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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."
... 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?
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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)
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.
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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.
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.
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(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...
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?
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make install -not war
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.
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.
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.
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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
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".
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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.
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.
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.