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It is pretty clear that FUNimation’s roll out of their new license Shikabane Hime onto streaming video websites on Friday trumped what little bit of buzz ADV planned to generate with its Monday license revelations, not only because the title debuted only three weeks ago on Japanese television but also because of the strings and behavior involved in what will be the company’s most ambitious venture into digital distribution yet.

Let me make this clear before I proceed: I will not intentionally imply or assert that FUNimation has any ill intentions despite what the title of this editorial might suggest through subtle reference to contemporary politics; I simply wish to flesh out the many promises and concerns I have about their influence on how the handling of Japanese animation in North America will evolve in the near future. I will give them respect when due but I will also not hold back on expressing any pertinent criticisms.
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The confirmation that ADV will distribute Clannad in North America as well as some previously unrescued Geneon titles in Tsukihime and Mahoromatic hit late Sunday night and is a big news item to begin the week with, but don’t forget that it was CEO John Ledford’s interview with ICv2 that spawned said news.

Long-time readers might remember that Ledford mentioned ranking titles as A, B, and C in a May 2007 interview with ANN and said that “most people buy their A titles and they download their B’s and C’s” due to the prevalence of fansubs. Now 17 months later and after overseeing his company’s strategy shift, he calls the high-profile content ‘anime events’ that still sell well and the former C’s are now classified as ’super-niche’ titles that are reliable due to their core fanbases, their low upfront licensing cost, and the cumulative ‘long tail’ sales. Nozomi has been keen on with putting out sub-only sets of fan favorites including Marimite and Aria in recent months and doing well at it while Media Blasters has been producing hybrid releases with slightly broader appeal (e.g. Rurouni Kenshin, Berserk, Genshiken) for years. By the way, Chris Anderson’s original Wired article is four years old this month.

Unfortunately, the middle of the road titles (formerly in the B range) remain financial gambles for R1 licensors, according to Ledford:

Where things get tricky is in between the big hits and the smaller niche titles. Series that are strong but may not be world-beaters. Viewership is larger than ever, thanks to the Internet, but fans just aren’t buying DVDs like they used to. And when the costs stay the same, you’ve got a lot of solid, quality productions that end up running in the red.

That’s why right now the best business to be in are the hits and the ‘super-niche’ titles. Anything in between can kill you.

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This blog takes no official position on smoking but it does support multicolored skies.

In this edition of Potluck: reaction to Mario Parva’s interview and to some unsubstantiated Amazon listings, a different sort of team blog is born, and a small morsel of anime sales data.
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I can’t ENACT any of it? Crap.

Before getting into my short non-review of the first Lucky Star OVA (not hard to imagine there will be subsequent releases), I would first like to point out the above copyright reminder that was displayed after the live action Lucky Channel segment, which a fansub group kindly took the time to translate in order to incriminate themselves. So anyone who watched this using ANY METHOD other than through a legally acquired digital versatile disc (i.e. fansubs, raws, streaming media), you have violated the law…and so have I. If you want screenshots or an in-depth summary, look elsewhere.

Now, I wasn’t expecting a lot from the Original Visual Animation but I found it humorous throughout its 40 minute run time. Almost all of it pleased me satisfactorily: (1) a daily life look at Minami’s pooch, Cherry-chan, with some good POV shots; (2) the Hiiragi sisters, Konata, and Nanao-sensei taking on a online RPG together; (3) Kagami as a reluctant Cinderella with a surprise ending; (4) a volleyball match where Tsukasa on Misao’s team tries to beat her sister and her team; (5) the usual quartet gets lost in the woods on the way to a class campsite; (6) a strange story involving a pet shop, frogs, and dialogue reiterated through text cards à la silent film; (7) Anime Tenchou approaching Konata in the MMO - the stinker of the lot; and (8) Lucky Channel with Hiromi Kanno and Minoru Shiraishi sans animation on top of a roof. The background music composed by Satoru Kousaki was good as always and his involvement in fall title Kannagi may get me to sample that new series.

For those stalwart legal viewers out there, I would speculate this OVA coming stateside in summer 2009 after television series vol. 6 comes out in mid-March or early April. About possible pricing, this should not retail for more than 15 American dollars since mediocre Mave-chan came out at $10 with negligible extras and there will surely be on-disc bonus material on par with the regular Haruhi and Lucky Star releases, namely, behind the scenes production and special event footage.

UPDATE 10/13:
A few hours after the post went up, Fanboy.com’s Michael Pinto made a comment (above) on Twitter that I heartily second - Cherry-chan needs more screen time! You should check out his site - he beat some of the technorati to a few new Japanese iPhone ads.

Regular meetings for my anime club began last Wednesday and Thursday and while it was a little odd watching the new management running the operation, I figured I would at least get a feel for the larger, slightly newer crowd and also a few series I hadn’t sampled before. What follows are my impressions of what was shown during the first three sessions.
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UPDATE 10/10: I received a response from someone at the Times to my comment but didn’t check the email until today. I have added the reply at the end of the post and I feel satisfied with the explanation they provided.

This afternoon I was reading a so-so article penned by the New York Times’ Motoko Rich about how publishers and libraries trying to use video games to spur youth reading. Rich has written numerous pieces in the past for the Times about the publishing industry so one would imagine she is able to properly describe origins of printed works. Unfortunately, she slipped up in the closing paragraphs of the piece that ran in today’s paper when mentioning two particular manga titles (emphasis added):

Noah Tropp, 14, who participated in Ms. Steinkuehler’s program [that explored whether the reading gamers do through guides and forums might serve as a 'gateway drug for literacy'] for several months this year, regularly reads sites like gamewinners.com and supercheat.com. While looking for hints online, he read about “Death Note,” a novel based on a Japanese video game. Over the summer, he read it.

Noah also wrote about the games and other pastimes on a group Internet forum. “I was so surprised because he does not like writing,” said William Tropp, Noah’s father. “I said, ‘Why aren’t you like this in school?’ ”

In one posting, Noah recommended “xxxHOLIC,” a graphic novel based on Japanese manga cartoons.

“You should check it out if you get the chance,” Noah concluded, “and it is a good book!”

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It’s been two weeks since FUNimation premiered its long-form trailer for Darker Than Black, which recently had its English cast announced at NYAF, on its weekly Quickie video podcast. I thought it was well put together and one of the best anime trailers I’ve seen in a while, but I rolled my eyes when I saw the tagline they chose: “Everyone Wears A Mask”. After seeing that they were giving away shirts bearing that slogan last weekend, I decided I HAD to do something with the phrase so I chose to have some fun using some other mask-wearing characters that came to my mind last night. Check them out after the jump and feel free to best my efforts with more humorous ones.
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Earlier this week, both Hulu and Joost announced the launch of anime channels on their respective sites. While some people joked about the sliver of revenue publishers get from Hulu or complained about watermarking (get over it, it’s FREE content), I think these efforts as well as any similar future ones are beneficial for the licensing companies in terms of increasing reach and awareness.

The shows Funimation, Viz and others are providing to streaming sites have very likely already made most of the gross revenue they will ever produce. I doubt Slayers, Blue Dragon, and Astro Boy are generating any significant scratch for their rights holders compared to the bigger franchises (e.g. Bleach, Naruto) so why not let online users see half or all of a series they may not have known existed and might never buy on DVD. The more recent fare like the entire Death Note series, uncut and subtitled, has the potential of cannibalizing Viz’s sales of digital downloads through Direct2Drive, Xbox/Zune Marketplace, and the iTunes store along with physical DVD sales.
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Tomorrow I will begin classes for the fall quarter including Japanese 1. While my decision to study Japanese was driven by my interest in Japanese culture, I would be more likely to use whatever I learn to read original language manga (like my issues of Shonen Ace and random tankoubon) than to watch raw anime since I imagine it might take longer for me to keep up with normal-speed conversations than to read at my own pace.

I had previously taken a freshman seminar called “Communicating with Japanese: Introduction to Intercultural Communication” where I met exchange students and a few police detectives as well as some courses in Japanese literature but I hadn’t studied the language itself so I thought I should start at the base level. Using the Rikaichan Firefox extension has helped me wade through posts on Akibablog and other sites so it should help supplement my studies a little bit. I am looking forward to adjusting to different word ordering and verb change schemes than the tongue I studied for the past few years (German) and actually using the English-to-Japanese digest dictionary I bought a while back from Ichiban Kan in San Francisco’s Japantown.

To those who are currently studying or already have a firm grasp on the language: do you have any tips for a beginner aside from studying everyday?

So I was listening to Buzz Out Loud today (episode 813) when heard them read a listener letter that suggested Alltop as a site for people who want homepages with news on a specific subject. I visited their collection of “online magazine racks” and whaddya know, there was an Anime category. The listing shows the latest 5 RSS items from 54 sites, which vary from actual news found on blogs and professionally-run websites to non-news items such as discount sales on AnimeNation and new additions to video streaming sites. I think the latter group should be excluded on the premise that their feeds are merely promotional and not truly informative, but I’m not operating the site, am I?

The site’s FAQ explains how they choose which sites to include on their channels:

We use a patent-pending, semantic computational algorithm derived from the post-doctoral work of Guy at Stanford. Just kidding. We rely on several sources: results of Google searches, review of the sites’ and blogs’ content, researchers, and our “gut” plus the recommendations of the Twitter community, owners of the sites and blogs, and people who care enough to write to us. Let us declare something: The Twitter community has been the single biggest factor in the quality of Alltop. Without this group of mavens and connectors, Alltop would not be what it is today.

As they mentioned, you can email them if there is an RSS-enabled site you think should be listed on a particular channel and it will be taken into consideration. Japanator is not currently listed on either the Anime or the Japan channels and Japan Probe is vacant from their “Japan” sub-site so I think some electronic correspondence may be in order.

I like the idea of discovering blogs I’ve never heard of (e.g. Wolf Hurricane) and surveying a single page to get a sense of what’s being talked about, but scrolling down the page each time could become tedious over time. There IS an option to hide unwanted feeds from view and the ability to restore hidden feeds but there is no way to rearrange the order in which the sites are presented so users have to deal with their “highly subjective and judgmental” ordering patterns. (Quote from the same FAQ I linked above.) I might use the site on occasion but I’m not planning making it my start page anytime soon, choosing to stick with about:blank for now.