Forum - View topicHey, Answerman! - Translation Mitigation
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TitanXL
 Posts: 4036 |
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There's plenty of action-oriented mainstream anime that comes out every year, but the thing is most of it doesn't come out in America, and most people complaining I never see talk about it and would rather sit and complain. For example, on these forums I don't even see active One Piece/Naruto threads (which are actually released America and popular), so expecting talkbacks about all the other mainstream stuff is more unlikely. It definitely exists though, which is why the complaints never make sense. |
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belvadeer
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Glad to hear you're okay. A shame about the car though.
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2568 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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No problem. I was really excited when B't X got licensed, as it was the show that got me into Masami Kurumada's works (not Saint Seiya, like 99.9% of most people; in fact, it was the third Kurumada title I got into, with Ring ni Kakero 1 being the second), and when I started hearing about Illumitoon's horrible releases I was dreading what would happen to B't X. In the end I never bought Volume 1, but I did end up buying Volume 2, which is how I saw that Illumitoon actually did a (somewhat) good release at the end. Unfortunately, I couldn't stand the fact that I had an Illumitoon DVD in my collection, so I ended up getting rid of my B't X Volume 2 DVD after a few months. I can only hope that Discotek's release of the Saint Seiya movies this summer does somewhat well, because Discotek is essentially the only chance left for any & all Kurumada anime to ever get brought over. The fact that the movies come out a day before my birthday just makes it all the more awesome. |
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Keichitsu0305
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First off, glad you're okay from the car accident and no one was hurt.
Because it would have been a total waste of resources to get the cast from a 1990's anime to voice for a completely new, unrelated anime. Simple. That's like trying to get the DragonBall English cast to voice for Dr. Slump: sharing the same manga creator doesn't mean the anime will be treated in the same manner in terms of voice casting. Sure, it would be cool but no reason to be pissed off about. |
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Zhou-BR
Posts: 1428 |
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While Saint Seiya is one of the few long-running anime series that ever got a full DVD release in Brazil (OVAs and movies included), it was still riddled with bad picture quality, dubtitles, missing eyecatches and episode previews, replaced opening sequences (only for the Asgard and Poseidon arcs) and a hideous generic overlay replacing the original episode title cards, which featured a different illustration for each episode.
That's why I refused to buy the Brazillian release and ended up buying the Japanese boxsets instead. I decided to look for some subtitle files so I could sync them with my DVDs while watching them with Media Player Classic, but it turned out I only had two choices: terrible English subtitles ripped from Hong Kong bootlegs or dubtitles ripped from the Brazillian DVDs. I went with the former because they're still more accurate than the Brazillian subs, broken English and all. Still, I ended up buying the Brazillian releases of the Meikai-hen and Elysion-hen OVAs because Avex doesn't seem to have any plans to re-release them as boxsets in Japan, and I was stunned to see that even though they only feature two or three episodes per disc, their picture quality was still awful. Unless Toei decided to cripple the Brazillian release by providing the distributor with poor-quality masters in order to prevent reverse importation, I can only assume their employees are terrible at re-encoding video. |
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Melanchthon
 Posts: 550 Location: Northwest from Here |
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Given that it was an Aztek, which manages to insult both my sense of style as well as my spelling, I believe it deserved its fate. Glad Answerman is okay, though
I read a study once that compared human reading speed based on colour of word (your tax dollars at work). Turns out the slowest colour to read, you guessed it, was GREEN. So really, green is the absolute worst colour one could have their subtitles in. Just another thing to be irritated about.
I'm not certain that a number of Japanese studios going bankrupt or animators being paid less than 15K a year are signs of health. Just saying. Here is the thing about kickstarter. You hear about the successes, but never the failures. And there are a lot of failures. Check out this handy chart from the Economist. Film and Video projects only have about a 40% success rate, while publishing projects round out about 30%. Once has to wonder about the viability of this scheme if the backers can't consistently raise enough money to follow through. I think crowdsourcing has advantages for old, cult classic shows that the major R1 companies won't touch, but for modern shows, I think the best paths are streaming video and high-end collector releases like NISA and Aniplex. |
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RyanSaotome
 Posts: 4210 Location: Towson, Maryland |
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Companies will always be going bankrupt in any industry if they make bad business decisions. Like if a company just wants to keep on making anime that won't sell, or spend far too much budget on stuff that won't sell, it won't matter how healthy the industry is.. they will go under. I just mean the industry is healthy as any other time, not that its perfect. |
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TitanXL
Posts: 4036 |
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Citing specific companies going bankrupt doesn't mean much since I imagine you had companies going under in the 90s as well. Not to mention you have far more companies now than you did back then. These days we get over 100 shows a year, where as in the 90s you got about 25 shows a year. That alone tells me anime is stronger than it was back then.
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walw6pK4Alo
 Posts: 9322 |
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Maybe anime was only a long-term fad in the US, its inability to get on TV beyond paltry airings at Worst-o'clock Saturday Night are somewhat telling. Beyond that, Justin mentioned that networks would rather have their own shows that they possess full rights to, something that will never expire. It's more cost effective to make cheap anime knock-offs than actually show the real stuff. You get DVD/BD rights and all of the merchandising ontop of that. Airing anime can only hopefully give you ratings, that's about it, unless you join in on production committees.
Last edited by walw6pK4Alo on Fri Feb 22, 2013 7:29 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Surrender Artist
 Posts: 3264 Location: Pennsylvania, USA |
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Anecdote versus unsupported assertion!
WHO WILL WINS?!? Not anybody who wants to understand anything. I'm pretty sure that nobody here, at least nobody who's talking, has any good analysis or even useful data about the Japanese animation business. It's a much more complicated question than a few stories about bankruptcy and wages or some crude quantitative claims can settle. The stories that Melanchthon posted don't really amount to a trend and TitanXL's thinking makes me wonder if there are credit default swaps on moeblobs. We don't know enough to make good judgements and I doubt that anybody here has the training to make good use of knowing enough. Besides, the whole damned thing seems to be a proxy battle in an annoying culture war anyway. |
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RyanSaotome
Posts: 4210 Location: Towson, Maryland |
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If you want data, heres some data. http://www.mania.com/aodvb/showthread.php?p=1972211#post1972211 13 of the top 25 anime since 2000 were from the last 4 years (2009-2012). The early 2000s were pretty barren for the anime industry, but it really started to get strong again about 2006. Theres no concrete numbers before 2000 since thats when Oricon came around, but the fact there were only 1/4th the shows we have now, I think its safe to say the industry is healthier now then it was in the 90s. Last edited by RyanSaotome on Fri Feb 22, 2013 7:41 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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walw6pK4Alo
Posts: 9322 |
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Of course it's all speculation, no one is an insider here, not even those in the NA industry, they're still not Japanese insiders. What we can observe is that the TV industry appears healthy with little slowing down. Whether or not that's image upkeep to make everything seem okay we'll never know, but high budget shows are still coming out whether you enjoy them or not. There's movies aplenty. A snapshot of 2012 in anime overall is far more impressive than 2002, so unless we see some real issues coming up, I have no immediate fear for the well-being of the Japanese anime industry.
The only thing to lament is the truly original OVA market, as in OVAs not tied to anything else, completely unique in their creation. No manga, no addenda to TV series, no followup, no light novel, no visual novel association. That's either long dead or dying.
What I like about sales in terms of volume over money is that it's not affected by inflation, like where you can claim X movie is the best selling movie ever except it's not when you account that $1 from 1940 is like $13 now. More people physically buying a product is telling, regardless of profits. The adage of "why don't they make more stuff people want to buy" – they are, apparently. You're open to arguing with the numbers all you want (they're not accurate, they're skewed, this, that!) but I don't see any other data produced to make a counterpoint. |
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penguintruth
 Posts: 8467 Location: Penguinopolis |
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It's okay, Brian. Tomino isn't for everyone.
He's my favorite anime director, however. No, seriously. Stop chortling. |
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rojse
 Posts: 234 |
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Tomino is my favourite anime director, too. Yeah, his shows are flawed, but he was doing a lot of interesting things with his characters and story ideas that far surpassed what I've seen of the genre back in the seventies and eighties. And he's also managed to make me care when he's killed off his own characters - it's something I would say of very few writers or directors. While Tomino may have been responsible for some stinkers, he's also responsible for far too much high-quality anime (directing "Mobile Suit Gundam" and "Space Runaway Ideon", and producing "Round Verniam Vifam") for his success to merely be dismissed as luck or coincidence. |
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HeeroTX
Posts: 2046 Location: Austin, TX |
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I think this is the big issue. The opacity on the exact amounts we're talking is obviously another issue, and possibly part of why people want to talk to companies, but the larger issue is communication with the Japanese companies. Aside from figuring out who to talk to and possibly arranging interpreters (assuming all you bring to the equation is money) the biggest reason people want to talk to existing US companies is: "Why re-invent the wheel?" If Yen Press has existing relationships with certain companies and can get a license for the cost of the license and a phone call, why should I add double, triple or more cost to the overhead just for the purpose of building the relationship? I realize it proves my sincerity, but if I only want to see title A see publication in America, I don't care about "profit" (but would reasonably like to not lose money on it) then why not go with an existing US company. I don't think "start your own company" is a good way to blow off an existing fan. And besides, if the fan does not have a valid approach to discussing business with the American companies, then they're certainly not going to have an approach to talking to Japanese companies considering the differences in social norms. |
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