#this project could have been such a banger but i do not have the bandwidth. alas | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

recentanimenews · 4 years

Text

Anime in America Podcast: Full Episode 8 Transcript

It's time to bid farewell to Crunchyroll's Anime in America podcast, but not before it goes out with a banger of a final episode. Join host Yedoye Travis and special guest Kun Gao as they tackle the streaming wars, and read on for the full episode 8 transcript.

The Anime in America series is available on crunchyroll.com, animeinamerica.com, and wherever you listen to podcasts.

EPISODE 8: THE STREAMING WARS

Guest: Kun Gao

Disclaimer: The following program contains language not suitable for all ages. Discretion advised.

[Lofi music]

Last we checked in, the anime industry was struggling. Rising competition matched with the economic crisis of ‘07 and ’08 caused half the industry to shutter its doors within the next five years. And even without economic obstacles, the physical media and broadcast focused industry was still facing the looming threat of piracy.

I’m Yedoye Travis and this is the final episode of Anime in America.

[Lofi music]

By this point anime was already available to stream legally, and had been as early as 2002 with Valkyrie Media Partner’s video on demand service Anime Network. It had been a mainstay on Netflix since back when the company was still mailing out DVDs, which it technically still is, but if you already knew that, chances are your internet connection isn’t strong enough to listen to this podcast. Funimation and VIZ had already made the jump to digital with major streaming services Hulu and...uh… Joost?

Do you remember Joost? Cause I do not. What the fuck is “Joost?”

Both inked deals along with the now defunct U.K. anime distributor Gong in 2008 to stream select anime series from their catalogs. More on that in Anime in the U.K.! Ha ha, just kidding… unless… maybe?

Video hosting websites were presenting a major problem to anime distributors, however. The internet had entered the age of YouTube and new sites and services where literally anyone could upload a video without any kind of quality control were rising and falling daily and with them fell the final remaining barrier between consumers and pirates, technological literacy [Pirate “Arr!”]. The online ecology was primed for pirates to step out of IRC and torrenting sites and start putting their work on streaming video pages that literally anyone could use.

Unburdened by approvals and quality assurance, piracy had been beating official releases in terms of speed for decades and now suddenly was standing shoulder to shoulder with official services in availability.

But already the seed of a new era had been planted. And among the thousands of video hosting sites was an anime-focused page run by a group of young Bay Area techies.

Gao: We started to just tinker around on nights and weekends. We were watching Starcraft replays, we were watching anime content, and every week it was like “well, let’s load up this torrent and let’s wait for the Naruto to come out, and now we have to seed to a bunch of people before we can watch and let’s hope we don’t get a virus, or whatever.” And it was like, you know it was like a lot of work. And then we’re like “well, why don’t we just make a website that people can just click, just like YouTube, and just start watching?” And coincidentally, YouTube took off in… I’ll say ‘05-’06, when it was really starting to hockey stick, so we kinda said “well, that’s kinda the model.” YouTube, there was many other sites, at the time, now it’s just YouTube, but Veoh, MetaCafe, like Stage6, like all these sites we were like, what if we just did one where people would upload content they normally just can’t watch? And anime just made a lot of sense to us because we couldn’t find how to watch it… anywhere. Except for torrent sites. That’s kinda the chronology up until we founded the company in the middle of ‘06.

That is Kun Gao, founder and former CEO of Crunchyroll. It wasn’t always the biggest catalog of anime in the world, back then it was a small website he and his friend designed to host anime and Starcraft videos which quickly turned from a passion project into an ever-increasing logistical and financial struggle as site traffic began to balloon.

Gao: We ran out of bandwidth [dialup sounds] though pretty quickly, because bandwidth was really expensive. Especially back then [dialup sounds end] it was like 20 times more expensive than it is now. And I remember we were just maxing all our credit cards, because we didn’t, we weren’t really making money, there wasn’t a way to monetize with video ads, there wasn’t video ads to begin with. So yeah, that was the situation in early ‘07. So we, first it was raising with some angels. We said, we approached some angels, they were angels for our first company, my first company, and they had gotten a return from that investment. And I asked them if they wanted to invest into the new company, and they were very supportive and they were right behind us. And then within about a month or two after the angels invested, the site just continued to grow. And it was showing up on Alexa, which was not the Amazon speaking thingamajig, it was a website where you could look at other peoples’ traffic, and how they were trending over time. And I think that’s when VCs started knocking on our doors, they saw that the website was just hockey sticking and blowing up and they approached us and said they wanted to invest. And so from about… August-September through December of 2017, we started talking to a lot of VCs and then we found the right VC to invest into our business, and then we raised about $4 million bucks into the company, and that was when we started paying off all our credit card bills, and then we started to you know, get more servers, starting to hire full time employees, because we weren’t paying anyone or ourselves at that time, so that everyone could work on this full time.

That’s Angel Investors, of course, not actual… angels, which, uh… in some circles, you might believe are fake. Depends. We’ll leave that up to God. Who is real! [angelic choir].

Gao: In 2008, after we raised VC funding, we said “well, we need to figure out how to, like, license this content. We need to figure out how to compensate creators, and then we need to figure out how to make money for this content.” And so at that time, I think the company was like six, maybe seven, people? And everyone was an engineer, and so I drew the lucky or unlucky straw of having to figure out how to like, figure out Japan. The first thing I had to do was, you know, was like figure out “who do I talk to?” And I didn’t know who to talk to. And so fortunately, one of our advisors was a guy who was, at the time, the CEO of a company called BitTorrent, and he, along with Bram, who created the BitTorrent protocol, had setup a office in Tokyo where BitTorrent was a thing you can license to put on to like, a NAS drive, or a router, where you could do BitTorrenting on your NAS or your router so you don’t have to turn on your computer to do that. And so they had a business out there, and so I talked to him about who to talk to. And he said “well, you should talk to this guy called Vince Totino, he works for the BitTorrent in Japan.” And so in March of 2008, I went to Japan, met up with Vince, and then the more we talked, the more it was like “well, this guy’s awesome. Like, he knows everything about Japan, because he’s been there for 20 years. He speaks fluent Japanese. Maybe he can help us to navigate Japan.” And so he joined full time, and then we then set about going to all the major Japanese anime companies. And he didn’t have all the connections, either, so it was just we found someone who knew someone who knew someone, and then we contacted him and just kept going down the chain until we were able to get to, we were able to get to the key folks at all the major companies. And then, as relates to subtitling, outputting content, once we figured out the business side and we were able to get a deal with TV Tokyo, we had to figure out how to legitimately subtitle the content. Because we were getting the files before TV broadcast, we can’t just put it out there for fansub groups to fansub, because we wouldn’t know or be able to trust that. And so we started to hire people to help us to subtitle. And it ended up being that a lot of the people who used to participate in the fansub community were the best people to subtitle. And so they were able to receive some compensation and credit for their work doing it officially, legitimately, through the Crunchyroll business.

So, Kun just went to Tokyo, linked up with Vince and got all the major anime publishers on board. Pretty simple, right? Wrong! Absolutely wrong. You’re stupid for thinking otherwise. Turns out it was pretty difficult not only to sell them the whole idea of streaming media, but also to convince those publishers to license out their valuable IP to a pirate site.

Gao: Interesting side story is, if you remember when we previously talked about VHS that was pirated and distributed by fans, for fans, very analogous to what we were doing, that started a company called AD Vision, by John Ledford, who I would say is probably the pioneer of anime home video distribution. And today the company’s called Sentai. But he helped us to introduce us to TV Tokyo, in like the Fall of 2008. And then, when we got to TV Tokyo, they were, you know, they were very pragmatic about the situation. I would say not everyone was pragmatic. We would have conversations, a lot of conversations, were something to the tune of “Hey! We’ve got a website, there’s a lot of fansubbed content on there, we know it’s not legal, we want to get the license to legally do it.” And then they would just… not try to make eye contact, they would like act visibly angry, they would be shaking and they would say “you’re stealing from us, you’re pirating our content.” And we said “well, we want to make it legitimate. And if you want us to take all of your content down, today, we will. But that’s going to send all the fans to dark corners, to get access to your content, because they really want to watch it. And we want to make a bright lit place for you and your content to be distributed worldwide.” And so I think TV Tokyo really got that, and so we were able to work with them to figure out how to license Naruto legitimately. And at the end of ‘08, we announced together with TV Tokyo that they would be, we would be simulcasting Naruto, for the first time [Naruto opening 2 “Haruka Kanata” plays], within like an hour of TV broadcast starting Jan…. uh, Jan 7th, or something, 2009. So that’s kinda how that arc started.

[Lofi music]

On New Year’s Eve 2008, Crunchyroll deleted all of its illegal videos and fan contributed content, converting to an official streaming service that began simulcasting Naruto Shippuden in January 2009. On the Japan side it would remain an uphill battle over the years as Crunchyroll continued to shop itself out and prove itself to other publishers, but in America it was a deal that shook the entire industry. Streaming anime was just beginning to creep onto platforms like Netflix and Hulu in 2008 but NO ONE was simulcasting. At the time, Naruto was the single most popular anime in the world and suddenly it was on a brand new service that was putting it up to stream within an hour of its Japanese broadcast.

For anyone who doesn’t know, simulcasting is a portmanteau of the words “simultaneous” and “broadcasting,” and I think based on those two words you can guess that it means “simultaneous broadcasting.”

This was a foundational shift both for the established industry and for pirates. Where before pirates had speed on their side, they couldn’t hope to turn around episodes of Naruto within an hour. Crunchyroll’s agreement with TV Tokyo got them all the materials in advance of the broadcast to allow them to do the legwork pre-release, which would eventually shrink down the window to be near simultaneous with the Japanese TV broadcast. Suddenly the fastest and easiest way to watch new anime was once again an official source.

Along with their new offering, Crunchyroll also established a new framework for the streaming business. Although Crunchyroll’s original catalogue was small, many fans considered it a win-win.Crunchyroll had a large pre-existing community that trusted the brand and now it was beating the pirates in speed and had a clear financial throughline from your wallet to the people making the product.

So Crunchyroll started to grow. And it started to grow FAST.

Suddenly industry titans like Funimation, VIZ, and the recently established Aniplex of America found themselves having to play catch-up. This started the Simulcast Wars, a nearly 10 year long race for each of these companies to launch its own branded streaming services and get their products out alongside the official Japanese broadcast, and of course, everyone tried to get in.

And I mean everyone. Every single person.

But quick aside before I get into that… This pivot to simulcasting is a huge moment for anime itself, but that moment had another lasting effect on licensing that’s definitely worth mentioning. Anime itself got more opportunities. Licensing companies always have to be strategic to make money, but the shift toward streaming as the primary vehicle changed the economics of anime. You might say it… disrupted… the industry.

Gao: I think when you start off as… when you start off and become so successful like Funimation in home video, sometimes it’s tough to switch gears and disrupt your own business. And so we were disruptors. We were definitely way smaller, but we had to be nimble. And there were a lot of content that Funimation just doesn’t license, because for them it doesn’t make sense to go get Haikyu!! [Haikyu!! opening “Imagination” plays]. It wouldn’t ever sell on home video, and that was the only way they made money. So that wasn’t interesting for them. But it was interesting for us. Through the internet, there’s a lot of sports anime fans who love that genre, who love the fact that sports is just a vehicle for telling stories, and they’re willing to subscribe, they’re willing to watch online. And so we had an advantage in that regard.

Before our modern era where there’s just about 100 percent licensing rate every season, tons of titles would get skipped over because anime distributors in the U.S. had to judge new titles through the lens of a physical release and decide if a production looked like it would sell enough units to make up for their investment. A streaming model meant it was not only easier for each anime to find its audience online, but a lower price tag since you didn’t necessarily have to add the costs of designing, manufacturing, and distributing DVDs and a title’s performance online could act as a testing ground to inform your later decisions regarding a physical release.

You could make the argument that this also hurts anime’s longevity since physical releases are often all that is left of a title if the license enters limbo and that’s certainly legitimate but, as a counterpoint... We might notta gotten Haikyu!!... so there’s that. That’s enough of an argument, right?

Okay! Back to the thing that I was talking about.

EVERYBODY. In all caps.

Funimation was the quickest to follow, streaming a near simulcast of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood the very next season, four days behind the Japanese broadcast, which was fast by industry standards, but still gave pirates plenty of wiggle room for one of the biggest shonen releases of the 2010s [Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood opening “Again” plays].

VIZ followed next with Inuyasha: The Final Act in the Fall season which they simulcast on Hulu.

This was the pattern for about two years as other companies experimented with simulcasts of top priority titles and Crunchyroll continued to grow not only in subscribers but their number of their simulcast titles each season.

Then Anime News Network tried to get in on the action.

Y’know, the news site. The one with “News” in its name? One of the most trafficked anime sites in the world at the time, Anime News Network wanted in on the game, and after picking up some catalog titles from the likes of Aniplex, Bandai, and Sentai, they made their simulcasting debut starting with Oreimo in Fall 2010 [Oreimo opening plays]. Oreimo is… uh… I will say the definitive title in a genre of anime known as “Siscon,” upon which I refuse to elaborate but you can google at your own risk.

Unfortunately ANN pulled a Funimation, and someone took advantage of an exploit in their system and managed to get ahold of the second episode of Oreimo pre-release, and ANN was also forced to suspend its simulcasts because siscon dudes mean business. At this point though they were probably already on their way out of the streaming business. Despite the large amount of traffic ANN commanded on its editorial side, it was unable to leverage that into streaming views and it quietly wound down its catalog over the years to once again focus exclusively on news. Because they’re a news site. They do news.

The Fall 2010 season also saw the launch of Toonzaki, a creation of none other than the now-failing 4Kids’. It started with a catalogue of 72 mostly non-exclusive titles, and honestly the streaming site may have been one of the best things 4Kids’ ever created, a community focused platform that attracted even longtime critics of the anime licensor. Unfortunately the site couldn’t survive 4Kids’s financial woes and it was ultimately killed, likely as a result of the 2012 lawsuit we mentioned in the previous episode. In 2012 Toonzaki suffered the 1-2 punch of losing its entire Yu-Gi-Oh! catalog and having its site mysteriously going down for three whole months. I dunno about you but I would cancel my subscription after uh, probably a couple of hours, actually. Ultimately the site’s ownership was passed to Konami and it was later shut down in 2013.

In 2012 VIZ announced its own online streaming channel called Neon Alley which was kinda like a TV channel but VIZ anime and on the internet. That uh, ya know the whole concept of streaming? That’s what we’re talking about this episode. Unfortunately it didn’t fly and by early 2014, VIZ cut a deal with Hulu that added Neon Alley as a content channel to the larger streaming service’s menu. Within just a few months the Neon Alley name was dropped altogether as VIZ’s content was fully incorporated into Hulu’s service.

2013 saw the introduction of a brand new face in American anime streaming which, if I were a company like Crunchyroll or Funimation at the time, I probably would have greeted with hostility. Daisuki was founded by a Japanese consortium led by Asatsu-DK whose investors included major studios like Toei Animation, Aniplex, Sunrise, and TMS with the intention of streaming their anime globally. If that wasn’t scary enough, they were later joined by another $3 million in investments from a who’s who of Japanese publishers like Kodansha, Shueisha, Shogakukan, and Kadokawa.

Included in their starting catalog were Aniplex hits like Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Sword Art Online as well as a large number of Sunrise mecha anime. And I can not emphasize enough the vibe at the time was that this was the apocalypse for international licensing. Japan’s gonna hold onto all their titles, choke everybody else out, and run their own one-stop shop for anime.

But obviously that didn’t happen, so… what went wrong?

Well nobody’s entirely sure but probably a number of things. By 2013 America’s short romance with mecha anime like Gundam Wing, Escaflowne, and Evangelion had long since come to an end and it was Gundam titles courtesy of Sunrise that made up most of Daisuki’s initial offering of exclusives. Look, Gundam fans, I see you. I’m one of you. I don’t know why kids these days can’t appreciate giant robots, either, but that’s just how it is. The rest of Daiksuki’s starting catalog was pretty sparse since they’d already shopped out the licenses to many of their major titles in the largest international markets. By now, I’m sure this episode feels like a thinly veiled Crunchyroll ad, but the fact is, Crunchyroll had the good fortune of launching with Naruto the single most popular anime of its era, while Daisuki had two major Aniplex hits that were already showing their age. That, along with some endemic technical issues on their platform, seem to have made an environment not even One Punch Man and Dragon Ball Super could save. Also, it seems, splitting up anime streaming rights by region and selling them piecemeal to major streaming services may have been more profitable for some of Daisuki’s investors.

In March of 2017 Bandai Namco purchased Daisuki’s owner Anime Consortium in Japan and by October of the same year the service shut down completely.

Anime was already a popular subsection of Netflix’s sprawling catalog in 2014, but that year the company started to make public moves to invest in the medium and secure their own exclusives, teaming up with Polygon Pictures to secure many of their future seinen releases such as Knights of Sidonia and Ajin: Demi-human [Ajin trailer clip], likely establishing the relationship that would later lead to a number of 3D anime produced by Netflix itself like the upcoming Pacific Rim and recently released Altered Carbon and Ghost in the Shell.

Early 2016 saw Funimation launch their own streaming platform dubbed FunimationNow. But that wasn’t the only major announcement they planned that year. 2016 was also the beginning of what was probably the biggest news for Anime in America since the start of simulcasting: the big Crunchyroll/Funimation alliance.

Under the tagline “better together” Crunchyroll and Funimation, now two of the biggest names in anime not only in the U.S., but worldwide, announced a strategic partnership in which they’d be sharing their libraries with one another.

[Lofi music]

As it turned out, 2017 was the year that two media juggernauts would turn their eyes on anime and I just gotta discuss the most unfortunate one first. I’m talking, of course, about Amazon’s Anime Strike. And I say “of course,” but you might not’ve known about it until I just said it, so... Amazon announced its entry into the anime industry January 17th with a great deal of fanfare.

[IGN News: Amazon has just launched its own anime focused streaming channel, called Anime Strike]

Anime Strike was the first of what would be several branded add-on channels for Amazon Prime Video, which were essentially ways of compartmentalizing content that they could charge extra money for. So, in addition to your Prime subscription, you’d have to shell out an additional $4.99 to watch the exclusive anime Amazon was planning to load on the service.

Amazon wasn’t fuckin’ around, either. Among their first exclusives was the seinen sex drama Scum’s Wish, which would be the first of Amazon’s new exclusive streaming deal with the lauded Noitamina animation block on Fuji TV which, down the line, would land them Inuyashiki, After the Rain, and Banana Fish. They also entered a strategic deal with Sentai Filmworks that would give Anime Strike an exclusivity window for certain new Sentai titles. After about four months they even rolled out the ability to download episodes for offline viewing. So even up against Netflix and the new alliance between Crunchyroll and Funimation, Anime Strike was shaping up to be the next major competitor in anime streaming.

Or… it seemed that way.

Let’s just say anime fans didn’t like Anime Strike very much. You could forgive them for charging another $60 a year for a very limited library of anime ($160 if you didn’t already have Prime). But also, Anime Strike just didn’t seem to “get” anime fans and didn’t seem very intent on trying to figure us out.

And despite Amazon’s massive and sophisticated streaming video infrastructure, they just couldn’t seem to get anime episodes up on time. They would show up days late, often without subtitles. And discoverability was a problem, with many complaining they were unable to find Anime Strike anime on Amazon even after searching for its exact title. Amazon publicly blamed late deliverables from Sentai for the frequent episode delays which Sentai very publicly stated was an outright lie.

It was a bad look that just got worse with their PR. Anime Strike “no commented” several journalists looking for interviews and the ones they did get like ANN’s interview with VP of Digital Video Michael Paul were… uh, awkward? Forbes and IGN each released articles panning Anime Strike, citing its prohibitive cost and that it just didn’t seem to understand anime fans. Despite acquiring many major titles in 2017 including the Anime Award Winning Made in Abyss, Anime Strike was circling the drain.

Just seven days shy of its first year, the channel was finished. Amazon announced they were canning Anime Strike and putting their content back in general population on the rest of Prime Video. Their deal with Sentai ended with Sentai slowly retrieving their titles off Amazon and eventually losing their exclusive deal with Noitamina as of 2019, which you can probably thank for The Promised Neverland, Given, and Sarazanmai showing up on Crunchyroll. But Amazon hasn’t gotten out of the anime game entirely. Their acquisitions have been more low key and selective but they’ve kept things going with dark fantasy and science fiction anime over the past year such as Dororo, Blade of the Immortal, Psycho-Pass 3, and PET. So some good shows to check out if you still have your mom’s login or your college forgot to delete your .edu email. Otherwise, you know, I don’t know what to tell you.

Later in July, Sentai would announce its own streaming service HIDIVE to stream Sentai and Section23 anime which at first looked like any of the services I’ve already talked about that had good catalogs but not much new anime because of Anime Strike’s exclusivity window, but in hindsight this may have been some next level maneuvering from Sentai to prepare for Anime Strike’s fallout. However you look at it, Strike is dead and HIDIVE lives, having picked up many of Strike’s most acclaimed titles like Made in Abyss and Land of the Lustrous since their exclusivity window ended on Amazon. So thanks for the signal boost, Bezos. And congrats on your… unnecessary amount of money.

[Bezos clip: Thanks, it’s great to be here.]

In October of still 2017, a year that felt never-ending until 2020 came along, Netflix announced a big $8 billion dollar spend on original content, a considerable portion of which was earmarked to produce 30 anime titles in the coming years. On the heels of the Neo Yokio announcement some fans with zero taste thought this was pretty terrible news, considering Netflix had also rubbed those same fans the wrong way earlier in the year by purchasing TRIGGER’s much-anticipated Little Witch Academia set to premiere in January then just not releasing it. So, until its eventual release six months later, no one knew why it wasn’t already out or when they could expect it to be released.

It turns out this would become Netflix’s strategy in the coming years, eschewing simulcast schedules for batch releases often months after their conclusion to compete with international dubs… unless you’re in Japan where they broadcast on time. This supports the binge culture that has only become more important as we all stew in our own smells at home. It’s hard to tell if that system is working out for them or not because Netflix only recently hinted at maybe releasing viewership numbers and because they’re so big they could honestly just buy all that anime and set it on fire and still not hurt their bottom line.

Anyway, Little Witch Academia was the first of a sudden Netflix shopping spree. In addition to streaming titles from other anime distributors, Netflix has been pretty reliably picking up exclusive rights to about two to three anime per season, even securing a big (although temporary you’ll soon discover) exclusive streaming deal for the Fate franchise with Aniplex, and slapping a “Netflix Original” sticker on it, driving anime aggregator websites crazy every quarter when they try to build seasonal launch lists.

Regardless, Netflix’s interest in anime is undeniable. They would follow up their 2017 announcement with another in early 2018 claiming they had partnered with Production IG and Bones to produce new anime and ANOTHER announcement including Anima, Sublimation, and David Production in 2019. And context should tell you those are VERY BIG anime studios. But If it doesn’t, I will tell you. They are VERY BIG anime studios.

Meanwhile their list of air quotes “original” exclusive seasonal anime is growing and Netflix has begun announcing a number of new original anime now based on successful live action Netflix series such as Altered Carbon, and also licensing all the live action anime from Japan that nobody has ever seen, unless you live in Japan. Basically what I’m trying to say here is Netflix is very into anime.

Another smaller announcement in 2017 was that Funimation had been acquired by Sony, which was notable but not unusual, since the company had changed hands multiple times.

And that’s where I’m ending my history. That’s it.

[Lofi music]

Now, in case you’ve been trapped under a rock for the past 10 years, you should know that media companies in the U.S. have been slowly consolidating, with Disney leading the charge on their mission to own all 100 of the Top 100 blockbuster Hollywood movies every year. And if you didn’t know before, I’m sure you’ve learned in quarantine, that Disney has started its own streaming service.

2020 was the starting line for what’s already been a free for all between Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video, Disney+, and HBO Max for the eyeballs of every human being on planet Earth and, of course, anime is a big part of that. If Amazon and Netflix suddenly investing in the medium doesn’t convince you then here are some numbers.

A report estimated the total revenue generated by the anime industry at about $19 billion USD in 2017. Another report estimated the total revenue generated by the U.S. film industry as a whole at about $43 billion USD, with anime on average being considerably cheaper than inflated Hollywood and premiere TV budgets like Avengers Endgame’s $356 million purse or Game of Thrones’s $90 million final season budget, which covered a mere 6 episodes.

It’s also worth noting that under quarantine a lot of anime is on hold, but overall animation is the easiest television production to produce, with Netflix going back into production on shows like Big Mouth and things of that sort.

Ironically, despite technical advances we’ve just about come full circle with the largest media conglomerates in the U.S. once again being in charge of anime localization. We’ve also seen the reappearance of anime as a relatively cheap addition to content portfolios, the major differences being the dramatically shrinking distance between Japan and America, an almost 100 percent rate of title acquisition by Western companies, and anime having transformed from something to fill time or disguise as American cartoons into its own mainstream force in the media alongside the MCU and whatever HBO is doing since Game of Thrones ended.

There are definite concerns with the way the industry is headed but the benefits are undeniable. Save for maybe China, Americans are the most privileged group of anime fans, even more so than those in Japan itself. A perfect storm of being one of the largest anime markets in the world paired with this decades long consolidation of media is that all the anime gets licensed but spread across less platforms than even in Japan. So, even if it seems like you’re forking over subscription fees to an unreasonable number of services to catch all the big shows, realize you’ve got it better than international fans whose countries don’t even get every seasonal title.

When you think about it, anime is even easier to keep up with than American TV. Amazon Prime, Netflix, Crunchyroll, Funimation, and HIDIVE gets you well over 99 percent of everything out there. Meanwhile in the sprawling American media landscape you’ll also need a subscription to Disney+, HBOMax, Peacock, and not only Hulu but make sure to grab Starz, Cinemax, and Entertainment add-ons… maybe even Hallmark if you, if you’re into stuff your grandma watches. And this is to say nothing of specialty and classic services like Shudder and Criterion. And of course Quibi. How could we possibly forget Quibi? Point is, each of these services probably has a few titles that were formative to your childhood and has some upcoming release that you’re interested in. And compared to that, anime has been cordoned off into what appears to be a reasonably small number of subscriptions.

Now the face of competition has changed entirely. Co-productions are nothing new in anime, dating back to the beginnings of anime in America in the 60s and definitely providing a deep enough topic to warrant its own episode if Crunchyroll greenlights a season two…?

But co-productions had previously been a way to get a particular project created, one of the most famous examples being the 1995 Ghost in the Shell film, a joint production between Kodansha, Bandai Visual, and the U.K.-based Manga Entertainment. Once again, Anime in the U.K.?

Maybe?

As previously discussed in our manga episode, up until that film Ghost in the Shell, along with many Masamune Shirow works, had a considerable following in the West, greater even than in Japan. Investing in the film made sense and the deal gave Manga Entertainment exclusive rights to a cult classic that’s still being both emulated and outright ripped off by American directors to this day. At the time it was what you’d call a smart investment in a specific title with crossover appeal to Western audiences.

And… yeah that’s still what co-productions are, but also they’re a way of getting your foot in the door early on titles you wanna license by investing in them years in advance rather than bidding on rights in the lead-up to the release. It also goes a long way in developing good relationships with studios and production committees.

And Netflix has been loudest on the co-production front, proudly announcing their strategic partnerships since as early as 2014, licensing content from studios directly to dodge the committee system, and just slapping “Netflix Original” on titles after they purchase exclusive rights whether they were actually involved in production or not, partly because that’s just how TV works in America.

Looking back you can find at least one example of a co-production from most of the major American anime companies that rose and fell in the 90s and 2000s. Crunchyroll itself has been quietly producing anime since early in its existence, counting over 60 co-pros before announcing their Originals Slate in 2020. Funimation first dipped their toes in back in 2016 with Dimension W and have slowly started to accrue their own roster of co-productions since late last year. If you’re a proper anime fan that never skips the OP, you may have noticed a growing number of American names and companies in the production credits since 2010.

[Lofi music]

Which brings me to my final point. What even is anime anymore?

Japan has been outsourcing work to Korea for about 20 years now even as foreign animators have been traveling to Japan to work in Japanese studios. International entities are becoming increasingly involved in production and now foreign creators and source material are more prominently featured in new titles. As the number of foreign names increases in anime credits that inevitably means the number of Japanese names proportionally decreases.

Korean webcomics are getting anime, Daft Punk and Porter Robinson had music videos made by anime studios, Studio 4C produced an anime film adaptation of the manga Tekkonkinkreet directed by an American animator. A manga by a french Canadian has been adapted into an anime. Marvel comics have gotten anime. Batman is a ninja now. Well, he has been for a while but this time animated by the studio that does the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure openings.

At what point does a production lose the essential Japanese-ness that the term anime implies?

Scratch that, what does “anime” even mean?

The very definition of anime is now being tested, used as a marketing term to evoke a popular conceit about the medium rather than an identifier of its point of origin. Nowadays if you ask Netflix what an anime is, they’ll tell you it’s a cartoon written by the lyricist of Vampire Weekend starring Jaden Smith or an animated series made by a studio in Texas based on a 1983 American kids show, and written by the director of MallRats.

So where are we headed with all this? Can anime survive its exposure to the American media ecosystem keeping its identity intact, or will anime soon just mean “cartoons but with blood in them?”

I can’t answer these questions, I don’t know. Gonna have to get back to you in a sequel podcast in 2030. Anime in Space. Or in The Parallel Dimension That Apparently Exists. All I can do for now is provide you with the wise words of the individual who has provided me with the answers to most of life’s questions up until now. My mom…

Grace: I don’t- I tried to do research, and I have no clue what this thing is.

Yedoye: Yeah? Like, nothing at all? You didn’t find anything?

Grace: They’re just cartoons! That’s all I know, you trying to test me?

Yedoye: [laugh] A little bit, yeah.

Grace: Why?

Yedoye: Because-

Grace: I never watched cartoons.

Yedoye: But WE watched cartoons!

Grace: It was never my thing.

Yedoye: It was our thing, though.

Grace: Pinky and the Brain, that’s it.

Yedoye: I mean, yeah, but that’s what we did on Sundays. But there was other stuff, after that.

Grace: [skeptical] Okay. I have no clue. I wish I did the research, I was too busy.

Yedoye: You didn’t listen to any of the podcast?

Grace: I listened to one, it’s all about Japanese something, right?

Yedoye: Yeah,

Grace: I know ??? used to draw them. He loved Japanese cartoons.

Yedoye: Yeah.

Grace: But I can not make out- I may have been sitting there, but I never paid attention.

Yedoye: No? There’s, I mean, there’s like… Pokemon is anime. That counts.

Grace: Oh, really? Pokemon is anime?

Yedoye: Yeah!

Grace: Oh my God! I thought the name of the cartoon is “anime.”

Yedoye: Oh, no, no.

Grace: [realization] Ahhh, Pokemon is anime, which means... There’s several versions, right?

Yedoye: Yeah, there’s a lot. There’s like, there’s Pokemon, there’s Dragon Ball Z, umm-

Grace: Dragon Ball Z! I just recently [Notification sound] heard that.

Yedoye: Yeah. And there’s um… did you ever watch Speed Racer?

Grace: In the car?

Yedoye: Yeah.

Grace: They like to drive?

Yedoye: Yeah.

Grace: Yeah, I’ve seen that.

Yedoye: Yeah. That’s anime, too.

Grace: I watched you guys ?? , but I just- you know, all that stuff was for you guys, babysitting activities.

[Both laugh]

Yedoye: There’s shows-

Grace: It was for babysitting, it was all for babysitting.

Yedoye: They're not even-

Grace: Did you know that?

Yedoye: They’re not even for kids, though!

Grace: Eh?

Yedoye: Those shows are not for kids though!

Grace: Yeah, that’s why I’m trying to tell ??. Yeah, so the general name is “anime.”

Yedoye: Yeah.

Grace: Then under anime is like, you have all these different versions of cartoons.

Yedoye: Yeah, yeah.

Grace: Okay.

Yedoye: You thought it was one show?

Grace: I thought it was just one.

Yedoye: Oh G- Okay.

Grace: And I just heard of them.

Yedoye: I definitely could’ve uh…

Grace: And the name is anime.

Yedoye: I definitely could’ve clarified that a few weeks ago.

Grace: Yep, I didn’t even know.

Yedoye: Okay, maybe that’s my fault.

Grace: So Pinky and the Brain, Pinky wasn’t one of them?

Yedoye: Uh, no, no, he was not.

Grace: Oh, okay. You guys confuse me. What else you wanna know?

Yedoye: Umm, I think maybe that’s it? I don’t know-

Grace: What do you mean “that’s it?!”

Yedoye: There’s not that much, I just wanted to know if you knew what anime was.

Grace: I wasted all this time just to tell you in five seconds that anime, something is under anime is just a broad name for all the cartoons.

Yedoye: Yeah!

Grace: Jeeze.

Yedoye: [laugh]

Grace: And I be here, all excited, thinking that something else is coming up.

Yedoye: Oh, no, no, I just was gonna- I just wanted to ask if you knew...

[Lofi music]

Thanks for listening to Anime in America presented by Crunchyroll. If you enjoyed this, please go to Crunchyroll.com/AnimeInAmerica to see the site I’ve talked non-stop about for most of this episode.

Special Thanks to Kun Gao.

This episode is hosted by me, Yedoye Travis and you can find me on Instagram at ProfessorDoye, or Twitter @YedoyeOT. This episode is researched and written by Peter Fobian, edited by Chris Lightbody, and produced by me, Braith Miller, Peter Fobian, and Jesse Gouldsbury.

[Lofi music]

[Beep]

Yedoye: But you can just- you can like, you can start watching them now, if you want.

Grace: [skeptical] Seriously?

Yedoye: Yeah, anime’s not just for kids, you know. There’s like, there’s adult stuff.

Grace: [continued skepticism] Really? Like, one example.

Yedoye: There’s… Cowboy Bebop is a good one, it’s like a… it’s like a drama sort of like...

Grace: Okay, tell me what do they do?

Yedoye: They’re uh… so the main characters are like they’re bounty hunters, and so they fly through space just like, tracking down criminals. It’s kinda like a, it’s like a crime thing.

Grace: You know I don’t like Star Wars.

Yedoye: [sigh] I know you don’t like Star Wars. [Chuckle] But I know you like crime stuff.

Grace: So now you think I’ll gonna like-

Yedoye: But I know you like crime stuff, though!

Grace: Ah-ha! Now you’re talking!

Yedoye: Yeah! It’s like a crime show.

Grace: Which one? I have to watch it! Which one?

Yedoye: It’s called “Cowboy Bebop,” they like, track down criminals and they take them in for a bounty.

Grace: They like, all those stick people do, right? It’s all cartoon folks, it’s not real? It’s not realistic?

Yedoye: I mean, it’s not real, it IS realistic, it’s drawn really well.

Grace: Yeah… see that’s still fake to me, I like more realistic stuff.

Yedoye: I think you would like it.

Grace: Name it again?

Yedoye: Cowboy Bebop.

Grace: Cowboy what?

Yedoye: Bebop.

Grace: Bebop? Cowboy Bebop, okay.

Yedoye: Yeah.

Grace: Cowboy Bebop.

Yedoye: I’ll send you a link.

[Lofi music]

Thanks! Bye.

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

0 notes