Posts Tagged “licensing”

As you may have heard, ADV announced on Thursday a deal with CrunchyRoll to stream dubbed episodes of the Gonzo comedy anime Welcome to the NHK! in a promotional partnership. I didn’t have any particular response to the news at first because ADV has traditionally tried to get their dubs as much exposure as possible and because it was an official partnership between the companies, with Best Buy running a short sale ad at the beginning of the first one.

However, while checking out the partnership on CR, I saw High School Girls under the “Others Also Liked…” sidebar and recognized it as the same series that Media Blasters was releasing as Girl’s High. Episode 2’s list of three pseudo-recommendations contained Hand Maid May, a Geneon title that is barely available to buy but is still, I believe, under license by the company. A perusal of CR’s anime index revealed more than twenty other anime available for streaming that are still being sold on region 1 DVD and many of them are Geneon and Media Blasters titles.
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I’m sure you’ve heard by now that Nozomi Entertainment, the licensing arm of TRSI, announced it will release the first season of ARIA the Animation (or as I like to call it, “that laid-back gondola anime”) subbed on September 30th. But while they continue to attract attention for bringing cult favorites like Victorian Romance Emma and Maria Watches Over Us to the states in season box sets, another independent licensor seems to be remaining stagnant and it’s not entirely clear how they will rise out of it.
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Friday’s news that Shinsen-Subs has dropped Romeo x Juliet in accordance with an C&D letter sent by FUNimation on behalf of Gonzo is a stark example of the deep relationship the two companies share. FUNimation has previously licensed many Gonzo titles including Black Cat, Bakuretsu Tenshi, Basilisk, Desert Punk, Kiddy Grade, Samurai 7, Solty Rei, Speed Grapher, and Trinity Blood. Anyone who remembers the “Babes, Blades, Blood, Beauty” campaign from last year knows that all those were Gonzo titles. Other licensors have also distributed shows from Gonzo such as ADV with recent releases Red Garden, Pumpkin Scissors, and Welcome to the NHK and less recent ones like Kaleido Star; Viz with Saikano; and Geneon with Hellsing, Last Exile, and Vandread.

One thing that concerns me about this occurrence is what FUNimation said to ANN about producers’ rights:

In a statement to ANN, FUNimation said, “…[I]t is important to note that the rights owned by Japanese producers are still applicable, and enforceable, worldwide even before the anime is licensed for local distribution.”

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(Photo courtesy of Revons under Creative Commons license)

I did not attend Otakon 2007 because I don’t have the money to fly over to Baltimore, get a hotel room and then likely purchase stuff at the convention itself. I think of Otakon akin to Anime Expo as each being the big summer convention for their respective coastlines. I WOULD like to attend it one of these years to get a feel for how differently it is run from Fanime and AX and the general atmosphere. Thanks to the Internet, I can at least get panel reports from ANN and extract interesting things from them.

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