The Retailer Focus, BD and New Media
While my heart goes out to the panning of the rant of a retailer, speaking as a buying customer (though I never shopped at RACS) I have to say there is a very agreeable point to what Robert (Bob?) is saying.
Let me see if I can pin it in fewer words and less “quit ruining my business!” bias:
- DVD sales declined partly due to Blu-Ray Disc adaptation, across the whole industry (let alone Japan, who is really taking the lead in anime BD sales).
- BD sales is the next cycle in the home video industry, or at least a part of it. So without BD uptake, the home video sales will suffer.
- BD uptake in anime licensing in America is currently throttled by licensing trepidation, lack of a better word, from Japan. Reverse importation may be the primary source of fear but who really knows? There is no data to support it, one way or the other.
- R1 companies should focus their efforts and resources in securing BD licenses and produce better products, because that’s where the money is in the near future. (I’d also add on my own that before BD prices drop across the board, now is the time to cash in on high margin SKUs.)
Also just for footnote, remember that the US anime industry (if one could be said that there is one, as commonly known) has its roots in the home video business. Pretty much everybody’s core business model is to sell actual, physical products (with one notable exception). It just happens what they sold had to be licensed from Japan. This business came from a tradition of pushing hardware, not software. So things like home video sales trend is key to their survival, including their downstream affiliates.
A proper rebuttal of Rob’s fears (perhaps better put as soothing and reassuring his worries, for the less confrontational) goes like this. In short:
- We don’t know for sure how the BD market is going to turn out in this space. Yet.
- Blu-Ray Disc market has yet to stabilize especially in America, considering the nature of the format still waffles between budding home-theater owners, trend-conscious consumers, and hardcore collectors.
- We don’t know how BD-buying anime fans fit between those categories.
- And there are a lot of other things that we don’t know (most importantly: pricing trends in specifics).
- And once we do know for sure, Japan will much more likely cooperate.
- (Old argument:) The internet piracy market doesn’t overlap with the BD-buying market anyways! All that online stuff is to add revenue stream through the people who won’t buy the physical media in the first place, and the data is good on cannibalization (as in, not enough to worry about).
- Most hardcore collectors either don’t give a flying damn about Funimation’s crap BDs, or lament about it (By the way, this is hawt.). [By the way #2, we also don’t care about some torrent of some 720p material upscaled (by manufacturer) to 1080 then downscaled (by encoder) to 720. WTH guys.]
The way I see it, when Viz, Funimation and others branch into online media stuff, they’re trying to secure as many revenue streams as their budget can allow. I mean, that’s what every media licensing company in America (and elsewhere!) is doing. Even if they don’t make money through it, it’s a great way to advertise. Take Viz for example, I think they suck when it comes to the internet in general, even compared to Funimation (maybe that is because they are now a Japanese company and invariably that sort of lack-of-business-savvy comes like a D&D racial penalty), but even then, they know they have to go there because the is money there, because the next generation of buyers are there. You have to be visible in that space.
If anything, Crunchyroll has shown Japan that there is money in the cloud. It’s a separate question as to if CR can stay afloat, but that’s a different inquiry. Ultimately there’s very little people like Robert can do, so his frustration with the whole shebang of ills throughout the system/process is sympathetic, if a tad misdirected.
I also have one more note from the blog comments–
Who has a BD strategy? I know Funimation does, as their 5-man dedicated in-house mastering folks…exist. They also have dedicated marketing folks that post blog posts and screw around on Twitter. I already mentioned before that these sorts of people are almost luxuries–how many anime licensing companies in the US can afford that? Viz comes to mind, and Crunchyroll? It isn’t like BD mastering is a simple and inexpensive process either. And even today, the only good anime on BD, in the US, come from Honneamise and Sony. That’s it folks! In reality Bandai Visual and Funimation are obviously two players with a BD strategy; one just gets hated on for no good reason (BDs being too expensive is no reason to hate IMO) and jumped ship, the other is in the process of making less-crappy BD releases and wrangling over licensing problems.
In short, BD is still too expensive for small fries, too corporate-paranoid for the big guys (except Bandai), and behind the curve for everyone else (see Funi’s backlog).
Personally, I would love to be able to buy BD of all the anime I want to buy. But a honest look at the landscape of the market would tell me that even if I have a lot of spending money and live in Japan, not all the title I want is even available in BD. Where is my Simoun? Where’s my Futakoi Alternative? Where’s my Kara no Kyoukai? If anything that is the “moral” of the True Tears box story. So, I think it is a little unreasonable to ask a foreign licensee that sort of thing, at this junction.
One thing I do agree with him: Funimation should quit pussy-footing around and make a strong statement in their BD releases; even if it is at the expense of spending more money there and spending less money elsewhere, BD ought to be/will be a core business product. Being the default anime industry leader in the US, they need to be able to put out a quality BD product. Absolutely have to. Why? If anything, so it quells my fear that they can’t even if they wanted to. As I see it, they’re really just trying to scrape by as cheaply as they can, and that just makes the HD-whore in me sad. Worse, it gives me an incentive to wait for something better, like a Japanese release.
And lastly, two more notes:
Japan is paranoid about reverse importation of BDs and they make people jump hoops about their Region A releases. Still, I think there is good sense to change your release methods to avoid making the “ultimate” SKU that will end up siphoning all the richest/most desperate buyers. It is the opposite approach of the Honneamise/BV strategy. For example, we have Disney’s Ponyo, which is tailored to the American audience for their US release, and tailored to the Asian audience in their Japanese release. I think it’s quite clever that the Japanese release carries just a 2.0 English track where as the US release carries a 5.1 Japanese (but lower bitrate than the Japanese one) track. I think that’s really tailoring it to the right audience. Of course, this strategy doesn’t apply so well on titles where volume of sales that don’t tier, or are just really low. And yeah, it rubs those perfectionist collectors the wrong way, but they could always just buy both copies :3
(Oh wait, that makes THREE studios with concerted BD strategy. Let’s remember the margin Disney makes on these babies in their Japanese release. Ahem.)
The other note being–do people care? I mean it sort of goes under my bullet up there about “overlapping.” Poor suckers like me probably would double- and triple-dip on BD/DVD/VHS/LD or whatever as long as you give us a compelling reason we will buy SKU from our favorite shows. I think that’s the basic operational mentality from the consumer side of things in the anime industry. In that sense, when Funimation releases Samurai Champloo BD, I bought it, mainly because it would be my only archival copy–that is the same as buying the DVDs of the thing, since the quality is about on par (if not worse). Still, I bought the damned thing. I can see why people might not buy it as an upgrade to their library, but it’s one example where the BD SKU can fit a role that a budget re-release DVD does for a title that already has a first or second pressing. I think Funimation understands this and knows that’s possibly where the money is!
TL;DR: It is a game of incentives. Funimation (and everyone) stands to gain from playing ball in the various markets, both because there is something to gain and because it is relatively cheap. Before we cry about bulking up core businesses we have to rationally examine the potential gain versus the cost, even if it contradicts with what I said up there…
How Has Anime Changed Over the Past 15 Years?
Ask John the same question, and you can read his answer.
It is a tough question to tackle, so I felt it was unfair to criticize him behind his back. Rather, I want to supplement his survey of the last 15 years of anime by pointing out some key changes that JP and I (mostly I) felt that was too important to be left out of John’s answer. There are also some erroneous bits, but I’m going to ignore them for now (ie., LOL moe and tsundere in anime predates 1995 kkthx).
Japan, now online: Between 1995 and 2010, cellular phone penetration has skyrocketed in Japan. If you recall Makoto Shinkai’s 5 cm/s, that was a key plot device in the first segment, especially coming into the film as a generation who find their cell phones second-nature. I presume this is how most modern Japanese teens and young adults feel about cell phones. Of course, Japan is this weird place where more people go online and do their internet stuff via cell phones than with their personal computers, so that also means places like 2ch is really a socially important thing today. Let’s not even go into how important 2ch is for anime fans of Japan. And 2ch didn’t officially exist until 1999.
The impact of 2ch on anime is hard to point and cite authoritatively, even if I’m sure we could cite to a bunch of stuff. It is, however, notable as a way for industry folks to gauge and interact with fans. Leaks to 2ch is almost like a marketing tool nowadays. (Kanatagatari’s leak is widely thought of as on purpose, for example.) We have anime and manga made about the Train Man story, which is essentially a national-cultural nod to 2ch. Obviously 2ch gets referenced in anime and manga, too. Still the real impact of 2ch has on anime is on the fans, on the fan industries (read: doujin market), and as a social hub that can make or break a work. Gurren Lagann episode 4 anyone?
And that’s just 2ch. Blogging; Mixi; online stream sites like Nico and Youtube, DTO sites, paid-streams, even the likes of Crunchyroll and foreign-operated licensees all play a notable role in the evolution of anime especially in the latter part of this decade. Pixiv and similar communities fostered growth of talents, even if only in part. It also presented a fan-facing revenue stream, complemented that whole “Comic Market” mentality that, well, we’ll get right to it.
Gundam and Retail Potato
I mouthed out some nonsense about True Tears, but in reality I was just cheering for joy. I don’t understand why people don’t grasp that the typical anime otaku who would buy True Tears in the first place won’t stand for a DVD unless it’s dirt cheap (ie., a throwaway purchase). That is, once they’ve tasted what that show looks like in HD! And of course, I’d suspect most anime otaku who could afford buying anime (in Japan) in the first place have a PS3 by now.
That said, it wouldn’t be fair to say that every high-def title out there is worth it. We have things like Bakemonogatari, which is more like an OAV since the TV airing was significantly different; it’s a worthy buy but it’s not because of production values per se. We have shows that probably don’t look any different on 1080p than 480p because the production value is too low. And then we have shows that actually look good enough on DVD that a Blu-Ray doesn’t make a whole lot of difference. We also have some upscales. Once you remove all of that you’re left with the shows that truly make a difference on a big screen.
Did I ever mention that Simoun had a high-def broadcast?
Well, no matter. I hope that Gundam Unicorn thing is at least a step in the right direction. Yeah, the price point is no good, but that puts Xam’d’s costs in perspective I say!
Lastly, some Dance in the Vampire Bund music (aff. link) for Momotato. I neglected this title from the last post because the first episode was clearly not enough to make an opinion on the show. I can’t even say if I could make up my mind at all after the second episode, but that is probably not a good sign.
Matching Passion with Preordination, Examples from Gamers
The post came to mind after listening to the latest ANNCast, with guests Adam Sheehan and Lance Heiskell from Funimation.
I sort of knocked Funimation a bit last year when I compared their online streaming stuff with Crunchyroll, but that’s probably something I didn’t intended to do at first. The thought came to and it was kind of fun to run with it, you know? Partly because it’s true that their approach to “new media” (in quotes as the term of art) is along the lines of what we see from the more entrenched players of the publishing industry, no matter how much better Funi is compared to most of the others that we know. That particular subject matter deserves its own post, anyways. Like this.
The thing is, I think Funimation’s marketing team is doing a very good job overall at least on their web-facing arm of the department. I think guys like Adam, Lance and Rojas all are doing it right. At the same time, it’s no fun when Funimation may be the only US-based anime company that not only can benefit greatly from that sort of marketing, but also they’re the only ones who have the resources to hire people to do that full time among these anime publishers here.
After listening to ANNCast (I somewhat skipped the movie talk bits, since I don’t really care), it occurred to me that while the two ANN hosts are trying to entertain their audience in their own ways, they come off as unprofessional. This was because compared to the two Funimation guests, who are both professionals and as sufficiently genuine as a PR gig can be, Zac and Justin come off like clowns who hate their jobs and the shows they have to watch. I guess it is forgivable in the sense that Zac and Justin were trying to make it entertaining, but uh, I wouldn’t invite Lance to a podcast if I want it to be entertaining. That’s worse than inviting Holo to be your anime’s co-lead, to use an economics in-in-joke.
Well, I’m sure both Zac and Justin are working in a field in which they like. I mean who would otherwise put up with the things they put up with? At the same time, I look at Chris Beveridge’s twitter, and I’m like, man, that’s kind of a nice job. But then again he is the guy who can watch all of One Piece and enjoy it, and the next moment review the torrential outpouring of crappy hentai anime that he reviews out of some notion of journalistic and artistic integrity. In fact, because he’s seen so many crappy anime, I think he’s got it: He knows how to reconcile with Sturgeon’s Law.
Let it be known that if you do want to write reviews for a living, you will end up fighting Sturgeon’s Law, that’s for sure. For a good example of what not to do, just read ANN’s reviews! Joking aside, it’s also possible that some may wander into the deep end, so the editorial and review policies of a thing like the ANN is not easy to balance. I knock ANN, because they have this big bull’s eye on their backs, since they are ambitious enough to take up their crosses and nobody else has (or could). Not because they suck (which could be true) and should go away (hah). Well, it’s probably unfair to criticize the whole organization for the failing of a few, and the problem I am talking about in this post is universal (as I see it on Jtor all the time).
So what’s the best way to approach this problem?
What I want to share is what has already been said, many times, by the video game folks online. The video game “web 2.0 press” industry has had a much bigger head start on blogging and reviewing that they’re past this phase already. Instead of reinventing the wheel I’ll I quote from Penny Arcade’s less eloquent half. After all, if the gamer world is the Matrix, Gabe and Tycho are like The Oracle. Except instead of cookies they make charities, cons and comics:
I think the biggest complaint I saw [in Assassin’s Creed] was that the missions become repetitive and boring. I actually didn’t understand this complaint at all until just the other day. I had gotten an early copy of the game just like everyone else in the media but I was just playing it for fun. I’d cracked into it over the weekend and when I got into the office on Monday I started seeing these negative reviews. When I saw the low scores I was actually really upset and I wanted to talk about the game here on the site. I wanted to tell everyone that these guys were full of shit. However, since so many of the complaints were based on the ending I wanted to beat it first so I was sure I wasn’t missing anything. I attacked the game again but this time with the goal of beating it as fast as I could. I was determined to get a post up on Tuesday and I was pushing through the game as fast as I could. I went from finding every high perch in a district to only getting the ones I needed to advance the story. I stopped saving every citizen and avoided any unnecessary confrontations. The informer missions that I had really enjoyed before, I now avoided because I knew they took too long to complete. I did the bare minimum of missions to progress the story and anything that “hindered” my progress was frustrating. Monday night after skipping over another combat (something I used to really enjoy) I stopped myself. What the fuck was I doing? I wasn’t playing the game because I wanted to I was playing it because I had a deadline and I needed to beat it. I stopped immediately and decided I’d write about the game whenever I got around to beating it. I spent another day and a half with it and during that time I hunted for hidden flags and explored the cities again. I came in this morning and finally did beat it but I did it at my own pace and I enjoyed every part of it.
Imagine what an open ended sandbox title must look like to a reviewer especially right now. How many games do they have piling up on their desks? A game like Assassins [C]reed isn’t meant to be played under a deadline. You shouldn’t be trying to beat it as fast as you can so you can move on to Mass Effect or Mario Galaxy. As soon as I gave myself a deadline all of a sudden I understood all their complaints. It was like a fucking Escher painting. I had put myself in their shoes and suddenly the landscape flipped and I could see games from their perspective. In the end I wasn’t angry at them for their bad reviews. I actually just felt bad for them.
If you’re not sure what Gabe is saying, go hit up the link and read the whole story, hopefully it makes a lot more sense. And yeah, I do feel bad about some of the reviewers out there, having to cram down crap moe shows they hate because that’s what they’re paid to do. In the end it tortures themselves, their organization, and their readers, all just for some traffic spikes. And it isn’t that they can’t or shouldn’t review moe crap or whatever, but they are incapable of handling it.
It’s worse because I know how some of you out there “work.” I am too an infinitesimal part of this nefarious cloud of individuals who can actually write a review in the disguise of press, and this is not a labor to be done without joy. If you are doing this web journalism thing for real, as a career, as your calling in life, please do not discredit your and your colleagues’ reputation by putting out reviews of things that aren’t labor of love. Because in truth, the whole Web 2.0-way of reviews is to connect, not to arbitrate. We look at reviews as just a data point to make a purchase decision. It’s YOU be the judge, not our REVIEWS. To cite the more eloquent half of Penny Arcade:
If I had to state the difference between our approach and others, it’s that we seem to understand that we are simply expressing an opinion. The age of the psychic reviewer shaman is over. You should never allow a meaningless, arbitrary integer promulgated by an arbitrary voice who came to power arbitrarily make decisions for you. That’s essentially what Gabriel was trying to say, but he said it in a Gabriel way and it may be that the signal was lost.
You can also read what I think about a large portion of the “pro” reviews out there for anime, because Gabe sums it up. It’s a very relevant tangent, but I won’t go into it here.
The ability to overcome this hurdle is what makes a real pro, well, a pro. It’s what makes you credible. The cold, harsh economics of it all is something you want to deal with as a pro, and not something you can put off to your readers just because “no publicity is bad publicity.” It is not a good community-building approach. It doesn’t mean a reviewer can’t express his opinion, but any idiot online can express his opinion, what makes yours earn your pay? A professional critic’s opinion is valuable in of itself, and not just because he has a title that is a professional critic. It is not couched in personalized contexts but truths that connects with the audience. Heck, I’m not saying you shouldn’t do troll reviews–again, any idiot online can troll. If I’m going to pay a troll, that troll better be a good troll, if not an excellent one.
I suppose, thankfully, that anime reviews have not reach the levels of seriousness in business that game reviews have. This mixed blessing both curses us to a sea of mediocre reviews being created merely on the merit of traffic, with better reviews gaining no clout on them; and it blesses us with a “yukkuri” attitude that, in the end of the day, reviews are just yet another pile of pies in the sea of opinion in which we exist.
Aria Culture Mashup, Cookie Monster Style
I remember taking some kind of Japanese culture class as an undergrad (unsure why, probably out of obligation of graduation requirements) and the persistent narrative of that course comes in the form of an illustration. Undoubtedly, I know some of you have heard of the onion analogy in respect to the layers of Japanese culture as a foreign perspective. Long story short, Japan has this tendency to mimic and regurgitate foreign cultural elements to suit their internal needs and purposes. Some well-known examples include the Japanese modern tradition of Christmas and Valentine’s Day/White Day.
Aria becomes interesting in this regard because it is a story about a repackaged Venice. A good portion of the episodes are almost like a tourism promotional video in the sense that various “charm points” of Venice are preserved and translated to its Martian counterpart. Somehow, the science fictional excuse (well, Venice is sinking is no fiction I guess) made the translation from the old & real to the new & imaginary totally cool, sort of like Spike and smoking inside a spaceship.
Thankfully, Aria is not truly about Neo Venezia (or the real Venezia), because the space-time transplant seems a little bit hollow to me. Instead, it focuses on the cast of Undines, who are the space-time transplants of guild-certified gondola guides working the water ways of Venice. In Aria and Neo Venezia, Undines are female only, which is a drastic contrast with their 21st century counterparts in Venice, who are almost all male.
That cute irony aside (and of course we would not have Aria in any way without its present and “iyashi” cast of Undines), there are a lot of little things like this in Aria, some less cute than others. Unfortunately, I am no Venetian, and I am probably equally ill-equipped to talk about Japanese culture in light of Venice’s characterization (as a city and people), or what seems comfortable to the average Aria viewer, rather than what a Japanese tourist might read from a travel brochure or see with their own eyes. I do know, however, that Aria is ultimately a prime example of iyashikei anime, and it intends to bring forth that pleasantry as both a selling point but also as a substance of its story.
If we consider Aria’s story as an onion about coming of age, as a story that instills hope for humankind in general and one that paints a reasonably rosy picture about people coming to terms about their future fears and aspirations, of successes and failures, then Neo Venezia is just an outer layer of that onion. It is, in a literal sense, a gateway to a fantasy world. The construction of that setting is both key to unlock what comes after it, and something more.
And as you can guess, I think the whole Venice/Neo Venezia thing is also a disguise. If we keep peeling back the Aria onion, past its characters and stories, I think we might find just what makes Neo Venezia different than Venice. Sort of like what keeps that cigarette on Spike’s lips in an oxygen-poor place to live.
For one, Venice, like much of the notable and historic cities in Europe, is covered in artifacts and churches. It goes without saying that one of the most prosperous cities in historic Europe (ie., it used to be) is like a gold mine for lore, made up or for real. However, we didn’t really get a lot of that from Aria and Neo Venezia. Instead, we got the “feeling” that there’s something new to discover everywhere you look, if you love the place enough and take the time to walk on shadows, or something. For the most part, we were treated about 40% sci-fi stuff (eg., moles) and 60% Venice notables (eg. the Bridge of Sighs).
Really? Is this why people flock to Venice as a tourist spot? Instead of, say, the beautiful wilderness of the Gobi Desert? Or some dimly-lit stretches of Tokyo’s urban crawl? I doubt it. At any rate, it leaves out one of those key things that can undermine its “everything is beautiful” premise, which is that if you live in a historic place like Venice, well, duh, you’re in rowing distance from some world-famous landmarks and architecture. But can you say the same thing about living in the middle of Antarctica, to use an extreme example? Woo you are actually near the physical South Pole! There are penguins! You are snowed in half of the year! Of course, if we are to see Neo Venezia through Akari’s eyes, it wouldn’t be the same as if we were to see Antarctica from the eyes of a penguin, but you can’t deny that there’s just a lot more to see in Venice or Neo Venezia than a lot of other places your Aria watchers people live. It is an exotic European getaway!
Another way to put it is that, say, if I live and work in Paris, and I spend a lot of time working, I might not have the time to treasure all that cultural richness as designated as landmarks or what have you. It is a good point that Parisians should stop and enjoy themselves and re-discover the cultural richness that surrounds them. But if I was working as a personal tour guide, maybe I should think twice about the everyday sights that passes by me. You know, part of the job and all. If I am neither a professional tour guide nor I live near any notable place on Earth, then it’s not so pretty out there.
Here is the TL;DR–if Venice (let alone Neo Venezia, which is a SF version of the same) is already the sort of touristy destination that your average Japanese-TV-viewing person would find otherworldly, why not use that as the getaway element? Why reconstruct this outer layer (as far as reasons in respect to the story)? And more importantly, what does this comfortably distant future serve for a story that could be told in today’s world?
In trying to find answers to those questions, the only revelation I’ve stumbled upon is that it’s a way to tune into its audience’s mind. It suspends beliefs and speak in a language that disarms the audience from the mental baggage that one might have if it was a real Italian location. Or a South Korean one. Instead of hard-hitting cynicism or political parody, we get some wishy-washy feel-good story about people rowing boats with gloves on. Or off. It’s as if we are tsunderes, or just too childish to take the bitter medicine so it’s coated with caramelized onion skin. OM NOM NOM NOM.
