Even though the news about Crunchyroll’s deal with TV Tokyo for Naruto Shippuden, Gintama, and three other unnamed series came four hours after Viz’s announcement of their streaming plan, I decided to break it out into its own entry because there are different mechanisms involved in the CR case including more places of distribution, a tiered viewing system, and ditching of what initially grew the site’s popularity.

The terms of the arrangement are that paid monthly Crunchyroll members ($3/month is the going rate) will get access to subtitled streaming episodes of Shippuden an hour after it airs in Japan while non-paying members as well as Joost and Hulu users seeing the same episodes a week later. It is not clear whether those paid CR members will be allowed to download versions of those episodes, high-quality or otherwise. The first episode to be distributed will be the one airing January 8th and should be episode 90. (See the Viz post for projected Japanese airdates.) Since Shippuden currently airs at 19:30-19:57 JST Thursday and will likely keep that timeslot, the quicksub version should appear one hour later at 3am PST/6am EST/1100 UTC that same day.

What may be the more important aspect of this story to Crunchyroll’s future is the “decisive transition” (press release) from user-submitted to professional-provided content. By the same day this new partnership launches, all user-submitted videos will have been removed from the site and many users will likely have leave for other haunts, not caring enough to stick around a place where a significant amount of fansubs of anime and Asian dramas once resided but no longer after Jan. 8th.

Co-founder Vu Nguyen remarked in his keynote address at Anime Expo this year that the amount of illegal downloads of Tower of Druaga and Blassreiter dropped by a significant amount as they legally premiered online in conjunction with GDH and that they will strive to find a balance between the desires of their audience and advertisers’ requirements while aiming to become an interactive experience built around content, not merely a venue for anime or other videos. An community thrives based on the quality and strength of its users and while the company may feel better about itself for assuming a no tolerance stance on user uploads (by disabling them entirely), their good intentions will, and may have already, leave many of their frequent, yet infringing users with a misplaced feeling of betrayal and abandonment and only time will tell if Crunchyroll will recoup its lost user numbers. High profile series like Naruto Shippuden and Gintama will certainly help them in offsetting an expected dropoff.

Viz’s announcement to stream quicksubs of Naruto Shippuden builds on the momentum of Gonzo’s same-day releases back in March and July and Funimation’s “just a few weeks behind” arrangement last month. I did some back-of-an-envelope projections of how all the parts might work when this plan gets implemented in January.

First let’s look at the “within a week of broadcast” component: Viz said in its release that “beginning January 15th the latest episode…will be available for free viewing…within days of its original airdate in Japan” with subsequent quicksubs appearing on a Thursday schedule. As of this posting, 84 episodes of Shippuden have aired so far in Japan, the latest premiere occurring on Nov. 13th. Taking into account that the regular schedule may take a break for Christmas and New Years’ Day, as those holidays fall on Thursdays this year, episode 90 would likely be the ‘latest episode’ once the 15th rolls around unless the translations for #91 are already ready in time of compete against raw viewership (and Crunchyroll’s base of paid subscribers).

(Projected Japanese Shippuden airdates:
11/13 - #84; 11/20 - #85; 11/27 - #86; 12/4 - #87; 12/11 - #88; 12/18 - #89; 1/8 - #90; 1/15 - #91)

The other half of this budding online initiative is a batch availability of eight subtitled episodes each Friday beginning on Jan. 2nd “until the series eventually catches up to the current third [sic] season”. (Shippuden is currently in its fourth twenty-six episode season but who’s counting?) That eight episodes a week rate means that the batch containing #89 through #96 would debut online on March 20th. The use of the word ‘until’ implies that the batch uploads would halt after the catch has been completed so I hope Viz keeps their more advanced episodes online all along, meaning that the first 109 episodes will be online by then (#99 would’ve been posted the day before on Mar. 19th).

I figured I would track when the regular series might finish its initial run on American TV. This past Saturday, November 15th, saw the airing of episode 203 out of 220 on Cartoon Network so if the pace of one episode per week continues, episode 220 would air on March 14th, 2009. The accelerated “11 volumes in three months” manga release schedule laid out by Viz confirms what was suspected a few weeks ago based on Simon & Schuster and Amazon listings.

There is no question that this is a smart move by Viz in order to divert views and traffic away from Dattebayo and scanlation sites in order, as ICv2 described, “to garner the promotional and advertising benefit of distributing new episodes on its own site, rather than ceding it to pirate third party sites” as well as to stave off any ill effects from scan-hosting sites by tightening the gap between Japanese and American manga volume releases.

I have previously written a number of times about English dubs out for genuine interest in how well or poorly titles are adapted for American consumption. That’s why I was very pleased to read G.B. Smith’s detailed review of Ouran High School Host Club Part 1 for Mania - the first of what I think should become a regular series of Eigo kudasai columns. (This seems like a more fleshed out spiritual successor to a previous AOD column - “Being a Brief Discussion of Anime Dubs” - that was written by Way Jeng, although it should be easier now to evaluate performances more fully now this age of 13-episode season sets.) The reviewer evaluated how well the respective voice actors’ performances conveyed their characters’ emotions, their ability to reflect the existing character dynamics, and the script issues that appear in varying degrees in any English adaptation, especially FUNimation.

It’s a good read if you want to get a sense of how some of the roles were not much of a challenge (Vic Mignogna’s Tamaki, Luci Christian’s Honey) or were “hardly unique” in the case of Monica Rial’s Renge. I concur with the “recommended” verdict of a “solid effort” after sampling some illicitly uploaded dubbed episodes on a certain video-sharing site. FUNi, I would advise you start clamping down on those out of pure business interest since they may detrimentally affect your box set sales to a certain degree!

According to Mania (formerly AnimeOnDVD), Bandai has delayed the release of Ghost Slayers Ayashi Part 1 and Clamp School Detectives Complete Collection by two months, meaning both are now scheduled to come out February 3rd instead of December 2nd. There are other minor, one- or two-week delays for more prominent titles like Code Geass Part 2 and vol. 5/vol. 6, Lucky Star v. 4, and Gurren Lagann Part 1 and vol. 1/vol. 2.

Some of you may recall the reissuing of Clamp School Detectives on DVD was kind of a surprise announcement during Bandai’s Fanime 2007 panel. Oddly enough, this is not the first delay for Ghost Slayers Ayashi since being announced at Otakon 2007: September 9th was the date given for these releases during the company’s panel at this year’s Fanime.

Bandai has not given an official explanation for the delays but I suspect ensuring the quality of the authoring process could be a factor given frequent reports of defective discs, like a AOD member who complained in August about receiving at least 12 defective discs from Bandai releases since late 2007, and of course that one week from last January where many of their releases had issues playing correctly. Better to delay the releases to fix any emerging problems than to risk worsening their reputation among heavy buyers. Another factor may have been increased attention in working on Gundam 00, which is debuting on Sci-Fi Channel’s Ani-Monday block on the 24th.

I received my first legitimate press release in the site’s inbox this evening and it did not seem exciting at first. It was sent by the The New Media Group and announced a collaborative content-sharing service to launch this December with Nico Nico Douga where Nico users will be able to view content from 20 “official providers” including as TNMG’s IPTV platform World On-Demand, MTV Japan, Avex, Bandai, and Livedoor. Wait, Bandai?!?

Yes, the anime and tokusatsu producer-slash-distributor is listed as one of many partners involved in this project (unclear if it is specifically Bandai Visual, Sunrise or both) so I have a little excuse to write about this. Frankly, there aren’t many juicy details except that Nico reportedly has 9.3 million Japanese (and secret foreign?) subscribers and commands either 2.3 or 2.9 million daily unique users, depending on whom from TNMG is trying to impress people. Simon Godden, President of e-learning service Teacher Tom Japan, thinks “this [deal] is a home run” so it must be great, right? Um, it guess it would be nice if you wanted to leave streams of comments on top of official music videos and foreign content as well as the swath of Touhou, IM@S, and Miku MADs that currently inhabit the site.

At any rate, you can read the entire release after the jump to get a few more optimistic quotes from executives focused on expanding the global reach of their managed brands.
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There have been a couple of recent high-profile efforts in the works to adapt anime into American live-action films: the Wachowski-directed Speed Racer from last May; the James Wong-helmed Dragonball coming in April; and James Cameron’s pet project Battle Angel, which will be shot in 3-D once he’s done with Avatar. (No, not an adaption of the TV show - M. Night Shamalayan is directing THAT movie.) Well, prepare to add a very unlikely project to that list.

After trying to catch up on Heroes last night, I looked up Peter Petrelli’s actor Milo Ventimiglia on Wikipedia and saw that an anonymous user added a strange entry to his filmography on October 11th, namely that he could play Ban Mido in a 2010 Get Backers live-action film that is supposedly “in negotiations”. I have not been able to find any information online about a director, screenwriter, or other actors to substantiate this claim so please take this as a DEEPLY UNFOUNDED RUMOR and probably someone emulating Anime Insider’s Casting Call column…badly.

The only other set of edits made on the entire site by that user were performed three days earlier, when Christian Bale’s entry was altered to include an “in negotiations” Batman Concludes film with a 2010 release date. This misinformation was removed on October 21st, followed by an false addition of The Dark Knight Returns for 2011 by another user on Oct. 25, which was removed later that day by a superuser. There have been no official details revealed about a third film in the Batman reboot series aside from Warner Bros. President Jeff Robinov hoping it gets released by 2011 among many tent-pole superhero and other big-budget films over the next few years.

I don’t know exactly how long this was implemented (a week ago?) but Yukan Blog’s categorical annotated blog list has the potential to assist people in finding new blogs of particular strains, be they week-to-week episode chronicling, intellectual, humorous, varied in content, comprised of many writers, those of the Yukan staff, or yet to be filtered into a particular classification. (’Kings of Funny’ is gender-specific but its intent is understood.) Although I found only a handful of new blogs that interested me in an initial run through all classifications, others may have more success in discovering different voices that resonate with their prose-reading personalities.

This blog can be found under “little of everything” (i.e. miscellany) accompanied by the following, as of this writing:

When you don’t feel like watching anime for a while, CalAggie is here to deliver all the news! Not once has he blogged a particular episode or review any movies (or so blissmo thinks), so this is definitely the place to be if you just want to be updated with all the latest gossip in the Anime World. CalAggie is also an awesome guy himself, who started a Podcast a while back but is also willing to join the Podcast at Yukan if he can too. CalAggie is brilliant at wording his thoughts and his blog is really pretty. He also had an old blog some time back, and this is now his new one! CalAggie is a man searching to fill in his spare time.

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Sometimes press releases can provide timely, relevant information by announcing a new product development or a featured guest for a conference but there are instances where a release is purely congratulatory and comes out much later after the milestone itself occurred.

Today’s ‘official launch’ of FUNimation’s partnership with Hulu comes 46 days (six weeks, three days) after Hulu’s concise release on September 23rd announcing the launch of a dedicated anime channel. The only new knowledge a reader would gain from today’s release is that Shuffle!, Peach Girl, and Slayers are debuting on the service this week and the rest is needless padding, save for CEO Gen’s heralding Hulu’s wide reach for “offer[ing] viewers a way to discover new shows”.

One would think that FUNimation would consider the initial debut of some of their managed properties on Hulu as, at the very least, a ’soft launch’ and surely many became aware of their presence on the service when they made a big deal only two weeks ago over putting subtitled episodes of Shikabane Hime on there as well as on YouTube, Joost, and their own website.

A prior incident of ‘after the feast’ behavior that occurred earlier this year was Bang Zoom! Entertainment patting itself on the back on June 17th for dubbing Lucky Star, volume 1 of which debuted on May 6th - exactly six weeks before the release was issued. Bang Zoom!’s release was fairly informative as it provided insight into their dialogue methodology and audio hardware specifics (Neumann U87 studio condenser mics, yo!) but surely it would have been more effective if issued to coincide with the first release of their tiring efforts. And what is this six week delay business? I doubt both are giving tribute to the 1982 film involving Mary Tyler Moore, Dudley Moore, and a 12-year-old girl with leukemia played by ballerina and figure skater Katherine Healy.

*sigh* Public relations managers, please be more prompt in issuing your firm’s press releases as part of your duty as producers of promotional material that is subtler than direct advertising and its upfront approach.

Just under two months after being shoved off into crack of dawn Sunday programming, Code Geass will shift forward to 2:00am late Saturday night beginning this weekend to mark the start of season 2, or R2 as the kids call it. (The first season began airing at 1am prior to the September change.) R2 had already begun when episode 26, “Day A Demon Awakens”, aired at 5:00am last weekend and that episode will be replayed during the new time slot this Saturday.

Also moving back to a more viewer-friendly time is Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit, now at 1:30am rather than 5:30am or 2:30am, but with a caveat: the first ten episodes will be rerun. The first two DVD volumes covering the initial seven episodes were released by Media Blasters yesterday but there is no explicit indication of when future volumes will come out or when newly dubbed episodes will air, although mid-January seems like a good time for new episodes since the run of rehashes will conclude by then. MB CEO John Sirabella said they were “rushing their way through” the series back in August during their Otakon panel.

Other changes involving new episode premieres are Bleach (now on #87) falling back two hours from 11pm to 1am and Shin-chan returning at 2:30am (was at 12am before shelved) picking up where it left off with episode 47.

The three remaining hours from 3-6am will now be occupied by reruns of fan favorites such as FLCL, Death Note, Ghost in the Shell SAC, Cowboy Bebop, Big O, and… InuYasha, all of which are starting from the beginning. The absence of Fullmetal Alchemist in the revised schedule means its latest attempt at reruns has shut down after episode 7, the first major downer in the series.

Overall, re-establishing a continuous five-hour block of anime should increase bleedover viewership and bringing back old standards like FLCL, Big O, and Cowboy Bebop will attract those who didn’t see them during their previous countless airings.

After seeing Baka-Raptor’s comparison of Soul Eater and Bleach and viewing an out-of-order-for-me episode during a club Halloween party, I began to think of how this emerging shonen franchise would differentiate itself in its foray into a broader North American consciousness. But I was surprised that the first manga volume is scheduled to come out a FULL YEAR from now in October next year! (The first light novel volume of Spice and Wolf is slated for a December 2009 release with a six-month schedule so that may be more painful for restless readers.)

Out of the five manga that debuted in issue 1 of Yen Plus — Soul Eater, Sumomomo Momomo, Nabari no Ou, Higurashi, Bamboo Blade — only Higurashi will have its first volume come out this year with the others making their individually bound debuts in May 2009 or October ‘09, the latter being the case for Soul Eater. While I initially thought that the long delays were part of a “syndicate first, bind later” strategy and still do, I believe Yen Press is purposely holding back Soul Eater’s initial volume release in order to promote it using Atsushi Ookubo’s (the artist’s) prior work, B.ICHI - the same type of cross-promotion appeared at the end of the Japanese 1st volume. The desire to gain more subscribers to its monthly magazine contributes to the delay of all the serialized titles by having readers to consume individual slices from different types of figurative bread rather than eat whole loafs at a time. (Not sure if that food analogy worked…) The monthly meting out of individual chapters should provide an consistent and slightly less intensive workload for those assigned to such projects, which is a good thing for a relatively small operation compared to the more established industry names.
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