Archive for the “News” Category

TRSI added a bunch of items to their online catalog today and along with many repackagings and consolidations in FUNimation’s September solicitations, there were many previously unannounced items and details to be found as well.

(UPDATE 6/24 3:44PM PDT: Robert of his eponymous Anime Corner Store wrote a post [saw via scottfrye] saying they now have pretty much all the same items up for pre-order.)

GONZO anime Burst Angel is evidently getting a Blu-ray release on September 29th at a list price of $79.98. (TRSI’s pre-order price is currently $60.) It will have all 24 TV episodes and the Infinity OVA, just like its Viridian Collection release in June 2008, except now in high-definition.

Nabari no Ou will have its first 13-episode set come out on September 22nd at a typical $59.98 price point. The ninja action series was one of Funi’s New Show A Go Go licenses last December and the manga is currently being published by Yen Press.

Sgt. Frog (aka Keroro) Season 1 Part 1 comes out on Sept. 22nd. That date was announced during their main panel at Anime Next but not the “budget” list price of $39.98 for 12 episodes. That’s at the same level as their Shin-chan releases but this will be a hybrid release (remember their test episode from November?) unlike the dubbed only Shin-chan.

Other first-run releases include the second half of Big Windup! sliding home (TRSI; RACS) on Sept. 29th ($59.99 MSRP), 6 weeks after the first half; the second half of Kaze no Stigma dropping on Sept. 1st ($59.98 MSRP); and One Piece Season 2 Part 3 continuing the adventures of the Going Merry crew on Sept. 29th ($49.98 MSRP). RACS also has that One Piece box set listed, saying it contains episodes 79-91.

After having finished with their Dragon Ball GT and DBZ uncut box sets, Funi will give the same treatment to the original Dragon Ball series when they release the first season uncut DVD set on Sept. 15th for $49.98 MSRP, the same price point as their previous uncut box sets from the franchise.

I’ll wrap up talking about Funi with some former Geneon releases. On Sept. 29, a box set of Heat Guy J will come out at $49.98 MSRP (TRSI) and both Black Lagoon seasons are being repackaged into a single box set at $69.98 MSRP, also on Sept. 29 (RACS; TRSI). There will also be a number of repricings of their $69.98 Geneon box set reissues last year: Ergo Proxy on Sept. 29th (RACS; TRSI), Fate/stay night on Sept. 1st (RACS; TRSI), and Shakugan no Shana on Sept. 15th (RACS; TRSI).

Finally: there are some Nozomi releases of some decades-old series. The first of two Kimba the White Lion mini-collections come out at $49.98 MSRP on October 6th (link), the second Gigantor collection on Sept. 15 for $39.98 MSRP (link), and two mini-collections of Astro Boy, both on Oct. 6th at $49.98 MSRP apiece (set 1, set 2)

Whew, that was tiring to put together!

UPDATE 6/23 11:10 PM PDT: I later found out that Nozomi had issued separate press releases about the Kimba and Astro Boy mini-sets.

ANN published a story yesterday about how the liquidation of Central Park Media’s assets is being conducted through MYC & Associates, a New York-based “full service auction, appraisal, liquidation, real estate brokerage & management firm dedicated to obtaining market value for bank owned and court administered assets”. In case you didn’t already know, CPM filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy in late April.

On its listing for CPM, MYC has linked to a Schedule of Assets that contains 23 pages of 547 copyrights relating to releases; two pages of trademarks including “Anime Alley”, “Anime Today”, and “Mangamusic”; office equipment and furnishings such as chairs, computers, and telephones; 12 domain names with expiration dates; a listing of “licences, franchises, and other general intangibles” consisting of four distribution agreements (Warner-Elektra-Atlantic Corporation, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, KOCH Entertainment Distribution LLC, AD Vision) and one consignment agreement (The Right Stuf International); and a five-page consignment inventory to TRSI.

The components of the Schedule has different dates: the copyrights listing is a draft from 5/23/2006, trademarks listing is a draft from 9/29/2004, domain names from April 7th, and the consignment inventory is as of April 3rd. The distribution agreement with AD Vision was dated March 26, 2009, and was “for distribution of DVDs and related merchandise in Canada and in the United States”. Since then, AD Vision has announced that it would reissue former CPM titles such as Now and Then, Here and There, Grave of the Fireflies, MD Geist, The World of Narue, and Darkside Blues.

My rough understanding of the chapter 7 process is that CPM’s assets will be sold off and proceeds from those sales would be distributed among creditors that have filed a Proof of Claim, showing they are indeed owed money by the debtor (CPM). Even though previously licensed titles are among their assets, it seems they did not have permanent and therefore only the elements that they produced – subtitles, dubbing, and packaging – would be available for purchase. Potential buyers of any intellectual property would still have negotiate with the respective Japanese right holders in order to be able to legally distribute them in North America. (ANN’s list of properties – which at least one site has copy and pasted – includes The Slayers, which is currently being distributed by FUNimation.)

Regarding the court case itself, I decided to sign up for a PACER account so I could do some research and look at the documents that have been filed so far in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York. Judge Prudence Carter Beatty is presiding over the case, Raymond A. Bragar is representing CPM, and David R. Kittay is the trustee. The only future scheduled event is a continuance of a Meeting of Creditors (aka 341 meeting) on July 2nd.

The following are creditors that have so far filed a Proof of Claim (deadline is Sept. 1st):
Bank of America
Biblos Co., Ltd./Libre (previously had a dispute with CPM about Be Beautiful manga)
Consortium Books Sales and Distribution (has a distribution agreement)
Cushman & Wakefield, Inc. (commercial real estate firm)
Fisk Building Management
KOCH Entertainment Inc. (renamed E1 Entertainment in Jan. 2009; has a distribution agreement)
Levi Lubarsky & Feigenbaum, LLP (commercial litigation firm)
Moses & Singer (legal services firm)
NCO Financial Systems Inc.
Pittney Bowes Credit Corp.
Quebecor Printing Lebonfon (a Canadian printer)
Wells Fargo
XO Communications Services, Inc.

I also found out that there are two associated cases to CPM’s (09-12530): Binary Media Works, Inc. (09-12532) and Mangamania, Inc. (09-12533), both wholly owned subsidiaries of CPM. Binary Media Works designed some of their web pages (e.g., Grave of the Fireflies) and held some domains in their name including ufocity.com. Mangamania was the name of an online storefront that is still up, searchable, and links to TRSI listings of products.

I’ll keep tabs on this case and post updates with whatever details I come across. Expect those posts to be as dry as this one.

While looking through some photos last night, I came to think about Mayersche, a bookstore chain I visited a few times during an August 2007 study abroad in Germany (and also met an artist there). I also thought about Stern-Verlag but that’s not relevant to this story. I decided to visit Mayersche’s website and I saw the above image on their front page, to my surprise, advertising a “manga weeks” promotion.

It turns out there are three components to this promotion. First, there is a list of recommendations (”Manga-Buchtipps”). Second is a drawing contest with no set theme – they just ask participants to bring their ideas to paper (”bring Deine Idee zu Papier”) and send it in their original drawings by June 13th. Ten winners will receive book vouchers worth 100 Euros (1st place), 75 Euros (2nd), 50 Euros (3rd), or 15 Euros (4th-10th).

The third component is a manga workshop with Alexandra Völker that is taking place over the next few weeks at different locations, all of which appear to be in North Rhine-Westphalia. (Too bad for East and South Germans, I guess.) I haven’t heard of Völker but I did some research and her earning of 2nd place at Connichi 2004’s doujinshi competition with her entry, Tears in Heaven, opened the door to her career as a professional manga artist. She has since done Catwalk, Make a Date (a “Chibi-manga”) & Paris and has a new work called Dark Magic set to come out this September. All of those have been published by Egmont Manga and Anime (EMA), one of the main manga distributors in Germany along with Carlsen Comics and Tokyopop.

cropped from Select On Demand website

FUNimation announced Monday (saw this on Anime Vice) that they have joined Comcast’s On Demand service through two folders: The Cutting Edge, where other anime video-on-demand offerings like Anime Network reside, and Movies & Events, where pay-per-view content can be found. While the addition of already-released series through a standard free VOD model is nice for me as a customer, I’m finding “pre-release pay-per-view access” that “provides unprecedented sneak peek access to brands before the release on DVD” a little more interesting. PPV offerings for this month will include xxxHOLiC, Devil May Cry, and Tsubasa while Honey & Clover and NANA are mentioned among those slated for this summer. (I shouldn’t have been too surprised to see those last two considering this but I still was.) I will try to explore both folders tomorrow and maybe I’ll shoot a video while doing that.

This story reminds me of one that may not have received much press when it came out in mid-April: the appearance of streaming and DTO labels on Viz’s websites for the Honey & Clover and NANA anime. Both components are currently unavailable but at least one of them is likely to be enabled this summer since the first NANA box set is supposedly due out July 21st.

The DTO episodes should carry the now-standard price of $1.99 per episode for downloadable videos and could just entail links to various download services (iTunes, Zune Marketplace, et al.). I wonder what their PPV price on Comcast might be – according to their VOD blog post, Funi has their new dubbed series pre-DVD release series pegged at 99 cents – a very reasonable price point considering you’ll if you choose to watch that way – so it’s very likely that Viz’s will bear that price as well, but there is still a chance it could be a little higher. Their $2.99 price point for movies is the same that Comcast offers for library titles on their general Movies on Demand service and that Apple does for library titles on its Apple TV and through iTunes. I suspect that the streaming component might involve Hulu if they are planning to embed episodes onto each respective show site since Viz also uses that for Naruto.com.

FUNimation’s foray into PPV adds another method of non-DVD distribution for the company along with streaming episodes through Hulu, YouTube, Joost, Veoh, and their own video portal as well as offering download-to-own episodes through their web site, iTunes, Xbox Live & Zune Marketplaces and, most recently, the Playstation Network. Viz has been making similar strides into “alternative” distribution with a presence on many of the same video portals and marketplaces that FUNimation is on. They also brokered an arrangement to stream newly-aired-in-Japan episodes of Naruto Shippuden on Crunchyroll, Hulu, and their own Naruto site.

The “octopus approach” operated by both companies continues to take them to new platforms, though Viz has some catching up to do. Meanwhile, Bandai just began on putting episodes on YouTube in February and currently have Code Geass season 1 and Gundam 00 up there. They don’t have the financial flexibility to venture out as much as the other two do but at least they’re starting to experiment with it.

P.S. I know this is all US-centric stuff so if you choose to make a comment, don’t just complain about regional restrictions. By the way, Evan Flournoy, Manager of Brand Protection and Rights Enforcement for Funimation, said last week that those restrictions are mandated by the licensors.

Remember the misreported story last month about Best Buy getting rid of their anime section? Well, details of the company’s actual plans were revealed yesterday (saw via ANN) and they involve ranking of titles and clearance sales next month.

Once I read the words “A-list”, “B-list”, and “C-list” in the ANN article, I immediately thought back to two previous posts I had written in response to ADV Films’ John Ledford using similar terminology to describe how marketable different anime series are. In this case, the A-list titles will be “around 20 core anime SKUs”, according to ICv2, and would be carried in all locations; those would presumably include Afro Samurai, Naruto, and Dragon Ball Z. The B-list series (”over 100 anime SKUs”) would appear in about half of their 1,000+ stores and the C-listers would only show up in their top 200 stores nationwide as part of “large scale anime assortments”. So something like Baccano! may fall into the B range while Save Me! Lollipop and Indian Summer would likely fall under the C category. A reminder: these categorizations are based on expected marketability and not directly reflective of the quality of the series themselves.

I perused the list of stores ICv2 posted (ANN’s copy has store numbers) that will have 50% off clearance sales March 1st-21st and found two that I sometimes frequent – one in Vacaville and the other in Natomas – are on it so I’ll try to stop by both those in early March to see what’s available (and snag any good stuff) as well as do before and after shots of their respective sections. The ones in Citrus Heights and Arden Fair (Sacramento) weren’t listed so I’m assuming both will continue to carry A’s & some B’s.

There was no indication of a reduction in their online offerings but there may be a decline in how many copies they order as an entire retailer. This move will result in fewer total sales of anime in their B&M stores and pushing more people toward other online-only outfits but it may negligible for the company since the stores that are contracting their shelf space weren’t making an impact anyway. I hope many of those vacated spaces aren’t replaced by plastic instruments…

So just to recap: only the best-selling stores will carry the widest breadth of anime, the middle will carry a more moderate amount, and the least will have significantly pared-down sections – and there will be clearance sales next month.

A posting on the AOD/Mania Region 1 DVD sub-forum mentions solicitations listed among AAA Anime’s pre-orders for some of the series FUNimation announced during their “New Show A Go Go” promotional event in December. According to the listing, Gad Guard, Ikki Tousen, and Last Exile will supposedly all come out in May at an MSRP of $49.98, each currently bearing a placeholder date of May 30th. These are not the first of the bunch to get release dates: April has Vandread on the 7th for $49.98 (as mentioned in their NYCC panel) and The Count of Monte Cristo (aka Gankutsuou) on the 28th for $69.98.

Also among the listings is a never-before-released title – Murder Princess, with a release date of May 12th (its website confirms this) and the same $49.98 MSRP as Gad Guard et al. Fifty bucks seems high for the six-episode OVA Murder Princess but that may shift lower when online retailers update their listings.

Other FUNimation releases that are listed as hitting shelves in May are (all bear May 30th placeholder date): Case Closed: Season 5 ($49.98), Claymore Volume 5 ($24.98), a double feature of Dragon Ball Z movies 12 & 13 – Fusion Reborn and Wrath of Dragon – on standard DVD and Blu-ray ($24.98; $39.99), Dragon Ball Z season 9 box set ($49.98), and Karin: Complete Collection ($69.98). More cover art assets lie after the jump.

UPDATE 2/21: TRSI updated their catalog earlier this week and
pretty much all the above releases were part of it, including a lower price for Murder Princess. So here is their lineup (w/ affliate links):
Show ▼

Read the rest of this entry »

A 14-year-old Tecumseh, Oklahoma, girl who has been missing since Monday – Deborah Kalai Fourzan – is reportedly traveling to California with a once family friend James “Jim” Reimer and stopping at various anime conventions along the way, starting this weekend with Ikkicon in Austin, Texas.

Some elements that give this story an unsavory twist are that Reimer sent a number of explicit text messages to the girl’s phone, which her mother turned over to police and were used as evidence for a current warrant for “using text messaging to solicit sexual contact with a minor”, and that the convenience store where Reimer works was reported a cash theft Monday afternoon of several thousand dollars. (KOCO)

Authorities advise anyone who sees the two individuals not to approach them, but to contact the Austin Police Department at 1-405-598-9305. Fourzan is 5″2 and weighs 120 pounds. She has blue eyes, pierced ears, a birthmark on the back of her arm, and blond hair, but she may dye her hair black and also use her middle name Kalai. Reimer is 5″10 and weighs 280 pounds. He has brown hair, blue eyes, and a beard, but he may shave his beard off.

Despite the man’s previous behavior, there is a small and possibly irrational part of me – the devil’s advocate part – that thinks maybe Fourzan wanted to go to this journey with him and, less likely, has some feelings for Reimer. (Remember that Reimer is 40 and Fourzan is 14.) I simply wanted to float that possibility even though it may not turn out to be the case. Seriously though, I hope she does not get harmed before this case gets resolved.

Considering the area between Texas and California and looking at AnimeCons.com, possible conventions in their travels include Animation On Display in San Francisco, CA, on February 14-15 (if they can drive to SF in a week); Mizuumi-Con in San Antonio, TX, on March 21 (don’t know why they would go a short distance southwest over a month’s time); Animeland Wasabi in Denver, CO, on March 27-29; AniZona in Phoenix, AZ, on April 9-12; Anime Matsuri in The Woodlands, TX, on April 10-12; KamiKazeCon in Houston, TX, in April 10-12; and FanimeCon in San Jose, CA, on May 22-25.

Scott Green at Ain’t It Cool News passed along that Mamoru Oshii’s The Sky Crawlers, which is being distributed by Sony’s Stage 6 Films label, was granted a PG-13 rating by the MPAA Ratings Board for “material involving violence, some sexual content and smoking”. The next big steps are deciding on a release date and casting dub actors, if any.

Just to compare, here are what some other recent anime films to hit the big screen were rated: Paprika (2006; Sony Pictures Classics) – R for “violent and sexual images”; Howl’s Moving Castle (2005; Buena Vista) – PG for “frightening images and brief mild language”; Appleseed (2004; Arcangelo Entertainment) – R for “some violence”

I’d also like to mention that IGN has finished their countdown of the top 100 animated series (that aired on American television) and fifteen anime made the list, reconstructions of series included. Evangelion cracked the top ten at number 10 – the rest were Cowboy Bebop (#14), Transformers (#23), Speed Racer (#29), Robotech (#34), Naruto (#38), Battle of the Planets [aka Gatchaman] (#44), Death Note (#51), Pokemon (#70), Gundam Wing (#73), Voltron (#76), Dragon Ball Z (#78), Astro Boy (#86), Afro Samurai (#90), and Fullmetal Alchemist (#95).

I was browsing around online to see how the covers from the first Haruhi novel and the manga’s first volume differed visually (they’re similar but not close enough to cause confusion) and saw that Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon all currently list Volume 1 of the Lucky Star manga with a release date of May 15th, a price point of $9.99, and a page count of 150. Both its standard ISBN of 1604961120 and ISBN-13 of 9781604961126 checked out when I cross-checked them on ISBNdb.com.

Granted, Bandai has not officially announced anything nor have they sent solicitations to specialty retailers like TRSI or yet but the date looks right since it would be two months after the sixth and final DVD volume comes out on March 17th. I would expect them to announce this date along some more details at NYCC next month during either their general panel (Saturday Feb. 7th 12:30 PM-1:30 PM) or their Lucky Star panel (Sat. 1:45PM-2:45PM).

Here’s the product description that may show up on the back cover:

From the studio that brought you The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya! When eating a chocolate cornet which end do you begin with, the top or the bottom? Which side is the top and which is the bottom? For that matter, what is a chocolate cornet? The proper way to eat pastries is only one of the many every day occurrences explored by the girls of Ms. Kuroi’s class. Meet Konata, an athletic and intelligent girl too dedicated to her favorite primetime animes to excel in anything but otaku culture; Miyuki, the cute, bespectacled living example of Moe with an encyclopedic knowledge of all subjects; Kagami, the bitter-sweet, tough but shy sister; Tsukasa, a kind but air-headed klutz. Witness this study in the human condition as our heroines explore the unexplored in questioning the ordinary!

FUNimation confirmed today that it has sent out a batch of cease-and-desist notices to a number of fansub groups regarding D.Gray-man, Katekyo Hitman Reborn (which had been previously targeted), Soul Eater, Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone, Mushi-Uta, Spice & Wolf, and Seto no Hanayome on behalf of Japanese studios. (Those groups got their C&D’s on Friday and include Rumbel, Tadashi, and Nyoron among others.) FUNimation originally licensed the first 51 episodes of D.Gray-man when it announced rights in May and I thought that was it but I guess we can assume they now hold claim to the second season and therefore the whole lot of 103 episodes. Or they may have expanded that license and I simply didn’t notice.

Like any other cease-and-desist notice, this latest action by FUNimation does not necessary mean that they will distribute any of the series that don’t involve Innocence as a source of supernatural powers. Kadokawa Pictures USA previously announced an in-house license for the first season of Spice & Wolf at Anime Expo but whether that also encompasses the yet-to-air second season is unclear as, well, it hasn’t been broadcast yet. I doubt it does. Also: in June, KP USA included Mushi-Uta among 11 series they wanted AnimeSuki to stop listing.