Is anime dying? – Ramblings of DarkMirage

First and foremost, Geneon didn’t put any of their more recent titles on TV. Selling the rights to air a show on TV earns a hefty royalty fee, up to 30% of the series licensing fee which is an enormus boon to a company and serves as free advertisement for buying DVDs. How could one go wrong?

Geneon didn’t get a TV airing for most of their stuff because they only licensed niche shit, hoping for a cult special like “Elfen Lied” to explode under their asses. This made their properties TV-proof and their opportunes for DVD sales limited. This would have been well and good if what they licensed was cheap, but most of their niche titles like “Rozen Maiden” and “Higurashi” seem more popular than they really are because they were free to watch and download, no one would actually pay money for a show with seriously flaws unless they were a hardcore otaku, which is rare in America.

To make matters worse, Geneon’s marketing did a shit job of promoting these DVDs online and didn’t do much to put them into stores, either. Given how painfully bad some of them are, I’m not surprised chain stores that picked up titles like “Paranoia Agent”, “Hellsing” and “Tenchi Muyo” years ago wouldn’t go for such trash. Not to mention when people actually find DVDs outside of the internet and learn they’re very expensive, they tend to, you know, not buy them.

The final nail in the coffin was leasing the dubbing rights to Bang Zoom! Entertainment, a post-processing studio. On average, BZE produces shit dubs and is well known for horrible direction and casting, but they’re an economy class dubbing studio if one ever existed before. Dirt cheap. Fact is, people recognize a terrible dub when they hear it and when clips of some dubs leaked, that just made people not want to buy the DVDs more. “Fate/stay night”, which was fucking huge property in 2006, has fallen into virtual obscurity because of a bad anime adaption, horrible dub and nonexistant promotion. Considering that was a prelicense, a.k.a. paying a premium price for a show that would likely be more expensive to license after it aired and became more popular, it turned out to be a big disaster.

Given this, Geneon fucked itself with its inane marketing practices and deserved to fail because of it. They had a few titles I liked, but for the most part I hated the shit that passed out of their asshole.

Sayonara, bitches. You won’t be missed.

So it’s basically not worth it, it’s much easier to get fansubs, and the fansubs are usually subbed better as well.

All the anime company in the US is targeting either the hard core otaku (not many people) and little kids. They sell DVD and air late night on adult swim. They air during day time for little kids.

If they open up their market even more. I mean really to every dy people.

They need some thing for every one air on network TV (like NBC & FOX) during prime time (7:00 PM to 11:00). But NOOO!! American TV won’t show import. But one thing is that most american don’t want anything not american, no matter it good or bad.

With the advent of technology in the last decade, the availability of entertainment has hit such a hardcore state that we can practically just download any form of entertainment off the internet, like pornography, games and the occasional hentai serial out of nowhere. Most companies never bothered to enforce the licenses in the first place and this leads to the rampant spreading of fansubs and downloads. It just takes a video recording machine and a link to anime exclusive channels to be able to redistribute animation in whatever way one wants.

It is not surprising that as you have said, fingers will start pointing in every direction, but have the animators/distributors ever blamed themselves? For example, Odex offers inferior quality anime (I regretted buying Girls Bravo) at disgusting resolutions despite the advent of Hi-Res TVs and SM3 graphics card at this age. It contradicts them, as a distributor, to bring the best to the customers. Animators are the same, their storylines never sidetrack from the occasional dystopic theme like Claymore and Ghost In The Shell. IMO, the most creative anime I have ever seen right now is Hayate No Gotoku, which involves piecing in content from other anime into the story to make it more realistic, but at the same time create laughs using out of the world MLT (Mo Lei Tau) scenes and the occasional beeping from censorship.

However there is still a market for anime out there. As long as there is room for creativity, and a community to sustain interest in it, anime can still be kept alive. Haruhi has been gone for a year now (2006 since it last came out), but it is still quite popular among anime fans as a reference to sexual fetishism and fantasy (I mean, which girl would let you touch her star shaped mole on her chest?). This in turn would force animators to work on equally, if not better pieces of work like this. If Gundam and Dragonball Z has survive for more than a decade, and have their themes ported and referenced in many aspects (I just found out that one of DBZ’s themes is on Pop n Music 13), I am sure any good anime out there would have such a same effect, provided if they are able to capture the hearts and minds of their fans. Gundam wasn’t as popular back when Tomino made MS Gundam, but ultimately it still rose after Zeta Gundam because of it’s exploration into war themes.

If anime is to be revived, it has to be dependent on the conscience of the downloaders and fansubbers alike. If these people are willing to work hand in hand with the distributors, I don’t think there will be another Odex case sooner or later. With anime currently priced ridiculously and with disgusting quality, it is not surprising that anime lovers would turn to downloads as they are FOC and are of usually better quality.

These are just my 2 cents worth of thoughts. Feel free to dispute it.

P.S Sorry for the long post xD. I flunked all my subjects in school except for GP, and this is my A level year. What a way to go.

if u agree, can u just email me or contact me via my blog? my blog is seiryuulostmymusic.wordpress.com. hope to hear from u soon :)
and anime is not dying!! i’ll ALWAYS SUPPORT ANIME!!! YES!! XD

if u agree, u can email me or can just contact me via my blog. if possible, link my blog to urs too hehe. thx! and i’m from sg too! :D