While I was at a panel at AnimeNEXT last Saturday, I received a series of press release emails from FUNimation on the latest license acquisitions they had just announced at a convention in Texas. Among them was the currently on-air anime series We Without Wings.

“Why?” I ask myself out loud after reading that.

“Huh?” asks my girlfriend sitting next to me. I show her the email on my iPhone. “Oh…. why would they license that?”

I look over the email a little more trying to figure it out. I pressed the reply button to send an email back to Jackie Smith, FUNi’s PR manager and my contact within the company.

Dear Jackie,

Why?

-Scott

I almost sent the email as just that, but I realized that she probably wouldn’t be able to give me a response to such a rude and condescending question. So I deleted the message and left it at that, but the question has still continued to ponder in my head ever since.

The reason for my bafflement is not just because I don’t like the series. FUNimation has licensed a ton of shows that I don’t particularly find all that enjoyable. But in those situations, I can usually find some logical reason why the series would appeal to an otaku audience different from myself. However, I just can’t find that logic with We Without Wings, especially while the series is still on air.

The oddness starts from the show itself. We Without Wings features a massive cast of characters and begins with multiple, seemingly unconnected story lines. It is a style reminiscent of Durarara and its spiritual predecessor Baccano. The idea is that while the series may start off confusing and incomprehensible, it will gradually make sense to the viewer as the many characters begin to cross paths with each other and their stories begin to come together.

So I watched the first episode of We Without Wings and quickly noticed that it shared the same structure as Durarara or Baccano. But unlike Durarara or Baccano, I did not enjoy it. The jokes fell flat, the characters were unoriginal, the individual stories were not interesting by themselves, and all of the fan service was heavily censored in order to sell DVDs.

But I still thought that somehow this would all pay off once the stories started coming together. So I kept watching it on Crunchyroll week after week, just hoping that things will start to click in the next episode. But that click never happened, and when the stories started to come together, it became obvious that this series was not going to get any better as a result of it. So I gave up and dropped the series about 8 or 9 episodes in.

And then a week later, FUNimation announces that they were bringing it to America. And it is not just a streaming video deal, they’re committing to a full Blu-ray and DVD release of the series.

Where’s the demand? What’s the market?

The timing of this acquisition is particularly strange. The series is not finished yet, there are still a few episodes left. Even with a lame beginning, if the series ends up with an amazing conclusion, then maybe it would find a dedicated audience looking to own the entire set on DVD. But that hasn’t happened yet. There isn’t that demand.

Are they planning to sell it on fan service alone? Well, even though we don’t know what the show is like uncensored, I don’t believe that it particularly focuses on fan service. The point of the series is the Durarara narrative, and it just occasionally throws in a bit of T&A in a blatant unsubtle way. There are plenty of fan service series out there that will appeal to that audience far better than this.

When it comes down to it, We Without Wings is just a crappy visual novel adaptation pretending to be smarter than it really is. We’ve seen enough of it to know that it is not the next Durarara, and history has proven that visual novel adaptations just do not sell well in America.

So why did FUNimation decide to license and release it here?

I just don’t know, peeps. I just don’t know.

You know, I never review new-from-Japan anime series on this blog because everyone and their mother blogs about the newest anime episodes as soon as they hit the bittorrents. But Ed Sizmore of Comics Worth Reading requested to hear my impressions of one of my favorite series this season, Chu-Bra. Ed watched the first episode last night and was absolutely appalled by what he saw.

Ed’s main hangup on the series is with its over-sexualization of adolescent children. The characters are portrayed as just beginning Japanese middle school, which would place them as 7th graders, or 12-year-olds, at the start of the story. However, I think that Ed and most viewers are completely misunderstanding what type of appeal the series is intending to go for. And because they can’t see past this misconception, they’re missing out one of the better anime series to have come out in recent years.

I’m a fan of bishojo, or “pretty girl,” anime series. For the most part, this genre tends to have similar designs for all of their female characters regardless of their age. The bishojo – from elementary school girls to full blown adult women – all have innocent faces with big doe eyes, and they tend to also have petite frames and short stature. This creates the allusion of a girl who always appears to be young, healthy, and energetic, which is a very unrealistic notion because all girls eventually grow older and eventually lose their young looks. But in the fictional world of anime, these girls never age, so we become numb to this concept of aging and just enjoy the characters for their youthful visual appeal.

So saying the characters of Chu-Bra are 12-years-old holds no ground in real world logic of attraction because real life people look nothing like the ageless bishojo. Also, how could a bishojo possibly look like she was in middle school when she would have looked the exact same way if the story claimed her to be in high school or older?

We see this contradiction right there in the series. One of the “adolescent” lead characters, Haruka, has the body and figure of a fully matured adult woman. Meanwhile, the only “adult” bishojo character, the gym teacher Tamaki, looks just as young as her adolescent students. Age is completely irrelevant in this genre of anime, so you can’t waste all your time thinking about it those ways.

But one thing that Ed is correct in assuming is that there is a highly sexualized tone to the series. Chu-Bra is supposed to be a very sexy show meant to be enjoyed by mature men. However, the sex appeal doesn’t come from the fact that it’s about middle school girls. It comes from the fact that it’s all about female underwear!

By constantly showing females in their bra and panties, Chu-Bra is using the same sex appeal that you’ll find in any lingerie photo spread or Victoria Secret catalog. There’s no fetish in that, men simply like seeing girls in their underwear. It’s something I’ve been quite fond of beginning way early in my adolescence, and I don’t think this interest is going to go away any time soon.

The age isn’t sexy because you can’t equate bishojo character designs into the real world, but you sure as hell can equate bra and panties to their real life counterparts. And that’s where the true sex appeal emerges from this series.

Now, if you can take the time to look past all the fan service and silliness, you will see that the idea of 12-year-old girls just starting off middle school actually plays a key part in the plot of the show. This came as a big shock to me as I was expecting there to be no point to a show about girls’ underwear. But there is a point to this setting, and it’s one of the most interesting topics I’ve ever seen an anime series try to cover.

Chu-Bra, at its core, is a fairly serious look at girls facing a problem that we all did during the age when we switched from elementary to middle school. The lead characters go from being children to suddenly being surrounded by teenagers who have matured greatly through puberty. It becomes a very awkward and unfamiliar time in their lives, and the girls become self aware of their own bodies in relation to their peers.

And not surprisingly, the girls are not happy with the way they look.

You get both sides of this common adolescent problem right there within the main cast. On the one hand, you have the character of Yako. She has become sexually aware of herself, but her body has yet to physically mature. So she goes into denial of her own puberty by refusing to wear a bra, because that would be a reminder that she’s supposed to have developed full breasts like the rest of her classmates have. And on the other hand, you have Haruka, who’s body has already fully mature beyond most girls of her age. However, she is not yet ready to accept all the attention she’s now getting from the boys around her, so she hides her body whenever she can.

The only character that’s totally happy with her body is the lead girl, Nayu, who has yet to enter that stage of puberty. She serves as the positive voice of reason, and reminds the other girls to always be happy with the way they look no matter what size or shape they may be. But at the same time, we start watching Nayu also gradually enter adolescence as she becomes friends with Hiroki, a male classmate. As each episode goes by, we see her blissful happiness fade away as she becomes more confused and worried over these new feelings.

Just like we all were at that age.

So yes, the age of the characters is a major part of the appeal of the series, but it’s not THAT kind of appeal. There is a clear disconnect from the serious plot of girls struggling with puberty and the blatant sexuality of the series. As I wrote on this blog last week, all the fan service in the world won’t save an anime series unless it has a decent plot to keep it going. Chu-Bra is a fantastic coming-of-age story wrapped up in a sexy and comical package, and I think writing it off as being pure lolicon fodder is doing it a major disservice.

Originally posted on December 28, 2006, almost exactly three years ago:

Buzz was generating through out all of last week as a mysterious website popped onto the internets. The simple page made promises that the popular anime series, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, was being licensed in the US. The website only claimed that “The world as we know it will end” that Friday. But for those looking around, one could find hidden messages to decrypt written in the website’s source code. The popular news website AnimeOnDVD.com also played along by highlighting of the letters SOS written on their posts. The hype was big, and many started to speculate who was behind the mystery.

Well, after my last round of final exams that Thursday night, I checked on the website after midnight to see if the announcement was made. I was on the east coast, but unfortunately, the announcement was going to be made at midnight on the west coast. So I stayed up really late to see that as midnight struck through the different timezones, the website’s source code updated with various messages, including a comedic dialogue between Haruhi and the other members of the Brigade. Finally, when midnight came on the west coast, the website changed with this video:

At first I thought it was a joke. A bunch of fans got together to pull the biggest hoax in anime history. But as the video continued, it became clear that this was no joke. In fact, this was probably one of the most enjoyable marketing campaigns I have ever seen.

Bandai’s idea behind the ASOS Brigade is to reach out to everyone who has already become fans of the series through watching the fansubs. They have created their own amateur-style home movies and are posting them on the internet via streaming video services. They also created a Myspace page and encourage fans to connect with the franchise through social networking.

The movie is done “for fans by fans” style, and they really know how to please their target audience. The movie interlaces Japanese and English dialogue with a Korean-American actress, former Pink Ranger Patricia Ja Lee, playing the lead role, and two Japanese actresses playing her sidekicks. Lee even admits in the film that the Japanese actresses are only meant to appeal to the otaku fanboys. This is a very suitable attitude for the character she portrays, and is even more entertaining when we, the otaku-fanboy audience, realize how true it is.

But the video also dives into other aspects of the online anime community that we weren’t expecting from a company like Bandai. Internet catchphrases like “O Rly?” and “No Wai!” are used through out the video, which are only used by visitors of such otaku-influenced websites like 4chan.org and ytmnd.com. Also, after fans complained over Lee’s choice to translate the word to “psychic” over the word “esper”, a new subtitled version of the video included the fan-preferred word written under the original recording.

And while this Myspace page (like most Myspace pages) is a nightmare to look at, it is actually one of the greatest parts of this campaign. The profile is done through the point of view of the series’ narrator, Kyon, and the blog that is featured on the site is very well written and entertaining.

“Hello to everyone in the States. Haruhi has ordered me to make an American website for a new branch of our club she is forming, the Americans Spreading Excitement All Over the World with Haruhi Suzumiya (ASOS). My name is Kyon, and I am a sophmore at North High School, in Hyoga, Japan. Truth be told, Kyon is a nickname. I suppose that isn’t relevant. In any case, Haruhi Suzumiya, the president of our club has worked out a sponsorship with an American company. In exchange for mentioning the US release of the The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya DVDs, we get supplies for our next student film. I heard it was a box of costumes and a few video tapes. I don’t want to think of what kind of costumes that Haruhi will make poor Asahina wear after the last time. In fact, I never really wanted to join this club in the first place. Well, that doesn’t concern the rest of you.”

And in the latest blog post, Kyon makes references to very fansub-specific ideas, such as torrenting and “raw” video files:

“Haruhi has been in a FIT since we didn’t post the subtitiled version of the video. Asahina grabbed the wrong torr…err…file. Haruhi has been sending me text messages to my cellphone nonstop since then. She just posted a rather angry message on the main http://asosbrigade.com website, so at least I have the link. [...] I thought the raws were fine, but in any case…enjoy!”

And that is where I feel the ASOS Brigade holds its defining characteristic. Many people feel that Haruhi will never sell well in the US because most of the fans have already seen the show through illegal methods. This campaign is an attempt to target the fansub community into actually supporting the series financially when the opportunity is available to them. The movie ends with special thanks to “All fansubs lovers who buy the official DVDs and who help support more creative works,” and specifically gives no thanks to “downloaders/bootlegers who never buy the official DVDs.” This is a very bold statement, but I completely understand where they are coming from.

I fully support Bandai in this campaign, and encourage you all to do the same. This is a fantastic series to get behind, and deserves all the praise and support it can receive. I have never had this much fun over a marketing campaign before, so mad props to all the folks behind it! :-)

Bandai did a similar marketing stunt with their announcement of the Kannagi anime during Otakon weekend earlier this year. And then yesterday, Christmas Day 2009, the ASOS Brigade website sparked back to life. The campaign is now utilizing Facebook and Twitter to promote what appears to be Bandai’s acquisition of Haruhi’s second season and / or spin-off “webisode” series.

Even before I became an anti-piracy advocate, I had a bone to pick when “professional” anime news site Anime News Network began reviewing TV shows that were not legally available in America and could only be obtained through online piracy. The website began doing this to drive up web traffic and to compete with the ever growing number of non-profitable amateur anime blogs. I felt that a website making money from ad revenue shouldn’t be promoting piracy and profiting off of it like this.

On October 1, 2009, ANN once again began posting reviews of anime shows from the Fall 2009 season, some of which are still not legally available in America. So to spread awareness of this horrible profit-off-of-piracy scheme the website has going, I’m reposting my original essay from last year and starting a 30-day boycott of the site on my Twitter feed.

Originally posted on April 16, 2008:

In Search of Number Nine brought up a very good observation last weekend. Why is the popular anime news website, Anime News Network, doing a spring anime preview? The website has dabbled in such articles in the past, usually being written by an anonymous collection of the websites’ writers and presented in one long feature. But this season, they’re going all out with promising 24/7 reporting of all the new shows fresh from Japan. It’s a move that appears to be blending the website with the anime blogging community, and I must say, I think I preferred it if they stayed where they were before…

Anime News Networks promotes “24-7″ coverage of new anime shows

Now, I have a lot of respect for the Anime News Network. I’ve been visiting their site for as long as I’ve been an anime fan, which has to be a least 7 years now. I read every one of their articles religiously to find out what’s happening in the American anime industry. They have been my inspiration for anime journalism, and the reason why I’m doing this little website of mine as a hobby. One of my proudest moments of blogging was having one of my posts picked up by them a couple of years ago.

But I think one of the reasons why I love them is because they aren’t anime bloggers over there. They’re the media, they’re professionals. They are the ones at the anime conventions with the “press” badges while I am the one without one.  I have always seen their events correspondent, Mr. Mikhail Koulikov, at every con I go to, and he gives off this vibe of sophistication. He quietly sits near the front, jotting down notes in a tiny notepad, and only raises his hand to ask the panelists the most obscure questions. Compare that to me, loudly typing away at the Mac laptop in front of me, clapping and wooting over any mention of some moé title, and asking the same ol’ questions about digital distribution. There is a difference between the pros of ANN and the amateurs of blogging.

No offense, of course, to any of you other bloggers out there. ;-)

It’s that kind of professionalism that gives ANN its reputation as being one of the biggest, if not the biggest, anime media outlet in America. In my view, anime news simply does not break until it breaks on ANN. The website is a major asset to the entire industry, and that gives them a whole lot of responsibility and heavy weight to throw around.

For the most part, they treat this responsibility quite well. Their news reporting is completely unbiased, and they report the facts accurately backed up with reliable sources. Their editorial content, while still opinionated, has always been very fair and balanced, and always allowed that American industry to showcase their wares. But up until recently, they have held a fairly respectable stance on the subject of fansubs and illegal downloads. They reported on news of take-down notices and consequences, and when pressed on the issue, would honestly talk about how such activities negatively effect the industry they report on.

That’s purely out of respect for the niche market that is their livelihood. The website relies on the industry just as much as the industry relies on the website. But the moment that ANN comes out and begin to openly support fansubbing, they turn their back on the industry and step into that shady morally gray world that we, the bloggers, live in.

As much as we all do it, fansubbing is still illegal. A necessary evil is still evil. It has become a sour note in the industry because it is the reason why most of us aren’t buying DVDs anymore.  By presenting these 24-7 reviews of anime episodes fresh off the bittorent, ANN has advocating the practice of illegal downloading. It’s a move that I believe should not have been made, and I’m very disappointed in ANN because of it.

But even beyond the moral issue of turning their back to the industry, the editorial staff has even shown signs of being hypocritical in their policy. They feel that in order to counter balance their new advocating of fansubs, they must also preach violently against it. ANN Executive Editor Zac Bertschy recently did a brutal interview with one of the folks who run the video sharing site Crunchyroll. If you can stomach to read through this gore-fest of journalism, you will find that one of the key points of Bertschy is so adamant in discussing is the fact that Crunchyroll is potentially profiting from fansubs and pirated videos. Bertschy’s point is that this is the reason why the video service is so rotten and evil.

And yet the ANN has no problem with fully pimping out their “24/7″ fansub reviews, which they will also eventually profit off of with ad revenue on the site.

And what probably disturbed me the most was how last week’s episode of the ANN comic, Anime News Nina, starts off with the characters talking about watching fansubs…

The comic then turns out to be an editorial piece in which they justify that their fansub watching habits are better and more ethical than this particular “Narutard”’s fansub watching. Their message is “fansubbing is okay as long as you by a DVD every once in a while.” Coincidentally, this is an argument I have also made before. I still very much believe in this ideal, and I’ll fight for it for as long as I can. But there is something very wrong about reading this message on ANN like this.

So why is that? What’s the difference between the ANN preaching it and myself?

It’s simple:

I’m just some ranting a-hole with a blog, and they are the freaking Anime News Network!!!

I’m no professional journalist, I’m a software engineer. I don’t have any weight on the industry, and I have not built up years of respectable, unbiased reporting. And as much as I dabble in advertisement, I have yet to make a cent off of this blog. I’m just a fan giving my commentary and views, calling it like I see it, and leaving it out in the open for anyone who wants to read it. I’m no where near the level of ANN or other major anime websites.

So why is ANN so eager to stoop down to my level?

Maybe the line between the pros of ANN and the amateurs of anime blogging is truly starting to blur. This professional media organization is going too keep on going into that morally gray world by advocating the use of illegal fansubs and even posting their reviews of them, and all the while making a living off of ad revenue. Who knows, maybe they might start serving up links to bittorrent trackers some day.

And yet the irony is that I, the amateur a-hole with poor grammar, will finally have that press badge starting this summer at the major east-coast conventions. ANN and I will finally be on that same playing field. While I’m happy that the bloggers are still moving up in the world, I wish it didn’t have to come with the downgrading of a once respectable media.

Here’s hoping that the ANN will stick with reporting the news and commentary of the domestic market, and leave the dirty work to the unwashed masses.

I should note that since posting this essay, the “I have yet to make a cent off of this blog” line is no longer true. I have actually made money off of my blog… around $25 in total over the past year. This all came from Amazon.com referrals when my readers bought legal copies of the legal anime and manga titles I review on this blog.

I have also had one-on-one conversations with all of the ANN staff members named in this post on this very subject. After talking to them, I confidently stand by my accusation that the website is profiting off of illegal fansub viewing.

Hey otaku, did you hear that Disney bought Marvel?

It’s an acquisition that has been the subject of many jokes and ridicule from the snarky community of the online peanut gallery.

Disney has been known for generations as the people behind the world’s most popular cartoon characters and family friendly kiddy fair. Most recently, the company has been striking major success with targeting the prepubescent female demographic, or “tweens” as it’s been called, with series like Lizzy McGuire, Hannah Montana, and the Jonas Brothers.

The acquisition of the major comic book company seemed completely random to the fanboy community as Marvel has very little to do with Mickey Mouse or Hannah Montana. So most, if not all, of the comments from that peanut gallery had to do with how Disney would change these super hero franchises in order to target these inappropriate demographics.

Otaku themselves had their own mini version of the Marvel acquisition when Viz Media announced that the popular Naruto Shippuden series would begin airing on the new TV network Disney XD. Naruto, a fairly violent action series targeted towards boys, seemed to also go against the ideal of Disney being the squeaky clean outlet for little kids and tweens. So once again came the snark of how Disney will ruin the popular anime franchise.

But if we nerds would take the time to stop ragging on Mickey Mouse and Hannah Montana for a second or two, we’d actually see that they might be on to something with this Disney XD channel.

In fact, Disney XD could be to anime in the upcoming decade what the Cartoon Network was to anime in the past decade.

Disney XD launched last February as a network purely aimed at boys aged 8-14, i.e. no girls allowed. No Hannah Montana. No Jonas Brothers. None of that girly stuff. Instead, we got a new original series from Disney called Aaron Stone, a sci-fi action show about a teenager who gets to live out the life of a video game hero in real life. The reaction to the show has been great, and the network is in the process of creating more original action programming for boys.

To fill up the rest of the 24-hours in this brand new network, Disney had acquired the rights to air many reruns of young male oriented programing from the past few decades. X-men, Spider-man, Pinky and the Brain, Gargoyles…

Gargoyles, people! Gargoyles!

If you were a young boy in the 90’s, you’d know that Gargoyles was the most bad ass cartoon they ever dared to air on TV. In fact, a lot of the current programming on the network are reruns of the shows we all obsessed over growing up. Now a whole new generation of boys are able to check out these “classics” of Saturday morning TV.

This is the reason why the company bought out Marvel. It’s not to ruin the franchises with “Wolverine meets Hannah Montana”, it’s to grow out this new network with all the same type of cartoons that we used to – and probably still do – love. If it didn’t have the Mickey Mouse stigma attached to it, Disney XD would be a total fanboy’s paradise.

And initial ratings seem to indicate that it is working and that boys actually do love the network. So the move to add Naruto Shippuden to the network is going to introduce these kids to anime, which will probably lead to a new generation of American otaku.

A lot of otaku of my generation will talk about Cartoon Network’s “Toonami” animation block as their gateway into the medium. The channel’s heavily edited broadcasts of Dragon Ball Z, Tenchi Muyo, and Sailor Moon can be cited as a catalyst of the big anime boom at the start of the century. But Cartoon Network has been pulling away from anime in recent years, and gave the axe to Toonami on September 20, 2008.

Just the right time for Disney XD to take over that demographic.

So my fellow anime fans, get over the Mickey Mouse / Hannah Montana complex. Open your eyes to this amazing new network Disney is putting together full of action, sci-fi, superheroes, and soon, anime. They’re about to raise a whole new generation of fanboys, and 10 years from now, they may look back to Naruto on Disney XD the same way we look back at DBZ on Toonami.

Yesterday, Reed Exhibitions announced that for 2010, both the New York Anime Festival and the New York Comic Con will combine for one massive convention. While some people seemed to be aware of this news for some time, it was the first I ever heard of it. And I must say, I had some very mixed feelings about it.

I’ll make no bones about it, of all the conventions I have attended in the past few years, my favorite has always been the NYAF followed closely by the NYCC. I fill up my Twitter feed with news of each con leading up to it, and I write nothing but gushing reports about them afterwards. It’s not just for hometown pride, it’s because of the wonderful folks in charge of them.

The local anime scene in New York City was dead following the final Big Apple Anime Film Festival in 2003. If otaku wanted to go to an anime con, they had to travel out of state. But when Reed Exhibition hired former Central Park Media employee Peter Tatara as their lead program manager for their new east coast conventions, we saw a massive resurgence of anime and otaku culture in the city that never sleeps.

Reed Expo debuted the first annual New York Comic Con in 2006 to an impressive 33,000 in attendance. While the con featured all aspects of nerd culture, there was more than enough anime and manga-related content for the NYC otaku. Then with Tatara at that helm, they added the New York Anime Festival to the line-up in late 2007. The NYAF debuted with over 15,000 in attendance, instantly making it the third largest anime convention in America.

So not only has New York had the honor of having two large conventions to look forward to every year, but Tatara would also organize the occasional otaku-centric events at the midtown Kinokunya bookstore all year around – ranging anywhere from Haruhi Day to Lolita Day to Occult Day to the upcoming Eureka Seven Day in a little over a week from now. Ever since the NYAF has come to town, we have had plenty to look forward to around here.

But there has been one thing that has become apparent in recent years, and that is that the New York Comic Con was growing into this huge beast of an event. While the Anime Fest has seen a moderate growth in attendance like any other anime convention, the Comic Con has grown nearly 50% in size every year. We saw it grow to 77,000 last April with Saturday and Weekend passes selling out. As popular as the Anime Fest was, it was clearly being dwarfed by the Comic Con.

With the popularity of the San Diego Comic Con on the west coast and now the New York Comic Con on the east coast, Reed decided to lay stake in bringing a similar comic con to mid-America. In April 2010, Tatara and the rest of the team will be holding the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (C2E2) in the windy city and hopefully recapturing the success they’ve had in New York. This timeframe would be usually set for NYCC, so for this year, the NYCC will be bumped to take place in the fall, the time that we would normally be having the NYAF.

So where did this leave NYAF? Being the third largest anime con in America is nothing to take lightly, but when you compare it to the scale of NYCC and potentially C2E2, it clearly takes least priority. So after much uncertainty, they finally came up with a solution: merging the two New York conventions into one massive con.

According to the announcement, on October 8-10, 2010, the Javits Center will host both NYAF and NYCC. In the past, each con has only taken up a fraction of the convention center while other trade shows took place on the other side. This year, the two cons will take up the entire venue – NYAF on one side, NYCC on the other, and a big ass dealer’s room between them. Although programming and scheduling will run independently between the two cons, attendees will only pay one price to have access to both sides and the dealer’s room.

But is this really a merge between the two cons, or is this just hiding the fact that the New York Anime Festival is gone?

To me, this looks like all they did was simply expand the New York Comic Con to fill out the entire Javits Center, which was something that was eventually going to happen anyway with it’s 50% growth rate every year. And the NYCC always had plenty of anime / manga related activities going on every year. The new “merge” might add some new otaku activities that would not normally be at the NYCC, maybe even double it. But really, all they’re doing with this merge is moving all the j-pop culture stuff into one side of the venue.

And it’s not like we otaku were lacking much to do at the con before. One of the great things about the NYCC was that when I wasn’t covering the otaku events, I was able to check out some non-anime things like video games, Hollywood, or TV show panels. By concentrating all the anime-focus panels to run along side all the non-anime panels at the same time rather than on separate weekends, I’m almost certain I’ll never get to see anything on the other side of the Javits.

So you can have either the NYCC or the NYAF, but with both awesome events at the same time, I don’t think you can have both. There’s too much conflict and overlap. And since I’m focused on the world of Japanese pop culture, I’m afraid it’s the Comic Con side of the merge that I’ll have to say goodbye to from now on.

So long, NYCC, my second favorite convention. It was fun while it lasted. (T_T)

But perhaps the C2E2 will replace the NYCC for me. Because of all the great cons I have experienced with Reed Exhibitions in New York, I am committing myself to taking the plane to Chicago for it’s debut this April. I’m actually really excited about going to it. But it’s just sad that it had to come with the loss of one of the great New York City conventions.
—-

Update: The man himself, Peter Tatara, emailed me about the merge:

Just read your NYAF/NYCC merger write up. […] While, yeah, there are concerns, there are also a lot of good things that will come from it.  Two of the biggest being bigger guests for NYAF as the rock stars of the anime and manga worlds will find a show with all the press and attendees of NYCC a lot more attractive than NYAF as it exists presently – and moving NYAF’s Masquerade into the 3,000 seat IGN Theater.  Further, bringing NYAF and NYCC together during the same time means it’ll be exposing NYAF and anime culture to a lot more mainstream press.  CNN, NPR, the New York Times, etc. are always at NYCC, and for them to finally see an anime event is a very good thing.

I do realize that the NYAF could benefit a lot from popularity and publicity that the connected NYCC would bring. However, I still believe that the anime section will be vastly overshadowed by the comic con section.

I’ll talk to Peter more about this at the NYAF two weeks from today, so you can bet I’ll have more to write about with this subject in the near future.

But I think a lot of folks sort of missed the one part of Ju-den Chan that I found the most interesting and shocking of the whole series-

The anti-piracy warning at the start of each episode.

Warning messages are something that anime fans have gotten used to for well over a decade. In late 1997, an episode of Pokémon featured a strobe effect that caused hundreds of children to feel dizzy and then be rushed to the hospital.

While only a small fraction of those children actually suffered from epileptic seizures, the “Pokémon Shock” caused a wide spread panic across the country that demanded anime be safe and sanitized for the sake of the public. So strobe effects were no longer used in the medium from that point on, and many TV shows began with the following warning message:

“Please be sure to watch anime in a well lit room and at a safe distance away from the TV.”

Of course, I guess if you were to watch anime on the big screen in a darken movie theater, you were probably doomed to just break into seizures right there in your seat. ;-)

It was a ridiculous warning for an overreaction to an isolated incident, but these warning messages became a staple in anime culture since then. And while some series just brushed it off with some text on the screen, other series had fun with it.

Both Full Moon and Hayate the Combat Butler had a little skit at the start of each episode showing one character advising the other to move away from their TV sets. The series School Rumble, on the other hand, actually made a parody of the warning by having its characters suddenly bring it up in odd and comical moments before each episode.

But it’s been well over a decade since the Pokémon Shock, and there has not been a single case of children suffering from epileptic seizures since then, so the need for a warning has started to fade away from public concern. Apparently it’s been replaced by a new issue currently plaguing the Japanese anime industry.

The Charger Girl warnings are very similar to School Rumble’s seizure warnings. Every episode, a different character, usually in a sexy or provocative way, says something to the effect of:

“Lately, many people have been downloading their TV shows over the internet without the right holders’ permission. Distribution via the internet or bootlegs is illegal. Please remember that.”

It’s rather direct and to the point, and it really stands out given the sexy way the characters say it. But does the message get out to the people that need to hear it?

Well, when I asked the Twitter community what they thought of the warnings, many appeared to be unaware of what I was talking about. It seems the “raw” video of each episode that was originally uploaded to the internet had the warning message edited out. So when the many fans download the fansub illegally later on, they never get to see the message at all.

So right now, it looks like the warning is simply preaching to the choir that is already watching the show in a legal and legitimate matter. But it still provides evidence that the Japanese are well aware of the piracy problem, and they are now publicly denouncing it for the world to see. This disproves the common fan belief that the original Japanese companies don’t care about piracy so it’s perfectly fine to download it.

I’ll be interested to see how many other shows begin to display these anti-piracy warnings before each episode. Perhaps in a year or two, they will become just as common and recognizable in the anime community as the seizure warnings have been for the past decade.

“Why are they spending so much time talking about Kannagi?”

“The show’s still unlicensed, right? What’s the point?”

“Do they want the fans to pressure American distributors to license it?”

“Do they really expect us to get hyped over this series at this point?”

I was reminded of another industry panel last year held by the Japanese company Kadokawa. That representative was there to introduce the American fans to new Japanese series and get them to demand it to be licensed in America. The problem with this plan is that since broadband internet had become so widely available in recent years, the fans were already well aware of these new titles and had probably already watched them.

So was Aniplex being just as ignorant as Kadokawa was with this Kannagi business?

“Well, we already had the Kannagi license back at Anime Boston,” says Bandai’s Marketing Director Robert Napton in an interview with me two weeks ago at Otakon. “That was the first time we were coordinating with Aniplex in what to say and what not to say. This has been in the planning stages for a few months.”

It wasn’t an act of ignorance on behalf of the Japanese company this time. It was the initial step in one the largest marketing ploys that the US anime industry has seen in years. And from the point of view of this blogger, I thought it was a tremendous success.

Setup and Execution

Looking back, it would seem like the writing was on the wall the whole time. In the weeks that followed Anime Boston, an English language website sprung up that paid tribute to Nagi, the lead female protagonist in Kannagi. When Otakon announced that anime director Yutaka Yamamoto would be a guest at the convention this year, they put a huge emphasis on his work on Kannagi and encouraged the press to post up a picture of this anime series in particular. This seemed very odd considering that Yamamoto’s other credits, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and Lucky Star, were far more popular among American otaku than the unlicensed Kannagi was.

OMG It’s Coming!

Then a mysterious ad appeared on the Anime News Network linking to a countdown under the title “OMG, It’s Coming!” The countdown was set to go off the day before Otakon, so we figured it was related to that event. The connection became apparent when the English Kannagi website announced a major announcement to come at the same time the OMG countdown was set to go down. The ASOS Brigade website, a marketing campaign that Bandai had executed years ago with the license announcement of Haruhi, updated with messages mocking the OMG countdown for being an unoriginal idea.

So we could put the pieces together to figure out that Bandai would be announcing the Kannagi license the day before Otakon, but no one ever saw the massive scope of this announcement coming. When the countdown reached zero, the Anime News Network began streaming the first two episodes of the series for free on their website. And on top of that, Bandai had an exclusive partnership with online retailer Right Stuf International to take orders for the Kannagi DVD and have it shipped out the next day.

Although online streaming has become normal thanks to Crunchyroll and FUNimation, this next day DVD release was completely unprecedented in the American anime industry. As a result, it created quite a stir among anime fans and anime shop owners. With in just one day, Bandai had successfully brought the months-old series back into the fandom’s consciousness and it became the talk of the internet community.

But Bandai continued with this marketing blitz through out the Otakon weekend with special Kannagi panels involving the series’ director Yamamoto. In the dealers room, they shared a booth with Aniplex and invited fans to “share their confessions” online with a team of Kannagi cosplayers. And they even had that same team of cosplayers perform a Kannagi meets Haruhi skit at the convention’s masquerade:

It was an amazing display of brand marketing that weekend, so why did Bandai choose to do it with Kannagi of all series?

“Yamamoto-san has an amazing track record with Haruhi and Lucky Star,” Napton explains. “So we wanted to license Kannagi because we love his work. And at the same time, we’ve been contemplating doing this strategy for a while, so we just felt that it was the right time to do it.”

The Change in Retail

The most striking component to this Kannagi release is the fact that the DVD was released so quickly, and it was only available through one online retailer. Napton explains the reasoning for not going through a more traditional retail channel:

“Obviously the retail market in the US has been struggling. Anime does well, but it’s still a niche market compared to the mass retail situation. So we felt that based on what was going on in the market, it was time to do something a little more focused towards the core anime consumer. Rather then sending it out en-mass to retailers and getting the product returned a few months later, we’d sell a more modest amount to that core consumer.”

The plan is to strike now while the buzz and hype is big for the anime series and fans are more inclined to buy on impulse. Bandai is even sweetening the deal by offering a free t-shirt to fans who buy the first DVD and pre-order the second DVD at the same time. Once the hype is gone and Bandai has squeezed all they can from that core audience, then they’ll start reaching out to a more mainstream market.

“There’s going to be a more mainstream release sometime in 2010, but people should be aware that it’s going to be the exact same DVD we’re selling now at Right Stuf. It still will not include a dub track and will actually have a more expensive retail price. So if you want Kannagi, you should get it now while the price is still low.”

The sub-only release has been a point of confusion from the fans because of how Bandai released Gurren Lagann last year. They had initially release a sub-only version of the show and then later re-released it in a package that included an English dub. Many fans, including myself, were expecting this to be a new marketing strategy that we’d see again with the release of Kannagi.

“That was a very unique case. Initially, we were not planning to dub Gurren Lagann. We acquired the title late from ADV and the fans were already becoming impatient with waiting for the release, so we just got it out there as quickly as possible. The dub only came about later because the Sci-Fi network wanted to broadcast the show on US television, and they require a dub for broadcast. So that was just a unique situation that we really were not planning to do. That wasn’t our strategy.”

The Speed of the Internet

Without the pressure of a traditional TV broadcast, Bandai is completely free to handle the release of Kannagi using nontraditional methods. But this comes as quite of a shock as the company has long since shared the Japanese belief in being very conservative and weary about breaking from tradition and embracing technology. In fact, less then two years ago I was harshly criticizing Bandai’s CEO Ken Iyadomi for his comments denouncing the internet and global distribution.

But this year, Bandai and their Japanese partners have been singing a different tune. “Aniplex was fully supportive of this. We’re all ready to answer the change to the retail market and try out something different with digital distribution.”

ANN Featuring Kannagi Stream

Streaming the series on the Anime News Network “satisfies the other end on our plan. The modern anime fan wants their product quickly because of the internet. So to answer that challenge, not only do we provide a legal video stream of the series the day we announce it, but we make the DVD available the same day as well. We love working with ANN and we believe that they have a great reach towards that audience. So it just made sense to put Kannagi on that site over YouTube or Crunchyrolll.”

This is the second unique license and release from Bandai this year as they started off 2009 with a simulcast of the anime series Kurokami. In another unprecedented move, that series was dubbed into English during the show’s development, and each episode debuted the same day in Japan, Korea, and America in those country’s native language. The problem, however, was that the series was only broadcast on a small cable network in America that was not widely available. Therefore, despite the rush Bandai made to dub the series in sync with Japan, most of the English speaking audience still couldn’t see it.

“There was always going to be a digital component to the Kurokami simulcast, we just couldn’t get the online deal in time for the show’s premier. They were really set for a simultaneous release in Japan, Korea, and the US all at the same time, so we had to settle with a TV-only broadcast when we first launched the show.” About 20 weeks into the series, Bandai finalized the online deal and began streaming the simulcast on YouTube and Crunchyroll alongside the TV broadcast.

Simulcasting has been the buzzword in the industry with in the past few months as FUNimation and many Japanese companies have seriously started to embrace it. But when I asked Napton if they’d pursue another simulcast following Kurokami, I got the impression that this was not the direction Bandai would be going for. “We understand that anime fans demand quickness and immediacy, but we would like to pursue other ways to satisfy this demand. And sure, Kannagi came out in Japan a while ago, but we believe that this new release model will tackle that exact issue.”

The Results?

Napton Filming a Fan for an Online Video

So while the rest of the industry turns towards simulcasts to fix the current changes in the anime market, Bandai is now focusing on this new hype-then-blitz strategy for new releases. Did it work out for them?

Well, I don’t have any figures or statistics to go by, but the response I witnessed with in the internet community was absolutely phenomenal. I saw dozens of the people I follow on Twitter order their copy of Kannagi from Right Stuf with in days of the announcement. I witnessed many fans with me at Otakon buy a copy of the DVD that weekend and get it autographed by Yamamoto himself. And the amazing thing is that many of the fans who were buying this DVD were the fans I rarely see buy DVDs.

In my years of fandom, I have never seen so many people buy the same DVD at the same time like this. And sure enough, Kannagi reached the top of the Right Stuf’s sales chart during the week of this marketing blitz and the pre-sales for the second DVD are still going strong.  And sure, these people are with in just a tiny niche of anime fans, but this is exactly the niche that Bandai was aiming for with this marketing strategy. Whatever Bandai did, it worked, and I believe they successfully reached out to the core audience using as little overhead as possible.

Can Bandai do this again with another series? Well, we’ll just have to wait to find out. But either way, I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next for Bandai and their crazy marketing schemes.

Through out the past several years of my fandom, I have seen a shift in the anime market from fans getting their video on TV and DVD to the underground world of online piracy and downloading. After years of ignoring this audience shift and suffering the loss of DVD revenue because of it, the anime industry has finally embraced new technologies and began experimenting with new digital distribution systems over the internet. That is why I claim that Spring 2009 will always go down as the “Season of the Simulcast” for anime.

But anime is not the only medium experimenting this season. Within the past few weeks, the American manga industry has started claiming its own stake into the digital revolution. A new series is being released in both Japan and America at the same time,  and a new manga anthology is set to be available exclusively online.

And all of these new developments have come much to the surprise of this blogger and industry analyst, because unlike anime, I have not seen the manga industry suffer at the hands of the internet.

That’s not to say that there isn’t piracy of manga. In this day and age, everything is pirated on the internet. But while I witnessed almost all my friends turn to the internet to get their anime fill,  I’ve only seen a few of my fellow fans download illegal “scanlations” of manga off of the internet. And even out of those fans, most of them still turned to legally store-bought manga as their primary source of entertainment.

In an interview from March 2008 with the Anime Today podcast, Del Rey’s Associate Publisher Dallas Middaugh noticed this difference between the two markets as well. “When it comes to watching anime, my experience is that fans are okay with a lower quality version of the anime if they could get it for free. When it comes to manga, the experience of reading manga on screen is not the same as the experience of reading the book. While for some people it’s good enough, I think for the majority of people, it’s not. Clearly it’s just a very different thing from anime.”

So Dallas wasn’t sweating over piracy, and why should he – or anyone in the manga industry – worry about it? In March of 2008, everything was looking pretty good.  According to ICv2 trade reports, the US manga industry has been a hot booming market in the 21st century. Ever since they started keeping tabs of the market in 2002, manga sales had been increasing year-after-year.

But there was trouble in paradise in 2008. In June, the once leading manga publisher Tokyopop announced major cutbacks and internal restructuring within the company. At the last New York Comic Con, ICv2 reported that 2008 saw the first ever decline in the manga market. Sales dropped 17% to bring the industry back to 2005 numbers.

So what happened? The ICv2 analysts cited several reasons for the decline. They said that Cartoon Network cutting back on anime programing was affecting the manga market. They claimed that Kurt Hassler leaving his post as head buyer at Borders to jump-start his own Yen Press publishing company lead to manga’s decline in bookstores.  Hell, they even believed that American teenage girls were too busy swooning over the pretty boys of Twilight in 2008 to be swooning over the pretty boys of manga.

But the one thing that the analysts didn’t cite in their report was that piracy was taking a bite into the market. While I have controversially come out in saying that piracy is killing the anime industry, I do completely agree with ICv2 and Dallas Middaugh that the manga industry doesn’t have to worry about it.

What saves manga from the dreaded monster that has consumed her sister? Well, along with Middaugh’s assessment that reading manga on a computer is a poor substitute to reading it on paper, I believe that the “scanlation” process of pirating manga is not as easy or well established as the fansubbing process of anime. While digitally fansubbing anime is simply the best method of distributing anime globally, scanlating manga is such a pain in the ass to do.

First, the pirate would need to physically remove the binding and then scan each page of the comic one-by-one into the computer. Then he has to remove the original text, translate it, and then go through the proper lettering procedure to ensure that the new English text will fit within the allowed space. On the reader’s side, they’re not getting a book when they download the scanlation. They’re getting a directory of image files that are hopefully organized by file name. It’s up to the downloader to find his own method of reading the image files in a legible and chronological way.

It takes more skill and tolerance to pirate manga. Add this to the fact that there are way more books being published in Japan than there are scanlators volunteering to do it, and you find that there are huge limitations in this underground system of distribution. This is much like how the hassles of fansubbing on VHS restricted that piracy’s impact on anime until broadband and digital fansubbing eased up the procedure. If piracy is not easy to do, it will not overtake the mainstream legal distribution system.

But while analysts aren’t concerning themselves with piracy in manga, the decline in sales from 2008 has apparently caused some concern within the industry. Viz Media, the largest manga publisher in America, has taken it upon themselves to experiment with some new distribution methods that could best be described as ways to combat piracy.

Viz has already been dealing with digital distribution with many of their Shonen Jump anime titles, most notably with their active simulcast of the very popular Naruto series. But at the start of April, Viz began the first ever “manga simulcast” with Rumiko Takahashi’s brand-new manga series Rin-ne. The same day that a new chapter is released in Weekly Sunday magazine in Japan, an English translated version appears on their website for American audiences to read.

I found that the Flash-based manga reader that Viz was using for their weekly Rin-ne chapters to be very easy to use and read on my computer. Their method of translation and online presentation is far more organized and professional than scanlated manga. And then last week, Viz announced that it was ceasing publication of its Shojo Beat anthology and replacing it with a new online anthology, Ikki, using the same Flash reader they used with Rin-ne.

Why Viz is doing this is beyond me, but I must say, I am glad to see one company taking some initiative in adapting the medium and embracing new technologies. That was a lesson that the anime industry failed to accept until companies started dropping like flies. Viz is taking a preemptive strike, and I’m glad they are doing it.

Where is this technology heading? What role will manga hold in the digital revolution?

Personally, as a member of the “internet generation”,  I’d be okay with giving up paper for electronic manga viewing, especially if it comes at a much lower cost. My bookshelf has gotten way overfilled with all these comic books, and it’s a nightmare to move my collection from one location to another. But I want to still be able to read manga in bed right before going to sleep, or on a long bus ride into the city. That is why I wish Viz or any manga publisher would seriously consider putting their Japanese titles onto a portable electronic device.

The Amazon Kindle would be an excellent place to start. The device uses a black-and-white “e-ink” screen that doesn’t glow like a computer or cell phone, so it is easier on the eyes like real paper. The blank-and-white nature of manga makes it ideal for the e-ink, and when Sony was showing off its own e-reader device years ago, they used to demo the unit with the Tokyopop OEL manga Peach Fuzz. And with Amazon introducing the new, extra large Kindle DX unit, it will be even easier to read these comics on the electronic device.

Another feature that Kindle specifically brings to the table is its wireless delivery technology. The device doesn’t require a computer, it uses cell phone signals to download its content from the internet. Not only does this make it easy to browse and buy books right on the device, but it allows you to “subscribe” to any kind of periodical and have it regularly downloaded onto the Kindle. Hell, even this very blog is currently available for wireless delivery on the device.

I think this new technology is the direction that the industry should be embracing and promoting. Wouldn’t it be nice to subscribe to a service that delivers new chapters from Viz’s Ikki or Yen Press’s Yen+ anthology right into your hand every week? It eliminates the cost of printing and physical delivery. And because the Internet is global, a Japanese company could just translate new manga in house from Japan and sell it in the US without worrying about working with a US team.

But this is all just a dream of a tech-savvy manga fan. In reality, manga doesn’t really need to reinvent itself in the modern era as paper has done quite well for itself so far in the 21st century. But a hiccup in sales this past year has provoked the leading publisher in the industry to test out the waters of digital distribution. I believe (and hope) that these innovations will bring with it a brand new way for us all to enjoy one of our favorite mediums.

A year ago, Japanese studio Gonzo was on the verge of financial collapse and tried to dig themselves out by experimenting with a new idea for the US market. They introduced the simulcast, a free, legal, fully-subtitled copy of their Spring 2008 series Drauga and Blassreiter. They would make each episode available on video streaming sites like Crunchyroll and Youtube within hours of it being broadcast on Japanese TV.

This was done in an effort to combat the piracy of new shows being released in Japan. Anime fans – especially those in America – had become too accustomed to the quick and easy fansubbing distribution system that came thanks to the availability of broadband internet access. By the audience using a method that was uncharted and not monetized, the industry on both sides of the Pacific began seeing a huge drop in sales as fans were less inclined to purchase DVDs.

The ad-supported simulcast strategy that Gonzo was experimenting with provided a monetized alternative to illegal fansubbing. By having a team work on subtitling an anime episode prior to its Japanese TV broadcast, the company was able to have their own version available to the audience before any pirated version could be released onto the web.

True, it didn’t fully stop piracy dead in its tracks, nothing will ever stop piracy. But the amount of lost revenue that Gonzo had now regained thanks to the simulcast encouraged them to continue with the experiment. They released the Summer 2008 series Strike Witches as a simulcast, and continue to do so with every one of their series up until this season’s Shangri-La and Saki.

As much as I was happy in the success of the experiment, I was highly critical of Gonzo’s choice to go with Crunchyroll. The video streaming website demonstrated a lax policy and attitude towards licensed material and copyright infringement. The moderators of the website refused to take down illegal material unless explicitly receiving a cease-and-desist letter telling them to do so.

I was disgusted the first time I logged into Crunchyroll to see them proudly promote the illegal streaming of licensed series from VIZ Media and all of the Disney released Miyazaki films. Clearly there was something shady going on with these people, and I had advised members of the Japanese industry to stay away from the service while they continue to demonstrate this disrespect and indifference to copyrighted material.

Crunchyroll kept with this policy through out the rest of the year, and they changed after they signed a deal with TV Tokyo to begin simulcasting Naruto the first week of January. Because Naruto was the most fansubbed series of all time – and because Crunchyroll was willing to give up their shady practices and go 100% legit for this type of content – this deal was going to be the spark that ignited the mass industry shift to digital distribution. The anime industry and the way that American fans watched their favorite shows was going to be completely different within months of this new development.

I had laid out this idea in my predictions post for 2009, I suggested that for the summer 2009 anime broadcast season, there would be at least a dozen simulcasts available. That would mean that there would be a wide selection of legally available alternatives to the new fansubs that would illegally appear during that time. I was expecting a linear progression of studios turning toward digital distribution. Four series in winter, eight series in spring, and a dozen in the summer. At that rate, we wouldn’t necessarily see 100% legal availability of anime by the time 2010 rolls around, but more series than not would be on board with this idea.

But the spring 2009 season had proven my prediction to be wrong, but not necessarily in a bad way. As of the time of this writing, Crunchyroll lists twelve different series being legally simulcast with a new episode every week. On top of that, FUNimation Entertainment is simulcasting two additional series every week fresh out of Japan. That’s fourteen series in total. We didn’t reach the dozen milestone in summer, we reached it already in spring!

There’s no linear progression here, it’s exponential. It would appear that almost every other day in the month of April, I have received a new press release from Crunchyroll informing me of a new partnership between them and a different Japanese studio.

Can you feel it, my dear readers? It’s all happening right before your eyes. The flood gates have opened, and the waters of the digital revolution are pouring right in.

But now that the revolution is in full swing, we’re starting to come across some issues that were inconceivable a few months ago. Gordon Schmidt sent me a Twitter last week saying, “I’m a little worried that almost the whole free legal streamed anime movement sits on the questionable crunchyroll shoulders.” And he’s right. With so many companies now turning towards Crunchyroll, are they becoming the monopoly in the digital revolution? And if they are the monopoly, can we really trust the douche-bags who used to so blatantly ignore copyright?

The only company that could potentially serve as Crunchyroll’s competitor would be FUNimation. One of the longest running anime DVD companies in America, FUNimation emerged as the market leader when its top mainstream titles kept the company away from the effects of the fansub monster last year. As of last summer, they made up a third of the entire American market.

But instead of simply sitting pretty on their huge mountain of cash, they used this disposable income to make a difference and shake up the current industry. The first step was to make it their policy that they would not license any new anime property unless the hesitant Japanese companies allow them to digitally distribute every new show. If you wanted to do business with the top anime company in America, you had to be open to the idea of the internet.

After finding success in the “download-to-own” model of digital distribution, FUNimation entered the simulcast game last September when they showed Shikabane Hime over their Hulu channel. The company remained low during the winter season to build their own video streaming portal. They then made a huge splash when they announced the simulcast of the brand-new Fullmetal Alchemist series at the start of the spring season.

Just last week, the company surprised everyone again by announcing a second simulcast for the spring season, Phantom. Unlike all of FUNi’s past announcements, Phantom was only going to be released streaming online with no intentions for an American DVD as of yet. This announcement came just after FUNimation had released a survey that asked its fans to rate new shows only available via fansubbing.

But despite this seemingly pro-fansubbing procedure, a FUNimation representative on Twitter had chastised a fan later in the week for downloading their shows illegally, and made the controversial claim that the act of fansubbing was losing money for the industry.

Twitter user jellokun questioned if FUNimation was sending out mixed messages with this stance on fansubbing. In response, the industry rep laid out the company’s goals: “We are not naive enough to think that no one is watching fansubs! But in the future, we hope to be able to ask: Which of our legally streaming [simulcasts] are you most likely to buy?”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,

FUNimation can do no wrong.

Without a doubt, FUNimation will be releasing the new Fullmetal Alchemist series on DVD. It’s almost guaranteed to be a success and they are probably about to start dubbing the show right now. But they have made no commitments on releasing Phantom on DVD. For now, it’s just going to be available for free online. But if they notice that the show is gaining a reasonable fanbase, then they will be more willing to put in the production costs of making a domestic DVD release.

Now that FUNimation has set a clear policy of “we’re not going to guarantee a DVD release just because of a simulcast” to their business practice, you can bet that they will be establishing more deals with their Japanese partners for the upcoming summer season. They will soon be on an equal playing field to Crunchyroll, thus providing a much need competitor to a currently monopolized market.

To FUNimation’s advantage, they have the experience and resources in the old model of anime DVD distribution. Crunchyroll cannot provide the Japanese with future DVD sales. However, FUNimation’s video portal is in pretty bad shape compared to its competition. Many users have reported slow service, which continues to persists despite the company’s claim to be fixing it.

Crunchyroll, on the other hand, currently has a stable infrastructure intact that is able to handle the massive amounts of new content and new traffic coming in this season. But even that came after a few months of growing pains themselves when they started the Naruto simulcast at the start of the year.

So that’s why I’m sure that the FUNimation’s video service will come up to snuff in time for the upcoming summer season. With the combined services of both Crunchyroll and FUNimation, forget seeing  a dozen simulcasts this summer! At this rate, we might damn well near 30!

In the history of the American anime industry, Spring 2009 will go down as the season of the simulcast. It is the time when everyone really got on board with this idea and very openly embraced the new technology that was pioneered by piracy. Hell, the whole concept got so big that it spilled into the manga industry and saw the first ever manga simulcast with Rumiko Takahashi’s Rin-ne last week.

… but the simulcast of Rin-ne is the subject of a whole other long-winded essay. ;-)