My hopes for the new anime streaming service, Daisuki

With the news earlier today that the Japanese anime industry is finally looking to take control of the neglected overseas market, I thought I'd do something I've been thinking about for a while and post a comparison of the existing solutions along with some hopes for the new one. It will be interesting to look back on when we finally hear more details about Daisuki!

Since we only have two active digital anime providers available to the UK, my post is going to focus on them. Viki haven't picked anything up for the UK for a while (as far as I know) while the other modern services such as FUNimation, Hulu, The Anime Network and the upcoming Anime Sols deliberately block foreigners to focus exclusively on a US audience. The current situation here is bleak; without Crunchyroll's efforts to expand to the UK we'd be left with only French company Kaze's Anime On Demand side project for a handful of delayed streams each season. Long dead UK company ADV Films did try some cross-promotion with a local version of The Anime Network before streaming had caught on fully. The other UK DVD companies have yet to show much interest in simulcasting at all, letting an opportunity to market their existing UK discs remain unexplored.

News: Anime streaming service "Daisuki" on the way?

Some huge news broke overnight which could easily end up being the biggest development of 2013 from the perspective of a UK-based anime fan. Six major Japanese companies are launching a new anime service called Daisuki specialising in overseas streaming and merchandise. With heavy hitters like Aniplex, Sunrise and Toei on board, all of whom are known for blocking streams to the UK on third party sites, this could be very interesting indeed. Since the new Daisuki service is scheduled to start in April, we don't have long to wait to see what's going to happen.

Previous criticisms of Japanese-led overseas anime initiatives have been dubtitles (not applicable where there are no dubs, of course) and cost (Japanese streaming sites have always been reasonably priced, and this mentions both ads and subscriptions). It sounds as though they have a good understanding of their market so far, and I've long believed that the only way to fix the current broken streaming situation is for Japan to take control of it themselves. It's all very well for users in the US, but when you live in a smaller country nobody wants to sublicense a risky show that won't make its money back - and if the US takes the UK rights and then blocks users with UK IPs, they've pretty much created a situation where fans have no choice but to miss out or resort to learning how to circumvent blocks. It's playing to the culture of piracy rather than monetising anime properly.

I'm not worried about the service failing to meet my needs. So long as the UK is actually included in the new service's definition of "overseas" - it often isn't - then I am comfortable reacting with cautious excitement. The streaming situation has always been grossly mishandled by the current set of companies controlling it; Crunchyroll is doing an excellent job with the titles they pick up, but every other company either sits on UK rights and locks us out or gives us a sloppy service with no communication. The press release specifically mentions One Piece, Lupin III, Mobile Suit Gundam and Prince Of Tennis: all series I'd love to be able to watch as simulcasts, yet only one of them has streamed at all here when the US was in command. Japan cannot possibly do a worse job with overseas fans than the US has done so far.

I'm looking forward to catching up on some much-missed classic anime!

All The Anime: A brand new UK anime distributor

Earlier this week, rumours began to spread about a new anime-related project in the UK going by the name 'All The Anime', associated with a new company called Anime Ltd. A Twitter feed and Facebook page soon surfaced, as did a placeholder website promising more details soon.

Hearing that the insightful Andrew Partridge was behind All The Anime was music to my ears. Andrew is very active in the fan community, having been attached to Beez when they released DVDs over here in the past and more recently to Kaze UK, Anime On Demand and the Loves Anime movie screening initiatives. He knows the market here, he personally listens to fan complaints and feeds them back to the industry, and more importantly, he's got a track record of being able to deliver on his promises. It's directly thanks to his persistence that we've been lucky enough to get some noitaminA shows on DVD over here - including The Tatami Galaxy, which is still unavailable in the US. And it's thanks to Andrew that I've been lucky enough to see some great anime movies in the cinema over here before their DVD release. That kind of thing would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

While the launch date for the project is currently January 2013, All The Anime finally broke their silence today with a lengthy interview with Anime News Network elaborating on their plans. The key points are that they'll be distributing a mix of classic anime and newer content on both physical and digital platforms while also expanding into cinema screenings. Most excitingly, as well as actually distributing anime they're going to be doing so with an eye on the dedicated collectors. Hopefully we can expect some NIS America or Aniplex USA quality releases.

I'm looking forward to what January will bring!

Kick-Heart Kickstarter progress update: two weeks remaining

Following on from my previous post, I've noticed that Production I.G has overhauled their rewards for Yuasa Masaaki's Kick-Heart Kickstarter drive. Having taken on a lot of fan feedback from the backers of the project, they're trying to add more value in the form of additional subtitle tracks, additional rewards for supporters and additional goals (which may be impossible) such as lengthening the short film substantially if there's enough demand. They've promised to make it thirty minutes longer if they can raise $400,000 rather than their original goal of $150,000, and if they can get over $1,000,000 they'll go all out and create a full feature film.

The extra rewards are interesting and I've ended up slightly raising my own bid as a result. They've added DVD editions, as some customers were complaining that they wanted something physical other than the Blu-Ray. There are also t-shirts and soundtracks on offer. The progress had slowed greatly over the last week, now sitting at $105,000 with 14 days left to make up the rest. I think they'll be able to pull it off.

Nostalgia: The fan pledge drive which brought Kimagure Orange Road TV to America

Some of the discussion about the anime Kickstarter project this week has reminded me of an earlier time in western anime fandom. It was a time when the online fan community was closer knit thanks to there being fewer anime-related websites. Everyone knew what rec.arts.anime.misc was, and large numbers of people loved individual series so much that they made web pages dedicated to them, all lovingly indexed on Anipike. Today, although the potential audience is much larger, I've noticed a worrying decline to a state where people consume entire series so fast that they rarely stop to truly appreciate them. It's easier to write provocatively negative criticisms of a succession of cheap, throwaway shows than to be selective and watch the shows you know you will enjoy from the outset. Anime has become disposable entertainment for the bulk of its audience. I do miss the days of enthusiastic obsession, when anime was valued.

Anyway, back to the nostalgia! Back in those days, OVA and movie releases were the bread and butter of collectors in the west as long TV series were risky for the anime companies of the time. Even when TV series began to come out and gather momentum, some genres were seen as safer than others. Fans overseas still wanted to get their favourite shows on VHS, LD or (eventually) DVD, but for the most part they were out of luck and just had to pray that someone would take the gamble one day.

Kimagure Orange Road is the most famous example of a series which came out entirely due to this build up of fan support. Thanks to pressure from fans and the dedication of AnimEigo, a pledge system was set up where people who wanted to buy the show could preorder it and put down a deposit before the product itself even existed - like Kickstarter, before Kickstarter itself was invented.

In case that site goes down (it's amazing that the creator has kept it up so long to document that moment in history) I've created a snapshot of the page as a series of image files as well:

Reading the site brought back a lot of great memories and I applaud the amount of passion those supporters had for Kimagure Orange Road. The comments about DVDs are also unintentionally hilarious in retrospect; a relic of the period.

The outcome of the pledge drive was, of course, that for many years Kimagure Orange Road TV became available, fully subtitled, to fans in the US. It would eventually come to DVD too, before AnimEigo lost the rights to the series in 2006 and it disappeared once more. Perhaps the Japanese rights holders can continue to make the English subtitled version available to new customers in years to come, letting future generations continue to enjoy the fruits of the early fans' hard work.

The pledge model would occasionally reappear in later years. There were a large number of failed projects which couldn't get the same level of support as Kimagure Orange Road, and others where the fans were willing but the distributors unable to organise something on that scale, however there were some low key success stories too. After A.D. Vision failed to pick up the second season of Super Gals! Kotobuki Ran due to the first season not having sold enough copies to support dubbing any more, The Right Stuf International stepped in and licensed it instead. Their version wouldn't receive an English dub, but at least Gals fans could watch the rest of the show as they'd been requesting desperately. Since this was a title with a very vocal fanbase and they wanted to get a bit of a boost for the release, TRSI asked that as many people as possible preorder the series; in return they offered a very Kickstarter-style incentive, crediting that first wave of customers as supporters of the series on the actual DVDs themselves. They used the same idea for the release of the niche series Victorian Romance Emma as well, though recent preorder drives have dropped crediting supporters in favour of physical extras to sweeten the deal.

With Kickstarter being today's equivalent of those early experiments in catering to the niche market of paying anime customers, I'm cautiously excited to see where it will take us in future.

Gintama returns (again)

After Gintama' mysteriously ended with an apology episode a while ago, its presence in my life had been sorely missed. The series seems cursed, from the aborted English language release of the manga to Sentai's stony silence on more DVDs, and the actual anime has stopped and resumed in Japan more than once now with very little explanation. And that's even without mentioning the incident where airings were suspended due to defamation of an unnamed (but pretty obvious) political figure.

However, its popularity hasn't waned and suddenly Gintama is coming back once again in anime form (and with a movie in the near future to boot). It seems that the staff have not missed an opportunity for some of their usual mischief in the process.

The official television listings are all playing it straight but instead of Gintama, they're showing a listing (and logo) for Kintama. Furthermore, the synopsis published for tomorrow's episode casually replaces every instance of Gintoki and Gin-san with Kintoki and Kin-san. 

Even the official series homepage has removed our hero from existence and installed his dashing blonde replacement front and centre.

Before Gintama' was abruptly terminated, its last next episode preview (which was subsequently revealed in the actual final episode to be a lie) was for the adaptation of the infamous Kintoki arc, so it seems that they eventually came through for us. Since the manga was cancelled I have no idea how long this arc is actually going to be.

I'll be eagerly watching on Crunchyroll tomorrow to see what happens next in the melodramatic roller-coaster that is the Gintama TV series.

Bucking the trend: Kickstarter

One of the recurring themes in this hobby lately, from the perspective of a foreigner, is that the industry is closing itself off as much as it can from entire regions, actively preventing sales and growth. Realistically, foreigners outside Japan (and the major markets it recognises such as the US) aren't worth a great deal, I know. There is a old fashioned belief both in America and in Japan which persists that each market needs to be treated separately, and those not being catered for don't wish to contribute.

However, today a project was set up which moved me to create a post (and indeed, to finally start using the blog I'd prepared!).

Kickstarter is a website which arranges for projects stuck in funding hell to get a boost from private individuals with money to burn. It's like a matchmaking website for wallets. For some reason, it's become extremely popular lately in America and people who would normally be too cheap to pay $20 for a PSP game are suddenly breaking out their savings to help fund strange indie gaming projects which may never go anywhere. I don't entirely understand it, but there have been a number of significant successes to date and if it's convincing fans to contribute more, it seems like a good idea.

Kickstarter was successfully used for a US manga project recently, but to date it had never been used for anime. Rumblings from western companies implied that it caused problems in negotiations with the Japanese rights holders and had a stigma of making things seem that the production companies had no money; in Japan, where companies generally retain some level of dignity and distance from their customers, it wasn't seen as presenting a good image.

There's also a logistical problem in that to put an anime project on Kickstarter, you need to have the licence to it; speculatively creating a project for something you don't actually have any rights to is not going to look good to anyone, and only risks ending in disaster when the contract negotiations fail or the asking price jumps. Similarly, few Japanese companies are going to want to let a western distribution house sit on a title trying to raise funds, preventing the creators shopping it to other companies. Not to mention the fact that a US distributor would only hold the licence for their region, crippling their ability to reach out to would-be investors globally.

In other words, the only way Kickstarter was ever going to get a proper anime project going was for someone in Japan to take the risk. Amazingly, that has finally happened.

Today, Yuasa Masaaki has launched a one month Kickstarter for a short, experimental anime called Kick-Heart. It's an absurd-sounding story which is bound to make for a very entertaining short film, and he has enough on his resume to get me interested even before considering that Production I.G. and Oshii are attached to the project too.

As I was just watching another quirky indie-style anime only the other day (Yamamoto Soubi's This Boy Can Fight Aliens, which received a US Blu-Ray release recently), I finally signed up to Kickstarter today and threw my support in for this one too. One of the site's gimmicks is that 'backers' can be encouraged to bid more by being offered rewards for meeting certain targets, and the $60 reward is a Blu-Ray of the finished animation if it all gets off the ground. Given that standard Blu-Ray pricing in Japan isn't cheap anyway, I decided that it was more than a fair price and this was the tier I went for (sadly, the $10,000 tier with its promises of a dinner with staff and a personal studio tour is a little out of my reach). The creators have since added some more reward tiers between the ultimate prize and the more affordable ones, so hopefully the response will pick up quickly as the wealthier backers start bidding. They've already been making good progress towards their target ($14,000 raised out of $150,000) in the few hours the site has been online.

Although I'll certainly be happy if I can be watching a shiny Blu-Ray disc of secret pro-wrestling nun romance in a few months from now, I want this project to succeed for other reasons. The creators are reaching out and directly targeting English-speaking foreigners with their Kickstarter page, and for the first time we can go straight to those creators and show them how much we want to support imaginative new anime. Even though I'm not in America, even I can throw my money down and show them that I both love anime and am willing to pay for it, and it doesn't have to be a safe romantic comedy adapted from some flashy new light novel with guaranteed sales potential.

I'd like to see more of this kind of thing. 

As for what the next Kickstarter project should be, I've already decided what the most sensible western anime company funding need is: the second half of Glass Mask! Sentai Filmworks reportedly mentioned at Anime Weekend Atlanta in the past few days that it was never happening (the first half sold too poorly for a release of the second to be profitable). Ok, Sentai Filmworks, you have the rights to it, and there is a small and passionate minority of fans who bought the first half sitting around waiting for the second. Stick it up on Kickstarter and we'll fund the release of the rest of the show. I'm ready when you are.