History of TYPE-MOON anime DVD sales

Here is the quick breakdown on DVD sales of famous TYPE-MOON inspired works. For any series to be considered a success story in industry, 10,000 DVD sales is the benchmark figure as I was made to understand (some say 20,000 units though). Some series sold on average of 3000 volumes got sequel(s) made so it is kinda confusing (ex: Zero no Tsukaima).

Shingeshutan Tsukihime / 真月譚月姫

Prologue - 14,581
Vol 1 - 19,519
Vol 2 - 15,788
Vol 3 - 15,165
Vol 4 - 10,573
Vol 5 - 12,910
Vol 6 - 11,338

Fate/ Stay Night / フェイト／ステイナイト

Curtain Raiser - 13,364
Vol 1 - 26,637
Vol 2 - 26,702
Vol 3 - 26,344
Vol 4 - 23,692
Vol 5 - 25,512
Vol 6 - 26,036
Vol 7 - 25,892
Vol 8 - 27,564

Kara no Kyokai / 空の境界

Movie 1 Special Edition - 69,771
Movie 2 Special Edition - 66,093
Movie 3 Special Edition - 65,892

Movie 1 Normal Edition - 11,770
Movie 2 Normal Edition - 9,382
Movie 3 Normal Edition - 9,749

Source

Small wonder A-1 Studios (which is indirectly Sony) willing to spend shitloads of money for Kara no Kyokai adaptation based on previous sales figure of Fate/Stay Night.

Long live TYPE-MOON.

I will edit this entry to record sales for rest of Kara no Kyokai series much later.

The story of Crunchy Roll

As the new year fast approaches, the news across the anime industry looks persistently bleak: downward-spiraling overseas DVD sales coupled with decreasing profits at home, a shrinking domestic labor force combined with an ever-expanding menu of file-share freebies--and, of course, an anemic global economy for all.

But there is a silver lining on the horizon, and you can test its brightness and durability beginning exactly one week from today.

Next Friday, Jan. 2, California-based Crunchyroll.com, one of the largest and most popular of the so-called "fan sites," or Internet portals for free anime uploaded exclusively by and for fans, is going legit: legal and fully licensed for producer profit.

If you follow this column, this is not the first you've heard of Crunchyroll's foray into unchartered bandwidth. In September, I conducted a phone interview with Vu Nguyen, the site's cofounder and vice president of business, development and strategy. Nguyen recounted for me his team's trips to Japan at the start of 2008 to obtain digital strategies directly from the front offices of Japan's anime producers.

The result? They had none.

"So we decided to give them strategies," Nguyen told me. "Because they're frustrated, too."

I was impressed by Crunchyroll's proactive approach to an industry whose upper management tends toward intransigence. In many of my interviews with anime executives, the mere mention of hemorrhaging profits via the Internet inspired winces at best, and at worst, outright antagonism--as if I'd inserted an obscenity into the conversation.

No doubt, Nguyen and his colleagues have benefited from their timing. While DVD sales figures have been slipping in all media, for anime, North American numbers have dropped precipitously, by an estimated 200 million dollars or more from their peak roughly five years ago.

The news isn't much better inside Japan. Years of declining birthrates have produced a shrinking youth consumer demographic, one that can hardly pick up the slack of their otaku elders. Young Japanese, distracted and enthralled by their ubiquitous high-tech cell phones, are no less Web-savvy than their overseas counterparts. And recent changes to Japan's employment and corporate structures mean that many of them are working longer hours for less money than their parents did. Why pay for what's free?

Which is exactly the question I put to Nguyen earlier this week. If it was difficult convincing Japanese producers to provide official content to a foreign-based fan site, how hard will it be to persuade foreign consumers to pay for that content--when it was nothing more than a mouse click away days earlier?

Crunchyroll's approach is firm, if not outright draconian. "By the end of this year [next Wednesday], we are disabling user uploads for anime and dramas and removing any content from those sections for which we have not obtained rights. We are transitioning the site from a user upload model to a licensed model, working directly with the producers in Japan."

On Jan. 2, the site's content rollout begins in earnest: "We will be airing several new simulcasts every week," Nguyen continues, "with titles including Naruto Shippuden, Gintama, Shugo Chara, Skip Beat and more. We will also be launching our subscription plan that gives members earlier access to the shows, great video quality and no advertisements. The episodes will be available the same day with English subtitles an hour after Japan broadcast, exclusively on Crunchyroll for subscribers. Episodes will also be available for free with advertising support for everyone up to a week after."

The gamble is obvious: Fans will value quality content and immediate access over the contents of their wallets. Crunchyroll also plans to offer various social networking opportunities to entice subscribers. But here's the rub: "The fans genuinely want to support creators and the industry," Nguyen claims. "They just haven't been educated on how the industry works. We're doing our best to inform them."

In 2009, the Crunchyroll story could prove a fascinating test of the Internet's capacity for self-monitoring behavior, whatever the content: Can human beings in a virtual world put group survival and sustainability ahead of short-term self-gratification?

Source

Personally I think this is future of anime, more and more Net consumers preferred to stream shows rather than using torrents to download them and then watch it while at the expense of the HDD space. The industry might be watching this effort since they are truly worried that declining youth population in local market forced them to "outsource" market so they can stay in business. Some commentators noted that current Japanese anime industry is bloated (50 series a year, unprecedented rate) might suffer another bubble burst just like Japanese real estate scene soon. Economic depression might just do the job.

Interesting concept so far.

THE scene of 2008 for me is.....

I can watch this scene again and again!

"I can kill anything alive, even God."

(Kara no Kyokai, 3rd movie)

MMA Anime fighter fighting Bob Sapp

I still have yet subside from laughing but yeah, Bob Sapp, one of the famous MMA fighter in K1 and Pride Japan will be fighting an anime character (masked) Kinniku Mantaro in upcoming bout. Look at the picture to judge for yourself.

LOL.

Source

Who the hell is Kinniku Mantaro?

Eve no Jikan / イヴの時間 and Pale Cocoon / ペイル・コクーン creator in interview

Eve no Jikan OVA

Pale Cocoon OVA

Yasuhiro Yoshiura is that rarest of artists: He comes across as humble and unaware of the many layers of depth to his work. His most recent anime, Time of Eve, is, according to the series' director and writer, only what it appears to be--a story of humans living alongside near-human androids.

But there is so much that can be read into the tale, which is centered around a unique cafe--called Ibu no Jikan (Time of Eve)--where androids and humans intermingle on the condition that they do not attempt to determine who is flesh and who is not. Within the cafe, the androids have no identifiable characteristics that distinguish them from the human customers; they look the same, sound the same and act the same.

Outside the cafe, however, the androids speak in a more mechanical manner and have digital halos--a particularly beautiful effect--that identify them as robots. One idea, Yoshiura explained to The Daily Yomiuri in a recent interview at his Tokyo studio, had been to identify them with writing on their bodies, unintentionally reminiscent of Jews who were forcibly tattooed during the Holocaust.

The metaphors could be extended to any sort of prejudice--racial, sexual or religious--seen in human relationships. The silence that penetrates the six-part series (and his award-winning 2006 film, Pale Cocoon), too, seems to refer to loneliness or a disconnection with society.

But, that was never the intention, Yoshiura says. "I wasn't out to try and make this some sort of social statement. It's just about a guy who's got this beautiful woman he lives with, and he's thinking, 'She's cute, but I can't do anything 'cause she's not human...ah, what should I do?'"

"There probably aren't that many Japanese who would look any deeper than that to see the issues of racism or social problems," he says with a laugh.

This is not to say that Yoshiura has not found an equally interesting social problem based in science fiction, one that also has shown up in works such as mangaka Naoki Urasawa's Pluto or episodes of Star Trek or Alien Nation: Can--and should--humans treat nonhumans as equals?

"In Japanese anime and manga, it's pretty much a given that robots and androids are treated just as other people. But if there was really a robot standing here next to me, would it really be that easy to interact with him? I don't think so, no matter how much he looks human. I wouldn't know what to do," the 28-year-old says.

Time of Eve, the third installment of which is out now on timeofeve.com and also at streaming.yahoo.co.jp/p/t/00502/v05087/, is not Yoshiura's first film to deal with this social interaction. Mizu no Kotoba (Aquatic Language, 2002), which Yoshiura completed while studying at what is now Kyushu University's School of Design, has a surprise, if unnecessary, twist at the end involving robots. Here, too, the storyline is more about inter"person"al relationships than anything to do with robots.

So, why all the robots and androids?

Yoshiura says he has been a big fan of Isaac Asimov, particularly his Three Laws of Robotics, from his I, Robot, ever since middle school. In fact, the Three Laws are referred to in Time of Eve, which also deals with android prostitutes, much like Spielberg's A.I., in the latest episode, which is available free for this month.

Outside of the literary world, Yoshiura has found inspiration in the films of Terry Gilliam--Pale Cocoon was an homage to the lonely, desolate society of Gilliam's Brazil--scriptwriter Andrew Niccol (The Truman Show) and The Simpsons, among others, though the humor found in those materials does not transfer well to animation, according to the director.

An obvious comparison, one Yoshiura does not seem to mind, is to anime auteur Mamoru Oshii, who has tackled both the issues of sentience in androids (Ghost in the Shell) and the use of silence to portray loneliness and disassociation (The Sky Crawlers).

Made with a combination of 2-D character designs with 3-D backgrounds, Yoshiura's films look contemporary, high-quality and engaging. For the young director, who has won awards at numerous international film festivals, this method was born out of practicality more than aesthetic reasons.

"I didn't have the ability to really draw very well, so when I was making the films by myself, that combination of 2-D and 3-D was what gave me the best results," he says.

"There are very few people who can just toss off a drawing of a character and a beautiful background," he says as he flips through a book on the making of Hayao Miyazaki's Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away). "Japanese audiences have a thing for hand-drawn characters...If everybody was a great animator, then I think fewer people would use 3-D, and that would result in much more 'Japanese'-looking films."

Unlike his earlier works, Yoshiura is making Time of Eve with the help of a team of artists, making it possible for him to make this Internet-based series, as well as to consider the possibility of extending it in the long-run style of a U.S. TV show.

But working with others has drawbacks, such as communication challenges, he explains.

"I had always wanted to work with other people, but for practical reasons wasn't able to," he recalls. "When it was just me, it was just me. But just because I'm working as a group now...it's not as if it's five or 10 of me working together."

Maybe Yoshiura should consider investing in some androids of his own. But how would he treat them?

Source

Both Pale Cocoon and Time of Eve are excellent works that is completely out of mainstream anime which I loved so much. As the article above mentioned, he is focus on themes of dissonance and social diaspora through high technology. Not as obtuse as Oishii, he able to convey the narrative effectively.

Kannagi's most hilarious moment for me is...

This song is titled Soya Bean Song. I couldn't help but keep laughing at this absurd scene.