americans will watch Anime, not that many will
Anime is designed for the Japanese culture, and will be better accepted in Japan. US animation is designed for Americans, and hence will be better accepted than Anime. Products do what they are designed for (excluding a certaing clear-glass-pane-inspired-OS)
The pr0n industry disagrees with you.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
That was basically my point. Anime is heavily tied to Japanese culture (although I can't understand how they can put up with the repetitivness), and inroads are only going to made in the American culture if it appeals to the average American.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Fansubbing isn't killing anime any more than airing it on TV does. Because if you air it on TV, people don't buy the DVDs, they just record it. On the other hand, almost everyone who watches fansubs will buy DVDs of shows they like.
So what we've really got here is the same complaint as the movie industry. They can't get people to buy crap sight unseen anymore, and it's killing their business model.
Japan doesnt export enough? Who needs to export when we have the internet. Who cares if you can't go to your local Blockbuster and rent/purchase it. Go to an online anime shop, and buy it there..
A lot of what does manage to come over is dumbed down for the 8-13 crowd.
Simplified dialogue is traded for formerly complex situations. "Constipated west-coast surfer dude" is the voice-acting style preferred by many dubbing companies.
Maybe if they stop trying to pander to a young audience and put proper effort behind importing these into the United States. I mean, Princess Mononoke was very well done and its content was intact.
Anime doesn't have to be exclusively for kids!
That all geeks must love anime. I'm glad 99% of the stuff doesn't make it here - why? Probably because it's crap. The story / dub quality on the anime on adult swim really sounds like it was done by a bunch of middle school students - the "plot" lacks form and any amount of depth for an adult to take seriously.
I'm 25 and in the prime of my geek life - Where is the appeal in Anime? I can't even take the art form seriously after it's been bastadized and role played to death by 'hardcore' geeks. Sorry, I just dont see the connection between anime & my technology based lifestyle. If anything I can relate to american cartoons (family guy, futurama, etc.) than anything else.
I can't connect with some guy named Onimaro that discovers he can shoot laser beams out of his nipples, because the ghost of his great aunt told him he could while he defeated the skateboarding ghost pirates from another planet. That's about how far out and abstract some of this stuff is.
I think a major problem with Anime in America is twofold:
1. The influence of the anime subculture cliques in the US have created a slew of American cartoons that try to appease everyone by becoming "Amerime" as I've heard it called. It's a little bit of American animation and a little bit of Anime, so it's won't make the purists really happy, but it may keep the majority quiet enough to stop barking for the authentic imports.
2. Some anime fan groups really do live up the title of otaku. For example, I absolutely hate Inu Yasha and I've never even seen it. The only reason that I can't stand it is because the anime fan club in my college talked about it so much, non-stop that I already knew the whole thing. In fact, within a week it was already like an overplayed radio single that made me want to smash things. I don't have anything against the story or characters or style, but the overload from the fans was so much that I couldn't stand hearing about it anymore and I still can't to this day.
Not all fans are this bad, and some are much less than this bad or not even bad at all, but there are enough fans that can be true otaku: Obsessed to the point that the average person doesn't want to hear it anymore.
I, for one, don't like to talk about anime anymore for fear that I will be crucified by some purist for watched the unclean dubbed version of whatever.
Personally, I think these two things really hold back anime from becoming truly mainstream in America. Correct me if you want.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
Of course, American movies and TV shows regularly feature novel plots and fresh ideas!
Just kidding. For example, if you haven't noticed, summer brings lots of action movies (usually a monster action movie, a disaster action movie, a terrorism/military action movie, a space action movie, or a horror-zombies-fantasy-undead action movie.) I think a point of the article is that so much anime DOESN'T make it here, that you can't fairly judge anime in general just by what you see on Cartoon Network or even what you get on DVD from a niche store. But I do agree with a lot of what you said in the OP.
Do you love freedom??? Do you love freedom!!! DO YOU LOVE FREEDOM!!!!!!!!
Today is the last day that my anime store, Otakurama, will be open. I've felt pressure from many directions over the years, but the two biggest factors working against my business are 1: competition from mass market retailers like Best Buy and Borders, and 2: piracy.
Number 2 is a big one--I would guess that at least half of my customers download anime from bittorrent. I've had hundreds of people tell me, "oh that series is great!" before it's even come out. Of course, once they download it they don't want to buy it.
The only anime that sells in my shop are the most popular titles. Anything cool but unusual just sits and rots on my shelf.
A smaller (but important) factor is that anime publishers change the prices of their products so quickly that discs 'expire' while sitting on my shelf waiting for a buyer. Six months after the last disc of a series comes out they release the entire box set for 50%-66% off. That causes orphans to clutter up my inventory.
*sigh*
Bye-bye, Otakurama
"There's companies that are just so cool that you just can't even deal with it," - Bill Gates, about Google
"It has always amazed me that the Japanese can be amazing animators, yet consistently hold to the same tired cliches in all of their animated series. I understand that the Japanese think that underage girls are the height of sexual prowess, but it just doesn't jive with American ideas of how life actually is." As a fansubber and, thus, viewer of much anime, I would like to point out that the above statement indicates a general lack of awareness regarding the diversity of the product as a whole. To say that "all" series adhere to these alleged Japanese beliefs is a) ignorant and b) a bit racist. Just as with Western television there is quite a range in offerings with respect to both quality and content. Generalizations like that simply don't hold. Furthermore, in the West, the "Disney era" as it were established our, meaning western, current viewpoint regarding the nature of animation and the target audience, hence why most adults don't watch cartoons/animation/whatever you want to call it. As per the "why not release sub-only" argument, that'd be fine if it weren't for one (amazingly stupid) thing: a lot of people, for whatever reason, hate to read subtitles. A dub/sub combo release caters to both potential audiences and thereby has a higher possibility of profit, which they may or may not make.
think about just how many anime DVDs have you purchased recently compared to the number of shows you've downloaded for free.
This is the same flawed logic that the RIAA, MPAA and BSA use. The correct question is:
How many anime DVDs have you bought only _after_ seeing a large part of it for free?
For me the answer is: several dozen discs. I've bought a couple other anime discs based on other criteria, but with only one exception the ones I bought before watching turned out horrible or mediocre.
Many times I saw them for "free" on television or by borrowing from friends. But if the owners of minor anime titles think they're going to somehow get those titles in front of me via TV, they can dream on. Far and away their best bet of getting new titles in front of me where I might make a buy decision is to make sure the first couple episodes are readily available on the Internet in an unencumbered format I'm willing to use.
Works for books too. I've made more than a few purchases after reading the first couple chapters online.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Too much anime is certainly cliched to HELL and back.
Blue hair. Check.
School girls with gigantic breasts. Check.
Everyone looks like they are 14 or younger. Check.
Big robots. Check.
Oversized, western styled eyes. Check.
Small overly cute inexplainable cat-like animals with blue fur. Check.
I mean, who is this stuff really supposed to appeal to? As an adult, I find that most anime is waaay to cheesy or childish for my likings. Clearly I'm not going to like Sailor Moon or the millions of copycats. The few good examples of what anime should be are few and far between. The first ninja scroll comes to mind as well as Ghost in the Shell. Cowboy Bebop was fantastic in so many ways. I did like Gundam and yes, even Gundam Wing was SPECTACULAR IMHO. The constant struggles over the validity of war were great in Wing. I also really liked Akira, though I thought the ending was entirely too bizarre and over the top.
Don't get me wrong. I love the Japanese vision of the future. In a lot of ways, I think they are indeed the most foward thinking people on the planet, but even their concept of what the future will look like is now so cliched, it has become thouroughly predictable. I mean it was great 10 years ago when I first started watching anime, but now I look at the series that some of the anime channels are showing on cable and every single last one of them is terrible.
zosxavius photography
(although I can't understand how they can put up with the repetitivness)
No kidding! I mean, look at hollywood. No repetitiveness there! No siree, none at all. The paragon of originality, Hollywood is...
"how many anime DVD's have you bought after seeing fansubbed versions?"
None, since the common legal perception among the translators is that it is illegal to redistribute the fan-subbed version if the DVD [or any other form of retail] is available in the language. Unlike the standard pirate, most translators adhere to the law. Finding english fansubs of popular work [the article's 1% released in the US] is near impossible.
There's so much wrong with the above post, I think it almost qualifies as flamebait. Where do I start?
Fansubs are not "killing the business". Fansubs are merely a symptom of a failure to properly respond to a demand. The demand is for subtitled digital files of the latest anime from Japan. The proper response is to sell those files at a reasonable price.
The rest of the post is merely Sturgeon's Law. Anime is television from Japan. It's mostly cliched crap for precisely that reason, just as American television is mostly crap. Guess what, that doesn't stop people from watching American TV, or from buying it on DVD.
That last point about importing Japanese DVDs clearly shows that AKAImBatman has no knowledge of the subject he's oh so insightfully posting about. Japanese DVDs made for the Japanese market are very, very, very expensive(Yes, that many verys!). Their DVD purchasing habits are very different from ours.
That's why Americans don't generally understand anime's unstated backstories, the iconic imagery, the standard storylines. It's not surprising.
What is still surprising is Japan's embrace of American pop culture, which is of course exactly the same kind of product as anime, with different forms and content. Maybe America's postwar pop culture is more universal, having been produced by and for a population from every global culture, including Japan's. Maybe Japanese culture has more experience of swallowing a foreign culture whole, especially after being "conquered" in a war. Maybe American culture resists influences from cultures other than the "Old World" of Europe and Africa. Maybe it was a unique combination of other factors. What exactly is the difference that makes American culture's foreign popularity a one way street? And does anime find any easier acceptance anywhere else outside Japan, or is America just like everywhere else, puzzling over peculiarly Japanese cultural references?
--
make install -not war
Having been to Japan and having seen a good example of the 99% that doesn't make it to the US, I would rather think that it is not the US but the Japanese who are killing the US market for Anime. Honestly, the folks who make some of those flicks must need serious psychological help on a routine basis...*twitches*
All the responses in the thread so far seem to be along the lines of "Fansubs == GOOD" and this is the case to a point... why wait two years to see shitty dub of a series (with commercials) when you can see it now, fansubbed, without?
:P
If anything, fansubs underscore just how fucking awful most dubs are... though a bad fansub can be just as bad, if not worse. (my experience with GITS : SAC hit both extremes - great voice acting, but a few of the episodes I watched had to have been subbed by a fourth grader who failed english)
If anything is "killing anime" in the US, it's one or more of three things:
A. The price of DVDs. Why the fucking hell would I pay 25-30$ for four 22-27 minute episodes, 3-5 minutes of which are credits and intro sequence? This is even more ridiculous with shows like Naruto, which often have many minutes of flashback and shitloads of standing-around-staring-at-each-other.
B. Dragonball. It's a great example of everything that sucks about americanized Anime - overlong credits, overlong intro, overlong "NEXT EPISODE!" overlong "IN THE LAST EPISODE!" and shitloads of nothing happening in between. If you're lucky.
C. The complete gutting / hackjob done on several titles in the process of translating them to "fit" the US market. Who the fuck is going to watch a "cleaned up" series after you've already seen the original, undiluted, unedited version? Editing the series to fit a focus group audience is asinine.
Personally, I dropped my fanboy boner for japanese media a few years ago. I still buy Battle Angel trades, I'll watch the occasional series if it's actually decent (Bebop, Witch Hunter), and I've been waiting patiently for Appleseed V since the 90s.
Haven't seen much of interest actually make it into the US in awhile.
But then, it's been awhile since American comics have had anything interesting to say, either - with Cerebus and Transmetropolitan done, the comic shop is nothing but X-men and merch for whatever anime Fox happens to be running this season. It sucks ass, and I'll be damned if I'm going to spend money on crap.
Yeah, because "Ed, Edd, and Eddy" is animated so much better than "Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex", and the stories are so much more interesting and insightful.
</SARCASM>
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Yeah, it's C).
My daughter is a big time anime fan and I enjoy anime as well, but a lot of the anime she likes is just plain grating to me. She absolutely loves it when the characters scream in anger or delight and go 'chibi' but I find it very annoying. IT'S LIKE SOMEONE WRITING WITH ALL CAPS AND USEING LOTS OF PUNCTUATION!!!!! It's just not something the majority of Americans want to see.
Notice that it happens in a _lot_ of anime, but not very much in the anime that is legitimately popular in America. Even Pokemon didn't spend that much time on massive emotional displays compared to a lot of anime popular in Japan.
I hope anime studios are paying attention: If you want to hit it big with your anime on American soil, look at what Americans actually want. If it's a story that's compelling to Americans, we'll buy a lot of it. Period.
Why so much fuss about Japanese cartoons? It's not like we get any of their movies or television either, so I fail to see why a dearth of their cartoons in the US market is surprising.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
Without fansubs, much fewer people would be introduced to new series, and so sales of the few series released in America would also be much less. With some more recent series, the (relatively) huge popularity of a fansubbed series has lead major TV networks to license and show them in America (Naruto, for example). I feel like I'm stating the obvious, but like any genre or art form, there are higher and lower quality things within it. There is plenty of awful anime (like movies), that are clichéd, dull and made purely for money (like movies). However I don't think the proportion of good stuff to bad stuff is any different to movies, to stay with the example.
If you look hard enough, and manage to sift through the awful series, there are some good series to discover. Otherwise I guess anime is not for you
First, much of Japanese animation is aimed naturally at Japanese modern society because they are watching it first. Do Americans aim their animation at any audience but themselves first?
Second, fan subs are killing nothing and only increasing the fan base which would gladly buy the anime if only it would be exported in the first place. Some of them are insatiable gluttons.
Third, between Suncoast/et al carrying manga and anime, there is a "this is new and faddish" crowd above and beyond the hardcore anime fans being carered to.
Nice article, some incorrect ideas, and doesn't show probably as deep a knowledge of the American and western anime fanbase as could be had with a little research. OTOH, that knowledge might be found frightening and Japan might just go (in Japanese) "WTF is wrong with these people? And they think we're the eccentric ones? We should just stop sending our animation to them. They clearly aren't getting out of it what we intended and getting something else we didn't."
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Anime is simply a medium, a way to put that sea of idea's in our heads into another persons head. The animation is usually good but the problem tends to be the story more than anything else. anime is especially good at expressing imagination, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and a few others were visually stunning, had great imagination but often lacked depth. Others such as Spirited Away & GTO had good animation but that was just sugar on the cake, the y had great story's with real imagination.
http://my.telegraph.co.uk/dublinclontarf
Yeah, that's right.
The reason fansubs are popular is simple.
1. Companies like ADV (and for that matter "Geneon" which used to be Pioneer) wait until a show is popular in the fansub community, buy up the rights to it, and then rather than get on with the job of subtitling and dubbing it sit on it for YEARS before American audiences get the chance to see their "licensed" version.
2. As it would turn out, the "professional" translators at ADV and other places are usually not as good at translating the anime as the army of semi-bilingual teens/twentysomethings on both sides of the pond (in Japan and America) who can email each other back and forth to make sure that not only is the translation correct, they got the idioms right.
3. Even when a big Anime movie comes out - like Howl's Moving Castle or Spirited Away - the American companies don't promote it properly. Disney should have had Howl's Moving Castle showing as a full-scale release with advertisements all over every TV station. But Eisner wouldn't do it because (a) it would prove him wrong about the "death" of traditional animation and (b) he dicked it over because John Lasseter wouldn't resign Pixar with Disney.
In that kind of environment, the reason Fansubs are popular is because WE ARE TIRED OF WAITING FOR THE COMPANIES TO FUCKING DO IT.
We can accept that it takes time to translate - though the speedsubbing groups doing Naruto have it pretty much down to a 24-hour turnaround and they're no less accurate than ADV or VIZ.
We can accept that it takes time to record dubbing voices. We CANNOT accept that it takes them FIVE FUCKING YEARS before they're ready to release a single DVD with only two episodes on it.
Here's your challenge, ADV and the rest of the studios: Get it down to a six-month turnaround. Six months after you license the anime, we want to see it on the fucking shelf.
Then, if fansubs are still "killing the industry", maybe we'll take you seriously.
I suddenly realized how lame the American voices were - and inappropriate for their characters.
Except for two of them, they were totally off in the English dub, and spot on in the Japanese voice choices.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
With the exception of the Wired references, the other references seem to have come from a recent Business Week article.
6 /b3939013.htm
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_2
There are other Anime that I can't stand that most people love like Ghost in the Shell, Armitage, Akira, but thats just a matter of personal taste. I know a ton of people that are downright annoyed by the SD stuff they do on Rayearth, I personally like it. Some people like Fanservice (gratutious content thats usually sexual in nature) however I don't, and I know a large part of the Anime community are just plain annoyed by shows that are excessive in fanservice. I've never watched DBZ, Yu Gi Oh!, or Street Fighter Alpha. Its like Novels, I don't read Romance novels, but love Tolkien and Rowling type stuff. If its not your bag, don't watch it.
Don't even get me started on Fansubs. How else is Anime supposed to get exposed to this market? I would have never heard of Erementar Gerard if it wasn't for Fansubs. They are not killing the market. Its giving what little market Anime has life. Besides, once an Anime gets released over here, Fansubbing stops immediately, and most responsible Anime fans won't download stuff thats been released.
Sorry, but AKAImBatman your just plain ignorant if you think all Anime is about oversexualized girls and macho men. One of the most popular shows in Japan is Ah My Goddess, and the main character who the Goddess is in love with is a Dork.
-- 4 8 15 16 23 42
The funny part is when they swallow our culture and they regurgitate it right back at us.
"Trigun" is a great example. It's the American Western seen through the eyes of Japanese and then, of course, re-imported back to it's culture of origin for me to watch. It makes me wonder how "Samurai Jack" plays in the land of the rising sun.
TW
I will admit that there is a lot of crap out there, but believe me we are not getting the 'cream of the crop'... Look at some of the crap that's shown on the cable channels over the last couple of years: Beyblade? Ultimate Muscle? Don't make me laugh.
What we need is some more of the decent animes like Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and Last Exile (That thank god has finally made it's way over here to the UK) to make their way over here with decent Dubs, accurate subs and decent prices... £20+ is NOT a acceptable for a DVD with 3, 20 minute episodes. Thats what, £180+ for a 26 Episode series? Ridiculous! And what about series like Inuyasha? Well over £1000...It's just not viable.
And besides, in my honest opinion, my experience shows that fansubbers generally produced a higher quality and more accurate translation that most of the DVD releases have. Why should we pay for something of lower quality?
Having watched numerous imports thanks to my college's midnight anime club (tho I'm still a newb by msot of their standards, some of those guys learned to speak japanese from watching so much anime!!) I can say that, yes, a ton of it is full of those stereotypes, but honestly, have you watched american cartoons lately? Fully half of it is spinoffs of PPGs and Pokemon. Look, you have to sort through a bunch of crap to find the gems like GITS, Akira, Evangelion, Lain, etc. but that's true of any genre. You can't just say 'well the 1% to 5% I've seen has all these stereotypes so the rest must too!' Part of the issue is that alot of the hardcore anime american audience do enjoy those types of anime (otaku anyone?), so that's what they tend to demand and therefore is what gets imported. As far as fansubbing goes I think as others have said the problem will mostly go away when the studios just realize that the fansubs exist because of demand - provide that product and the fansubs will go away, or move on to the next thing the audience is demanding.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
It seems like you simply haven't been exposed to some of the great Anime out there and are using the poorly dubbed filth on Cartoon Network as the basis for your argument. Sorry, but if you think Anime is "Dragon Ball Z" or "Sailor Moon", clearly you need more exposure to it.
However, this isn't entirely your fault. A lot of this ignorance has to do with American culture in general. One of the major reasons that 99% of the anime out there isn't shown on Cartoon Network is because it doesn't conform to what's "socially acceptable" in the United States. Great shows like Outlaw Star were first stripped of their original voice acting, and then butchered of entire episodes because they revolved around "adult" material that the fat cats at Cartoon Network did not consider to be appropriate for children.
A lot of the anime out there would most likely shock 80% (figure pulled out of ass) of American mothers to tears. There would be so many lawsuits and complaining that Cartoon Network would run into a corner and try to disappear to protect itself from the hordes of broom-weilding angry mothers.
Over the years American children have been steadily conditioned into stupidity and happy fairy tail lands where battles are not fought by people but by little creatures called "Pokemon", and I'll be damned if I ever see a single speck of blood on ol' Pikachu even though he was just smacked by 200 tons of solid rock.
Americans would best understand the nature of Anime if they thought of it as "cartoons for mature people" (even though a lot of it is watched by children in Japan). My suggestion to you would be to search Netflix or something similar (or *cough*bittorrent*cough*) and grab yourself a few DVDs of shows and movies like "Princess Mononoke", "Full Metal Alchemist", "Hellsing", "Cowboy Bebop" and "Spirited Away".
Best. Webhost. Ever. Dreamhost.
I run an anime club in Florida. Florida has 4 good sized anime conventions a year (3000+ attendees.) Our club has about 1500 members. If it weren't for fansubs there would be a very small fraction of anime fans and releases.
Fansubs are the primary avenue we find out about series, become attached to them, and subsequently buy them as they are released. We're ravenous. We buy the dvds even if we have the fansubs. We buy action figures, posters, art books, etc. Most of the members are college kids without a lot of money, and they still buy.
I can't tell you how many times I've been at a convention, talking to directors of american releases (usually voice actors themselves,) or employees of distribution companies about fan subs. The vast majority download them and watch them themselves. Their take on it is "don't buy them, don't buy bootlegs, don't seek them out after the show is licensed and airing/available here."
I can't think of any better marketing research than looking at what's popular in fansubs.
Yeah, some people will download a fansub, and not buy the show. Some maliciously, some not. Most cases people just check the show out, don't like it, so don't buy it.
Very important to every aspect of media piracy in this information age:
Just because someone "steals" something over the internet doesn't mean they would have bought it had they not been able to download it.
I wonder, sometimes, why they don't just work out a deal for advertising in fansubs. Let the fansubs continue with the stipulation that ads are included and have the advertising pay for the content. The means of distrobution is already there and there's no reason to pay for it. Hell, they could even take fansubs, if done well, pay the subbers a small amount and then distribute that on DVD as an ad-free version.
I think the industry is shooting itself in the foot.
I would buy much more anime if most disks had 5 or more episodes per DVD.
I do download a naruto and bleach, and I could see myself paying $0.50 an episode (and gladly uploading till I got to a 1.00 share rating)
But to pay $25 for a disk with 3 episodes. Give me a break, after I skip the intro and endings thats 60 minutes of content. I expect a 'movies worth'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
Despite the fact that anime is wildly overpriced in America, with some 26 episode series costing as much as $200 or $300 after you've collected all of the eight to ten DVDs in the series (what casual fan would pay for this?), the quality is still very low.
Take the $200 Zeta Gundam box set, for instance. You can see in every single episode that the subs are off. In one scene, a character looks at a giant robot with surprise and clearly says, in a heavy Japanese accent, "Gundam... Mark II?!", but in the subs, he says, "It's a Gundam?" And sure enough, if you change the language from Japanese to English, the dubbed voice says, "It's a Gundam?", because that's what fits the character's mouth movements. This means that in a $200 box set, no one even bothered to spend the money on proper subtitles, and in longer conversations, you can see that the meaning is completely lost in the translation. In another scene, a character making a longer speech says the word "Newtype" three times, but the subs never even mention it. Kind of important when the entire series revolves around newtypes and many characters' personalities are defined by the fact that they're a newtype.
The number of times that's happened in a fansub? Zero. In all of the fansubs I've watched, I've never seen as many blatant mistranslations as I have in a DVD box set from Bandai that I paid $200 for. And the same goes for other companies, as well. Obviously no one even spellchecked ADV's Bubblegum Crisis 2040 DVDs, because there are at least five or six typos in every DVD's subtitles. That's the sort of thing that would never get past 90% of fansub groups, because they'd be afraid of looking like idiots, but ADV and Bandai don't seem to be very afraid of making you feel like an idiot for buying their product.
So between lower quality, a higher price, and a generally narrower selection of titles, it's not really worth watching US anime DVDs. Not just versus watching fansubs, but versus most other things you could do with your time.
"Trigun" is a great example. It's the American Western seen through the eyes of Japanese and then, of course, re-imported back to it's culture of origin for me to watch. It makes me wonder how "Samurai Jack" plays in the land of the rising sun.
Then again, some of the best cowboy movies ever made, which Trigun draws from, were American & Italian adaptations of Akira Kurasawa's samurai movies, so it's all one big delicious pot of stew when you get right down to it.
(For those who missed the reference: "The Magnificent Seven" was remake of "Seven Samurai", and "A Fist Full of Dollars" was a remake of "Yojimbo.")
Oh, and Kurasawa himself often returned the favor. "Ran" was a samurai remake of "King Lear."
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Either there's something fundamentally more universal about our culture or there's something fundamentally more universal about our movies.
Or, far more likely, the Japanese are more open to other cultures than Americans are.
That's not intended as flame. Most of us who live in America grew up in a country with entire oceans separating us from anybody who's all that cultrually different from us. Canada? Mexico? I defy you to tell Northern Minnesota from Southern Ontario without looking closely at the street signs and money. Ditto South Texas vs. Mexico.
Apart from immigration (mostly by people trying to get the fuck away from whatever culture they came from) we don't really get exposed to much outside of our provincial and isolated chunk of the globe.
Japan, on the other hand, is almost within swimming distance of both China and... er.. um... whatever the fuck the former Soviet territory on that side of Asia is calling itself. It's Kamchatka on my Risk board, so I'll call it that. (What do I know about it!? I'm American!)
The reason why everybody watches our movies is that we are pretty good at making movies (or used to be, anyway), and people in a lot of other countries don't mind watching something "foreign" to them.
The reason we don't watch everybody else's movies is because if it's not aimed squarely at the only culture we really understand, we must struggle to "get it."
Anime is a terrific example of this. American animation has some very specific and uniquely American quirks that we don't notice because we are used to them. Nearly every major American animated move release follows the basic structure of a Broadway musical.
In Japan, they don't have broadway musicals. Their animation obviously shows some American influence, but their animated movies often feel a lot more like Asian opera. Everything is very broad and melodramatic. The "huge eyes" serve this purpose perfectly, because drawing expression in the eyes is a very usefull method for showing emotions on a simple line-drawing of a face, and over time they've mastered the technique over there.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Most of us who live in America grew up in a country with entire oceans separating us
You know, that sounds something like Japan.
The japanese are notoriously xenophobic, and often treat foreignors and "ethnic japanese" (the race of people native to the islands now known as Japan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_people) with contempt and racism. The depiction of foreignors in anime (which I admittedly have watched too much of) is almost always negative. This is not to say that all Japanese people are racist and evil, but compared to America it is a VERY homogenous population and culture. I watch a lot of anime, especially fansubbed anime that will prob never see U.S. release, but Im sick of the anime nerd's japan is better in every way mentality, because its just not true. America is called "the world's melting pot" for a reason, we have welcomed people from every country in the world to America, and we have very liberal immigration policies. Maybe the fact that we are the result of mixing cultures from all over the world gives our exported tv and movies wide appeal and the fact that anime is the product of a more closed culture with lots of completely inexplicable cultural quirks. If it was just americans are closed minded then anime should be taking off in other countries like hollywood movies are, yet we see the same thing, anime forms a niche market.
You know, I live in Lafayette, IN. I am friends with people who attend anime conventions like ACEN. I do use bittorrent to download anime. I look all over for anime shops to buy good japanese DVDs with subtitles OF THE EPISODES I HAVE ALREADY DOWNLOADED! I travel to Indianapolis regularly. In fact, for about a year, I went there at least once a week. I even recently went there to buy a vehicle. Yet, I have never heard of your store.
Surely being in the business you have to know that college and high-school kids are going to be your biggest market. Here I am at Purdue University, a very large Big Ten university, only 45 minutes away from Indy, and I have never seen an advertisement on any of our bulletin boards for your store. I don't make it to Bloomington very often, but it's not that far away from Indy either and I am willing to bet you advertised there as much as you did at Purdue.
Im not trying to insult you by what I said above, but I am actually a little upset. The day I find out about an anime store near me that may have a potentially good line-up of DVDs, I find that it's closing. For god's sake, advertise! Most kids I know around Purdue go to Chicago frequently for things like movies and concerts and shopping. Indy is a lot closer than Chicago and I know way too many people into anime around here. You missed your target audience.
I know one of the major arguments is that college kids have no money. Don't let that white lie discourage you from taking their money. They haave more than they know what to do with (most of them, anyway) and they WANT to spend it. I work full time, yet I am amazed at how often these kids can afford to go out drinking. I can't afford to drink that much and I don't have any major expenses (minus a car payment and rent.) Your audience consists of the two Big Ten universities flanking your city as well as the other universities nearby: Ball State, ISU. You need to reach out to them as if you are local to them because in the eyes of college kids, you are.
And hey, any chance you may stay open two more days? I get paid once a month and that happened today. I see your website hours are Mon - Sat 11-7. It's too late to make it there now and actually do any shopping in your store. But, I can leave straight from work tomorrow or even go down Saturday. I'll tell my anime friends (er, read "friends who like anime") and we'll get down their and buy shit.
May I present you with some examples of animes where women/girls are not portrayed as weak and mindless.
These are not some obscure animes, they constitute the majority of what I have seen so far.
Likewise, I can't make an analogy with the American movie/series culture repetitivness, since I'm too deeply immersed in that, too. However, to make another analogy: To the unimmersed, any given operating system looks more or less the same (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux with GNOME or KDE, what's the difference?), but to those of us who are immersed in computer culture, we can discuss the difference of details that mere mortals wouldn't notice even if they were explicitly pointed out.
The think that worders me is why Japanese DVD normally haven't subtitles, even in Japanese itself.
I think adding an English subtitles track doesn't cost very much, and permits english readers to BUY the original DVD instead of forcefully use fansubs.
This maybe will impact the sublicensing on
other countries, but the sublicensed version
could have dubbed audio or different extras,
and has to be of good quality.