I never compaired the two, I think that is what I will do today and let you know what I think. I have on dvd and blu-ray Chobits and Heaven's Lost Property.

Edit: I saw no difference between the Geneon DVD and the Funimation Blu-ray versions of Chobits, but I only watched 2 minutes of the first episode. For Heaven's Lost Property if you compaired the DVD & Blu-ray you would see the difference at some parts.

The way I see it is if its not one of my most favorite animes I am not going to rebuy for the blu-ray, if it is one of my favorits then even if I see no noticeable difference I would still rebuy for the Blu-ray. Quality is a major issue when I watch anime, Thats why I always buy animes I think the quality over the internet sucks to bad.

I think this is the reason for anime's fall. The late '90s and early 2000s were a different time for anime. I got into anime in '98, the summer between 6th and 7th grade, and that medium hit me (and to a lesser extent a couple of my friends who got into it around the same time) like a ton of bricks. I became very interested in anime because it was something new and different and not a lot of people knew about it. I remember looking in the backs of magazines like Gamefan and Electronic Gaming Monthly and seeing these ads for import games and import action figures and wanting them so badly because they were something different and special. Then, once the internet became commonplace and everyone was online, everyone, everywhere had access to everything. You wanted an import game or an import action figure or an Japanese wall scroll, you went online to eBay or one of those stores that was advertised in the backs of game magazines and ordered it. I think very quickly the mystique surrounding anime evaporated and no one looked at it as something foreign and mysterious; it became commonplace and weird.

At this point post-crash, I think anime has regressed to how it was in the early and mid '90s: an underground entertainment medium that a very niche (but devoted) audience pays attention to. Depending on how the powers that be manage anime licenses in the next couple years, this regression could be a good thing. Perhaps now companies that are involved in anime will be more selective and give fans higher quality shows instead of one or two decent shows and a half dozen crappers like they seemed to be doing during the boom.

Excellent post big_e. You hit the nail the on the head. It might be strange to say, but I think a lot of anime fans felt a certain vibe in the air about anime during the late 90's/early 2000's, that felt really fun and exciting, and now that feeling is gone. I was also a lot more interested and intrigued by Japanese culture during the mid to late 90's than I am now. Everytime I think about that period I get very nostalgic. Like you said, there was a certain mystique surrounding anime back then, that there isn't now.

God I wish I had a time machine.

It's sad, what happened to the industry, but I put a lot of the blame on the companies that released anime stateside. They artificially inflated their own bubble during the Pokemon/DBZ craze in the late '90s and early 2000s, released way too much stuff, then burst their bubble by over-saturation and crashed the industry by 2008.

If you have a VCR or a DVD player, you do have a time machine. You can watch anime from that period anytime you want. I love '80s anime myself and I have a large collection of it so I can plunge into it anytime I get the yearning. I just wish more of it had come out with English subs. before the bubble burst.

The year ended with Evangelion and Wolf's Rain going out of print. That's a pretty bad slump.

Sources:

http://www.fandompost.com/forums/sho...Rain-going-OOP
http://www.fandompost.com/forums/sho...V%29-going-OOP

Regarding Evangelion, I think that's a series where everyone who wanted to buy it, at this point probably already has. Hasn't it pretty much been in print for the last 10 years?

That implies that the anime industry is failing to attract new fans.

Maybe it isn't attracting new fans, or maybe the fans that are coming around don't want to watch Evangelion. Not everyone who is a anime fan wants to watch Evangelion. I've been a anime fan since I was 12 (I'll be 26 in exactly 2 weeks) and I have no interest in Evangelion. I've read enough about the show to conclude that I probably wouldn't like it, so I'm no going to waste my time on it. It also strikes me as a show that casual viewers and newcomers probably wouldn't buy right away. And aren't older shows usually a hard sell to newer fans anyways? Maybe the industry is attracting new fans, just not the type who would watch shows from the mid-'90's.

Before we conclude that kids these days aren't interested in Evangelion, we should consider the other possibility -- the license expired. Doesn't mean the title has lost popularity -- just look at the Sailor Moon manga, which was out of print for five years after TokyoPop lost the license but is now dominating the graphic novel bestseller list.

With the amazing Eva movies still coming out ... who would want the TV series anyways that doesn't have them already. IMHO Eva 2.22 blows the TV series out of the water... and I own both the R2 and R1 copies of the Revival release.

They probably just asked too much to renew. That's gotta be the most expensive title in all of anime.

Wolf's Rain has and will always be the most disappointing anime with the best talent behind it.

I have faith in Funimation to license Evangelion, They most likely just had to wait for ADV's license to expire.

There are some of us, like me, who enjoy watching an entire series of films in that respective collection, all in one sitting. I HATE the thought of watching the first couple of Eva Rebuild movies, only to have to wait until 20-friggin-13 to see the remaining two. Therefore I have vowed to wait until then before watching ANY of the films, so I will be able to enjoy all of them at once. Makes for a better viewing experience.

While FUNimation is likely the candidate to reacquire this, it may not be for a while. There is good chance the scenario noted by Madman Entertainment (Australia) applies here as well.

LINK

You say that as if they could have sat back, licensed less, and grown more slowly and that would have caused anime to still be popular today.

Now if there were just massive bidding wars for the bigger properties from the domestic companies and that's what caused their downfall, I could understand. But it always seemed to me like the Japanese companies, even with an increasing reliance on the money from foreign releases, always overvalued their IPs and kept the licensing costs high. In the US, as DVDs and anime became more mainstream, prices dropped across the board; in Japan, collecting videos is a niche hobby and a very expensive one at that. People pay a premium to collect stuff even though they watched it all for free on TV.

Plus it's a niche market here, and always will be... it just doesn't have the mass appeal that other genres do. I'm not sure what they could have done to get more mainstream popularity than what they did. They are cartoons made for a Japanese audience, and outside of kids shows, much of it for a very narrow band of the Japanese audience.

I think if the companies had been more selective with what they licensed, the anime industry wouldn't be in as bad a shape as it is now. Yes, there were multiple factors that led to the crash, but I think a major problem the American distribution companies had was that they weren't gauging whether what they were licensing was sellable to American anime fans or not. They just seemed to be grabbing whatever licensees they could get their hands on, regardless of whether or not what they were licensing would actually sell.

Yes, I agree with you; anime is, and always has been, a niche market in America. Which made me think, how weird it was that there was an anime bubble to begin with. Prior to the bubble, regular people always refereed to anime as "those weird Japanese cartoons", then after the bubble burst, they pretty much ignored it. I can see interest in anime rising during the Pokemon craze, but the bubble kept getting bigger and bigger even after the craze died down.

There's a big gap between the niche market of American otaku who obsessively follow assorted anime TV series from Japan and the more casual fan, who's into film and regularly watches subtitled foreign films and will sample the more critically acclaimed anime like the Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli films and films by Satoshi Kon (TOKYO GODFATHERS) and Mamoru Oshii (GHOST IN THE SHELL). We're talking about the same audience who made hits out of RUN, LOLA, RUN, AMELIE, CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON, KUNG FU HUSTLE, OLDBOY, etc. As anime TV series go, these fans might take an interest in "Cowboy Bebop," but I can't imagine them obsessively following "High School of the Dead," "Clannad," or "Bleach," or...fill in the name of any series currently popular with the niche market. These casual fans may attend the Studio Ghibli festival currently unspooling in Manhattan, but they're not signing up for the Anime Network or Crunchyroll or any service like that. But they might rent PAPRIKA or SUMMER WARS from Netflix.

The question is...did the U.S.-based distributors ever learn to make a distinction between the two markets?

I dunno about that. I think many of the non-fanservicey slice-of-life titles would appeal to such people -- Usagi Drop, Ikoku Meiro no Croisee, Ano Hana and possibly Hanasaku Iroha -- and Penguindrum is perfect for the arthouse crowd, what with it being nothing but densely packed symbolism wrapped around a bunch of screwed-up characters. Even Madoka with its subversiveness would be up their alley.

That's a tough thing to gauge, though. What would sell to an American audience? Ghibli stuff is pretty much locked up by Disney. Viz seems to have the young boys market tied up with Bleach and Naruto and Pokemon. But even in that genre, you'd expect something like One Piece to gain some popularity and it pretty much bombed. Funimation can only re-release Dragon Ball so many times. Is there no middle ground between Ghibli and Shonen Jump titles?

The advantage those subtitled foreign films had were that they were films and they had some kind of mass release in theaters. I think only Ghibli titles have that as far as anime goes, and even those are pretty limited releases. I can't think of many subtitled tv shows that have hit it big. And the anime exposure on TV has been pretty limited anyway.

It may be harder for me to see clearly because I'm a niche fan, but I am curious what the major titles have been in the last few years. I do think the deep discounted sets and the fast releases of those sets after the singles came out led to people not bothering with the singles for even what one could consider AAA titles.

Yeah, but how do you get them to even sample such titles? I'm a member of the niche audience, yet I've never even heard of the first five titles you listed. And I've only heard of Madoka from a thread on this board. I've seen tons of things that I think "civilians" would like, and I've given plenty of public presentations where I've had the opportunity to show these things, but if something like "His and Her Circumstances," to name one series I've used successfully, is only marketed to niche anime fans, how are the civilians gonna find out about it?

To be honest, even back in the day, I wasn't that interested in a lot of the more popular shows and generas. I never cared for Tenchi (honestly, i thought it was a boring show and the humor fell pretty flat with me), didn't pay attention to Ranma, Inuyasha, or Kenshin. I didn't like shonen shows, harem, comedy (regardless of what it showed up in, I never found anime comedy to be "funny"), slice-of-life, or magical girl shows. The only shows I watched religiously were DBZ, Gundam Wing, and Sailor Moon, and now I no longer care for 2 of those 3 shows.

I never really paid attention to the shows that were popular and instead went out and found my own shows either via blind buys or Starz/Encore's anime block. Maybe I've always been a casual fan and am now just beginning to realize it.

That's what I thought when I read his post. Would the arthouse crowd even be interested in anime?

They're all fairly recent shows so they haven't had DVD releases in the US yet, but two (Usagi Drop and Hanasaku Iroha) are available on Crunchyroll and Ikoku Meiro no Croisee has been licensed. They're all stories that could be done as live action drama series, except for Penguin Drum which is more of a David Lynch film.

But that's an issue of marketing. It's not like Highschool of the Dead where the average art-house denizen would be appalled if you tried to get him to watch it regardless of how it's packaged. It's not that different from what's gone on with Japanese sci-fi novels -- when manga publishers first tried to sell them, they made the books look too much like manga, so bookstores shelved them with graphic novels and most SF fans didn't know they existed. Then Viz and Yen figured out what they were doing wrong. Viz hired someone versed in sci-fi publishing and spun off the Haikasoru imprint, while Yen used their corporate parent to get their books shelved in the Young Adult section where they belong.

I think the problem is that the companies tried to make anime too big.

It was really special when we went into that strange Japanese market in high school and paid $40 for a VHS fansub of Dragon ball Z or Ranma 1/2 that had 2-3 episodes and passed it around too all our geeky friends.

What really killed anime in the US was trying to mainstream it. Being able to walk into Best Buy and pick up an entire series of anime for $20 whereas a few years earlier I remember paying $30 for X (TV) JUST TO GET THOSE GODDAMN SLIPCOVERS A) took the fun out of it B) killed the distributors C) annoyed core fans who didn't care about getting it all in a thin little box.

Instead of new releases.... distributors repackaged old stuff that they already had the license for. They basically turned a the experience of buying 1 Porsche every three years into buying a Honda Civic every year. .. ... That only makes sense to me, right?

I think it will continue with the niche that you can find at your local anime convention. I was a long-time staffer at Otakon and their attendance has been going up up up while anime has been going down down down.

I'd just like to add that I am STILL waiting for a release of Yakitate Japan

Again, though, how did it kill the market by making it bigger and by bringing out more titles? It's not like the hardcore fanbase is gone, it's the mainstream converts that are gone, but that's true of any fad. If anything, the hardcore fanbase is bigger. So they boomed and busted, but is the anime industry any worse off than the early days of those 2 to 3 episode tapes, or the mailed out fansubs, or the Australian accents in Clash of the Bionoids? More anime is available than ever before, and I don't see that as a bad thing. The distributors are less (and I still really, really miss Geneon) but that's what the market can support... The bad part is that I don't think a lot of the current fanbase really wants to buy anime, at least not from the domestic companies.

But heck, even if translated anime somehow goes completely extinct, it was a good run. I never thought I'd see Gundam and St. Seiya toys at an American Toys R Us.