Saturday, February 28, 2009

The Future of Watching Anime; a brief history of fansubbing

When I started watching anime fifteen years ago, there was a limited number of series and movies offered for sale. I quickly found the world of the fansubbers, where for a small fee to cover equipment upkeep, videotapes, and shipping, I received non-US-licensed series. The quality of the image and the subtitling varied but through them, I could get a look at relatively new series without having the uncertain filter of US commercial distributors who were unwilling to risk much on the unknown. Fast forward a few years and then an explosion of anime for sale bloomed both on TV (thanks to Cartoon Network's anime block called Toonami in 1997, featuring their runaway hit, Akira Toriyama's DragonBallZ) and video stores. Fast forward to 2007 and the sales of anime actually fell and then continued to fall all over the world.

What caused the dramatic drop? One could guess that fansubbing moved to the Internet. Fansubbers could upload a show within days (or hours) of original broadcast, and distribution became much easier, thanks to bit torrent, faster computers, and faster internet connections. So, what's an industry to do?

One fascinating development that I have been watching is the legitimization of a streaming anime site called Crunchyroll. When I first visited this site, I was amazed at the number of titles available that I could stream on my computer. Yes, many of them were licensed in the US but the site seemed to skirt this issue by only taking down those products when the license holder objected. This meant that companies had to know and actively seek them out; Crunchyroll could pretend to wash its hands about the legality of its actions. Not only that, but its actions seemed to irk some fansubbers who feared that the site was not only going to profit over their hardwork but also seemed to break their ethical code. You can read a particularly heated interview with a Crunchyroll cofounder here on the animenewsnetwork from March 2008.

In November 2008, Crunchyroll announced a partnership with TV Tokyo to stream anime straight from the source (not through fansubbers) to their audience, days or hours after the initial airing on Japanese TV. This meant that Crunchyroll would remove all unlicensed materials and drop fansubbers out of the equation. It meant higher quality video and probably higher quality subtitles (thought not necessarily). Their biggest coup was the wildly popular Naruto: Shippuden series which has become a cornerstone of their "coming out" party. (To put this in perspective for how popular this series is for non-anime viewers, the publisher Viz has been releasing the manga in the US, even going so far as to release three novels in one month. All of them hit not only bestsellers' lists for graphic novels, but also reached into overall bestsellers.)

With more and more applications done on the web, it's not surprising that Crunchyroll knew it had a moneymaking opportunity on its hands, but the question was how to do it. Despite alienating visitors to the site who wanted a return to the breadth of CR's catalog, this was a smart move. For a small membership fee, which they had offered before in order to recoup the extraordinary costs of running such a site, viewers can watch episodes quickly after they aired (non-paying members can watch them a week later).

It remains to be seen if more companies will partner with Crunchyroll and if this approach will restrain illegal distribution and even "save" anime beyond Japan.

2 comments:

  1. Interesting...

    I would like to explore more anime out there, but it's so vast, I don't know where to start. for example, I see a lot of manga titles in Previews, but it gets a little confusing. Also, I hate picking up a title in the middle of a story and try to catch up (something I don't like about any comic book series).

    Back to animation: There's a lot of anime titles that have become "classics" over the years, like "Vampire Hunter D" that I would check out just to see what the hubbub is all about.

    Other than raiding your DVD library, ;-) is there a site that lists titles and synopsis (maybe a picture or two) of what's out there?

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  2. You are welcome to raid my library, Cranky. I would be thrilled to show you some titles that I think you would be interested in.

    But to answer your other question about anime/manga reviews, here is an excellent site:

    http://www.mania.com/anime_manga_oav_ova_dvd_category_143.html They review almost everything and do a nice job of it. Initially they were called animeondvd and they would review the story as well as the DVD (like how good the sound is, packaging and other extras).

    Here is a review of Vampire Hunter D (the 80s version):

    http://www.mania.com/vampire-hunter-d_article_73350.html

    and one of the recent one, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust:

    http://www.mania.com/vampire-hunter-d-bloodlust_article_73729.html

    and

    http://www.mania.com/vampire-hunter-d-bloodlust_article_73342.html

    If you see a title that you are interested in, look it up here. If you can't find it, ask me and I'll find a good site for you.

    I'm planning for one of my future posts to be a review of DeathNote which you might find interesting.

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