The first DVD volume of xxxHolic will finally hit US shelves on March 25th, according to AnimeOnDVD’s listing of new Funimation solications. I’m excited about this not because it’s a great anime but because it’s taken so long for it to come out. The delay might have due to Funimation focusing on finishing its Tsubasa releases first, which they will do on January 8 when Tsubasa Vol. 6 is released. The first volume will feature four episodes, with Colleen Clinkenbeard voicing Yuuko and Todd Haberkorn voicing Watanuki.
I was walking around with my parents at Apple Hill today, looking at bunches of apples, pumpkins, and various crafts when I saw the headline “Manga comics losing longtime hold on Japan” in a copy of yesterday’s USA Today that was in a trash bin. So I made a mental note of it, checked out the article when I got home, and apparently there is a big problem of sorts. Sales fell the fifth consecutive year in 2006 and manga magazine sales are far from their 1995 peak of 1.34 billion with a figure of 745 million last year, about a 44% drop. The reporter noted that that high year was when Weekly Shonen Jump stopped carrying Dragon Ball. There were four likely causes given that primarily involve the habits of young Japanese people. Read the rest of this entry »
I did not attend Otakon 2007 because I don’t have the money to fly over to Baltimore, get a hotel room and then likely purchase stuff at the convention itself. I think of Otakon akin to Anime Expo as each being the big summer convention for their respective coastlines. I WOULD like to attend it one of these years to get a feel for how differently it is run from Fanime and AX and the general atmosphere. Thanks to the Internet, I can at least get panel reports from ANN and extract interesting things from them.
Remember John Ledford’s mention of “B” titles a month ago? I had kind of forgotten about it until I came upon two things recently that mentioned it. This week’s edition of the AnimeNation News Podcast released on Thursday covered the topic and an ICv2 interview with Mike Balliff, ADV Senior VP of Sales, mentioned the phrase in a question about whether popularity in Japan is a good indicator of success in America.
Every week on the AnimeNation News Podcast, the hosts cover the news of the past week as well as two or three Ask John questions. The question from June 22nd, “Why Don’t ‘B’ Titles Sell in America Anymore?”, was the first of two to be discussed and below is the audio from the June 28th episode:
Back in March, I wrote about Anime on Demand, a program built on the .NET framework that allowed you to watch streaming fansubs outside a browser. I didn’t particularly use it much after writing that post except for saving my ass once during an anime club showing. (Never screw up Ouran when there are fangirls. Ever.)
Anyway, lunarising89 left a comment yesterday saying that none of the streams worked anymore and I checked myself to find that to be pretty much true save for a handful of titles like Battle Programmer Shirase. For most, a drawing of a ball-and-chain prisoner with a message of removal appeared for about 10 seconds. So I e-mailed the developer and webmaster Rathlar this afternoon to find out what was going on. His reply is after the jump.
According to a post made yesterday on TorrentFreak, anime fans who use BitTorrent sport the highest share [seed/leech] ratio (2.5) over other more popular categories like TV shows (1.87) and applications (1.53). However, anime only made up 5.4% of traffic whereas “TV shows” was the most popular category at just under half the total traffic, 49.68%. Also, something interesting to note is that only 10% of torrents offered are TV related; anime torrents make up 4.3% of all listings.
The stats given in the post were based on a sample of over 400,000 .torrent files from public BT sites. Supposedly these numbers will be reported monthly so it’ll be interesting to see how they change in the future. Personally, I’ve started to use IRC more than BitTorrent to get my fansubs especially if the series is more than a couple years old and there are only a couple seeders.
An post on Japan Probe mentions that the tax office of Oharu in Hokkaido has put up for sale rare figures owned by a toy retailer who didn’t pay his taxes. The unopened figures included characters from Sentimental Graffiti among other ’90s love simulation games. The department uses online auctions site like Yahoo! to sell other seized items like cars and paintings and back in February, over 100 bids were made for four figures with the highest bid at 7,250 yen. Another ten sets are currently being hocked and bids will be accepted until May 1. Don’t ask me where, though - if you’re interested, you should be motivated enough to search for them yourself. Let this be a warning to all you collectors out there, especially if you’re running a business.
Almost everyone in the fan community dislikes 4Kids Entertainment for how they have handled titles like One Piece and some of them wish they would go out of business. Well, the company reported on Friday a $2.3 million net loss for the quarter ending December 31, 2006 and a $1.0 million loss for the year ending 12/31/06 (net gain for 2005 was $5.1 million), but they still have over $18 million in cash and $111 million in total cash and investments so they’re not going out of business in the immediate future. However, there is room for concern as their net revenue as steadily decreased over the past two years from $99.1 million in 2004 to $71.8 million in 2006.
UPDATE (3/2/07 6:30PM PST): I posted some corrections regarding the streaming issue and gave some impressions after watching it.
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I was watching the Oscars last night and thought of the American Anime Awards that were awarded the night before on Saturday at New York Comic-Con. While I am glad that the presentation is more tasteful than other genre-based award shows like the Spike Video Game Awards, I have four suggestions on how to improve the AAA’s (the Anidubs?) for next year.
Suggestion 1: Limit the Eligibility Period
The seemingly only criteria for eligibility is that an anime or manga must be available in the US during the previous year (e.g. 2006). This means that an anime could be nominated in multiple years if it gets a thinpack release in a different calendar year than its debut on the US market. This multi-year nomination problem also affects manga because something like Fruits Basket (the winner for best manga) with more than 10 volumes will likely have its volumes released over a number of years. In an interview with ANN, Milton Griepp from ICv2 was asked about this. Below are both the question and Griepp’s response: Read the rest of this entry »
According to ANN, Ideafactory is making a Ouran Host Club romantic adventure game targeted at women for the PS2, due to come out in spring 2007 in Japan. I guess this isn’t exactly a case of life imitating art but more like games imitating anime and manga since Renge, the host club’s self-imposed manager, went to Japan because she was a fan of a relationship game (a parody of Tokimeki Memorial) featuring lookalikes of the host club’s members. I hope the characters have the same voices and I wonder if Haruhi would be available as a love interest…
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