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Video: Jerome Mazandarani Discusses His Career at Manga Entertainment

The latest episode of The Anime Business, AnimEigo's documentary series of interviews with major figures in the Western anime industry, features a 43-minute interview with Jerome Mazandarani about his time with Manga Entertainment from 2005.

Justin Sevakis, the CEO of MediaOCD and AnimEigo (and founder of Anime News Network), has worked on The Anime Business series for the past few years. The previous episodes are also available on AnimEigo's YouTube channel.

Mazandarani says when he debuted at the company, Manga Entertainment was "running a model that it didn't seem aware had become irrelevant." It was still packaging anime titles as feature films and looking for another Akira. Mazandarani put the focus instead on anime series; he cites the rival companies Funimation and ADV which were already doing that.

He describes the company's breakthrough with Naruto, which Manga began distributing in summer 2006. The series had been available on the Disney-owned channel Jetix, "but they cut the **** out of it. All the fans that had been fan-subbing it hated it.... What we did know before we released the DVD is that there were tens of thousands of people in the UK watching Naruto on fansubs via LimeWire and file-sharing services."

Mazandarani continues, "I was confident it would do well because there was such a big audience watching pretty **** quality video on fansubs. As it turns out, we didn't ship enough... We must have sold out about 80% of our inventory in the first week. We just couldn't make DVDs quick enough. I think it's just that fans wanted a good quality product, and the audience was already there."

He describes Naruto as an inflection point, "where anime started to become mainstream." It was followed by such acquisitions as Death Note, Bleach (both from Viz Media Europe) and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood.

Mazandarani remembers, "We were competing with other companies (in America and Europe), but it was really friendly competition... (We'd) be in Japan once or twice a year for a market and you'd get to go out and get drunk and bitch and moan about approvals and how difficult certain companies can be with certain licenses. We were all still good friends. I really loved that."

He describes how the market situation changed drastically in 2015, just after Manga Entertainment became a private company. "We couldn't get any new content because ******* Netflix and Crunchyroll and Funimation were buying UK rights from under us... We were like, 'How do we stay relevant in this business? Our domestic market is growing, but we can't get content.'

He talks about co-producing LeSean Thomas's Cannon Busters (scripted in America, animated in Japan). However, he advises other creators against going that route, but instead working with 2D animators elsewhere. "Everyone (in the international animation community) is dying to do an R-rated action-adventure, blood splattery, fantasy-driven, Ghibli-esque, Ninja Scrolly, Ghost in the Shell anime thing. Everyone's got an anime in them..."

While fansubs were a problem, Mazandarani says "things got really ******* problematic" with the growth of streaming. In his view, when Crunchyroll became a legal platform, it had an unfair advantage. "They'd grown this massive audience, but they didn't have to pay for marketing, they didn't have to pay for the licensing and acquiring licenses. And so when they decided to go legit, they'd hit a critical mass of audience size, but they hadn't had to follow any of the rules the rest of us had to."

Manga Entertainment was acquired in 2019 by Funimation, itself rebranded as Crunchyroll in 2022. "It's like, if you can't beat them, join them," Mazandarani comments. "Crunchyroll won the war, really. They became the way anime was going to grow and become the mainstream medium, thanks to them and Netflix."

Mazandarani thinks that, while anime fans are well served today, one loss is a local voice. "You're missing out on that interaction with a local vendor or label, like going to a comic convention, meeting me and the team; on social media, knowing that if you're engaging with an account, you're talking to people in your country that will respond to you. You're losing that personal touch... Part of the enjoyment of being an anime fan isn't just the content, it's the community... Anime is the first audiovisual media outside of video games that can become a lifestyle and an identifier of who you are, what I'm into, this is who I am."