Ask John: What Missteps Have Set Back Anime in America the Most?

Question:
Anime has had many up and downs in its time in the US. I’m curious, in your opinion, what are the worst decisions that have been made, from a business perspective, that have hurt anime the most? I would think that this could easily be divided up in to “Japanese company mandates” and “American decisions.”

Answer:
The history of modern anime dates back in America, in fact, practically as long as it does in Japan. Yet while anime quickly gained popularity in Japan and has steadily grown in popularity and sophistication, the mainstream and commerical popularity of anime seemed to peak in America in the mid-2000s. A number of missteps have impacted the growth and expansion of anime in America, some of them debatable and some unquestionable. Subtitled anime didn’t reach American commercial release until 1990. While live-action foreign films had been frequently released in America subtitled, uncut, and respected as “art,” Japanese animation was strictly imported as artless, culture-less mass-media product for thirty years, establishing an American perception that anime is provocative but otherwise worthless – a perception that American otaku are still struggling to overturn today. Particularly in the mid-1990s, distributors including Central Park Media and Manga Entertainment, most prominently, crassly promoted anime as sensational taboo-challenging “adult cartoons” filled with shocking sexuality and violence. Central Park Media chose a mascot character that resembled a futuristic football player holding a large gun. Manga Entertainment’s mascot appeared to be a cyberpunk zombie that shrilly shouted at consumers. The emphasis on early domestic licenses including Urotsukidoji, Vampire Hunter D, Angel Cop, and Fist of the North Star created an unsavory American impression of anime that still hangs over anime in America today.

However, the most damaging impacts on the dissemination of anime in America occurred during the peak of the domestic anime boom. From roughly 2004 through 2008, Japanese distribution companies envisioned America as a limitless new frontier for anime licensing and eagerly took advantage. American demand and Japanese supply created a seller’s market, allowing Japanese licensors to request and receive licensing fees, supplemental fees, and royalty percentages that made domestic anime distribution unprofitable & unsustainable. Such high licensing fees may have been viable in Japan where consumers are comfortable paying high prices for anime home video releases. But domestically, high licensing fees coupled with unavoidably high production costs met with lower retail prices and fewer obsessively devoted consumers created an environment in which obtaining and distributing anime domestically typically cost more than it earned.

American distributors were partially to blame for fueling unrealistic Japanese demands by giving in to exorbitant licensing fees. During the peak of the American anime boom, distributors like AD Vision consciously tried to find the bubble’s breaking point. They actively tried to learn how much anime they could release before the market would throw up its hands and give up in frustration. The industry did find out where that breaking point was, the the domestic market did indeed break. Literally acquiring as many titles as possible and releasing as many DVDs per month as the company could possibly manage overwhelmed and flooded the small domestic market. Consumers couldn’t keep up with the sheer number of anime DVDs being released, and couldn’t easily distinguish between the good and the bad titles and releases. The logjam of domestic distributors all trying to release as many DVDs and titles as they could quickly resulted in distributors including Central Park Media, Urban Vision, Super Techno Arts, Hirameki International, Synch Point, AN Entertainment, Arts Magic, Image Entertainment, Anime Who, Pathfinder, Geneon, Toei, Bandai Entertainment, and AD Vision all ceasing distribution.

While Japanese greed contributed to an unsustainable environment in the American anime business, American greed played a significant role also. Partially contributing to the glut of anime DVDs in the marketplace was the staggering number of re-priced re-releases that numerous American distributors promoted. Priced-down re-release lines like “Anime Classics,” “Essential Anime,” “Veridian,” and complete series repacks and thinpacks bled the market and indoctrinated typical consumers to avoid buying new releases. “Just wait six months and the same title will be re-released at half the price.” American consumers were already displeased by the fact that anime DVDs cost much more than comparable domestic entertainment releases, so giving American consumers additional incentive not to buy new releases only undermined the domestic distribution industry’s own sales.

Particularly since 1990 the American anime industry has made countless mistakes and faced numerous known and little known obstacles mandated by Japanese distributors, but most of these hiccups have been minor ones that the industry and consumer market have absorbed. Strings of defective or flawed discs from Bandai Entertainment and Media Blasters, and most recently Sentai Filmworks, inferior Blu-ray encodes from FUNimation, Sub-par commercial DVDs from Toei, dubtitled DVDs from Bandai and Geneon, a closed-captioned instead of subtitled initial release of Ghost in the Shell 2 from Sony, heavily edited or censored DVDs from Geneon (Dog of Flanders), Manga Entertainment (Dangaioh), and FUNimation (Kodocha), incomplete DVD releases including Fortune Quest, Monster, Corrector Yui, I’m Gonna Be An Angel, and Soar High Isami, to name a few, dubbed only Blu-rays (Kurokami, Persona 4) have all been problems encountered by the domestic anime industry, yet none of these problems have had significant, lasting impacts on the entire American anime industry. The few major missteps that occurred in the mid-2000s during the height of the American anime boom nearly destroyed the American anime industry. Even now, five years after the implosion, the domestic anime industry is recovering yet shows no sign of ever reascending to the prominence that it had in 2005.