Author Archives: torisunanohokori

Via Newtype USA: [inside] Toei (December 2003)

Posted on by
Reply

Along with an understanding of the broader context of the subject, the most vital ingredient to good anime coverage is a reliable source. So when US journalists actually interview people on the production side in Japan, it’s generally worth noting unless the interview consists entirely of fluff. This is the second of what will (hopefully) be several posts over the next couple of weeks archiving articles from Newtype USA’s [inside] series of articles written by Amos Wong. It contains comments from President Hiroshi Takahashi and Director Daisuke Nishio on researching how to best portray action sequences, overseas sources of income, and the pluses and minuses of the transition from analog to digital animation.

Note: Pictures are scans of the article made on my crappy scanner, which cover the article text but not the entire page. Apologies for that. Scans after the jump, along with comments on the contents of the article.

Continue reading →

Via Newtype USA: [inside] Satelight (September 2003)

Posted on by
13

Along with an understanding of the broader context of the subject, the most vital ingredient to good anime coverage is a reliable source. So when US journalists actually interview people on the production side in Japan, it’s generally worth noting unless the interview consists entirely of fluff. This is the first of what will (hopefully) be several posts over the next couple of weeks archiving articles from Newtype USA’s [inside] series of articles written by Amos Wong. It contains statements from President Michiaki Sato and Director Kazuki Akane on how the studio went from subcontractor to full-time anime studio and how they handled the increased demand for female casts in the millennial anime boom.

Note: Pictures are scans of the article made on my crappy scanner, which cover the article text but not the entire page. Apologies for that. I have also transcribed the article after the jump to make for easier reading (though I probably won’t be doing so for other articles due to the time involved). Also note that each part of the article is a two-page spread, so page 19 comes before 18, 21 before 20, 23 before 22, and 25 before 24.

18-19a

18-19b

20-21a20-21b

 

22-23a

22-23b

24-25a

24-25b

Continue reading →

Fun With Numbers: Amazon Rank Progression for US Releases (March 18)

Posted on by
Reply

Compared to last and next week, this slate of releases was a bit small, containing 3 rereleases (Zombie, Shana, To Love) along with 2 new releases (Upotte, Bleach set 20).

As before, here’s the rankings up to this week in Aria the Natural part 2, featuring one total copy sold and the majority of days spent ranked 120,000th or higher:

Aria-wk3

Chart is date, rank, # in stock

The decline in rank seemed to slow down this past week. I would guess that, once you get to the 200,000s, you hit a point where there are a lot more shows that haven’t sold in a while or at all, leading to a slower advancement. At this point, I’m mainly following the ranks to see if the series can drop back into the 70,000-80,000 range with the next purchase that gets made, or if the long drought will have significant effects on the post-purchase rank.

Plots are posted after the jump.

Continue reading →

Fun With Numbers: April 2014 Amazon Data (Initial Numbers)

Posted on by
2

US amazon data may not be a perfect source, but it is a very interesting one, with a lot of organic components. I’m just about done collecting data for March releases (data for the 18th will be up when my schedule permits, data for the 25th still needs to be collected), and while these datapoints have managed to shed some light on a few of the narratives I pulled out of the February data, they’ve also raised still more interesting threads to be explored.

That means it’s in my best interests to continue collecting data both to broaden the sample and to give predictions a viable testing ground. All numbers posted here were collected on March 25th, via amazon’s upcoming anime releases page, one week before the earliest releases on the list.

Note: The price I note is the series’ MSRP price. If the series becomes listed at more than 50% off that price at any time during the amazon solicitation, I will note that both now and during the final analysis. The February part 1 release of Robotics;Notes had such a discount, along with Psycho-Pass and One Piece (all Funimation releases, which is probably noteworthy at this point).

Continue reading →

Fun With Numbers: Composers With Blockbuster Chops (Part 2: 2 Shows)

Posted on by
Reply

Continued from this post, here’s the list of composers who have managed the very impressive feat of writing soundtracks for two non-sequel megahits.

Two Important Notes About The Classification: First, I only included non-sequel anime when looking for head writers. This means nothing with some manifestation of a 2 in the title. Ditto for Gundam or Macross franchise entries after the original. My rationale is that it’s a lot harder to make a prime-time anime from scratch, even with popular source material, than it is to continue living in a house someone else built. I count A Certain Scientific Railgun and Mononoke as spinoffs rather than sequels, as the series they spun off of are considerably less well-established franchises.

Also, I did not credit any composer if the credit was split 3 or more ways and I was unable to discern a clear head of the project. Notably, Jun Maeda, Shinji Orito, and Magome Togoshi split music credits for Little Busters, Air, and Clannad 3 ways. Not crediting stuff like this is tough, but giving solo songwriting props to all of them feels like over-distributing credit.

Continue reading →

Fun With Numbers: Composers With Blockbuster Chops (Part 1: 3 or More Shows)

Posted on by
Reply

Good sound is terrifically underrated. Compared to the people who make the visuals in anime,* composers are significantly lesser known. There are individual names that people know for individual big works (Iwasaki Taku, Yoko Kanno, Yuki Kajiura), but by and large the majority of people who write the bgm for anime tend to fly miles under the radar. Which is a shame, because good bgm (and good handling of said bgm) can be the keystone piece that takes an anime from good to great. In the interest of making the big achievers in original soundtracks a little more well-known, here are the composers who have written soundtracks for at least 2 10k+, non-sequel hit series.

Two Important Notes About The Classification: First, I only included non-sequel anime when looking for head writers. This means nothing with some manifestation of a 2 in the title. Ditto for Gundam or Macross franchise entries after the original. My rationale is that it’s a lot harder to make a prime-time anime from scratch, even with popular source material, than it is to continue living in a house someone else built. I count A Certain Scientific Railgun and Mononoke as spinoffs rather than sequels, as the series they spun off of are considerably less well-established franchises.

Also, I did not credit any composer if the credit was split 3 or more ways and I was unable to discern a clear head of the project. Notably, Jun Maeda, Shinji Orito, and Magome Togoshi split music credits for Little Busters, Air, and Clannad 3 ways. Not crediting stuff like this is tough, but giving solo songwriting props to all of them feels like over-distributing credit.

Continue reading →

Fun With Numbers: Amazon Rank Progression for US Releases (March 11)

Posted on by
Reply

Now that a week has elapsed since the 9 releases from 5 March 11 titles (Accel World, Digimon, Ikkitousen s4, Psycho-Pass, Sakurasou) have been released, it’s time to dump the data plots of their daily performance.

As before, here’s the rankings up to this week in Aria the Natural part 2, featuring one total copy sold and the majority of days spent ranked 120,000th or higher:

Aria-wk2

Chart is date, rank, # in stock

1 sale per day does seem to boost a series up into the 70,000th-90,000th range, perhaps for a relatively brief period. It would be kind of nice if I were able to code and could track these hourly, but that’s way beyond my ability level. At any rate, the observation made last week that 120,000th or worse means zero sales seems to hold up.

Plots (and some commentary) are posted after the jump.

Continue reading →

Fun With Numbers: Blood-C and Malleable Movie Price Points

Posted on by
2

First of all, let me open this article with a mea culpa; back when I posted a quick reaction piece to the announcement that Tamako market would be resolving its romance arc vis-a-vis a movie, I mentioned that the late-night anime series with the next-lowest sales average to get an anime announced later was Bodacious Space Pirates at 7337. This was incorrect; Blood-C put up a 1577 average, though its movie, The Last Dark, was announced before the TV series even aired (meaning sales couldn’t have been a part of the decision-making process at that point).

This also represents an opportunity to spot-check one of the key assertions I made in that post – that it would be possible for Tamako Market to tap a larger, less-enthusiastic fanbase that might be more willing to spend 80,000 yen than they were to spend 300,000 yen. When anime is freely available via TV and streaming, it’s easy for people to finish shows, but not 100% of the people who finish a show want to buy it. And setting price points isn’t about making sure 100% of those people buy it, but about balancing the income per sale with total number of sales for maximum profit. However, that does mean that when an installment of a franchise comes out costing significantly less money, more people can often be expected to buy it. The K-on movie sold about 3.5 times as much disks as season 2 averaged.

It turns out this principle can apply to the lower end of the cost spectrum as well. In addition to raking in just over 67 million yen at the box office, Blood-C sold 4521+1362= 5883 total disks, also a little over 3.5 times the series’ average. With DVD and BD MSRPs at 7000 yen and 9000 yen, that means it brought in roughly 4521*4500+1362*3500=25,000,000 yen, after retailer take. Depending on the movie budget, that might have been enough money to make the movie project pretty close to break-even.

Movies of a franchise don’t always sell more than the TV series. Star Driver went from a TV series that sold 9000 disks per volume to a movie that sold about 6500 disks of the movie and made only slightly more than Blood-C (~80 million yen) at the box office. Bodacious Space Pirates’ recent movie failed to make the box office top 10. I’m not trying to say that every series has hidden riches waiting to be unearthed at lower price tiers associated with movies and OVAs. That demand curve is going to look different for every series. Bodacious Space Pirates is an instructive example of a series whose fanbase is almost entirely made up of disk buyers, as the TV anime may well have averaged more than the light novels typically do in their release weeks; volume 10’s July 11 release failed to chart in a week where the threshold was 6260 copies.

Recognizing when a series’ demand curve favors more-affordable shorter-form content is a tricky task that industry people spend a lot of time working on. I certainly don’t pretend to understand the mechanics of how every individual fanbase operates. I just think it’s important to point out that there are some demand curves which favor movie (and OVA) production for anime which are unsuccessful as TV shows, and some that don’t.

Fun With Numbers: The Late-80s OVA Boom (and Why Late Night TV Replaced It)

Posted on by
Reply

The two most influential series in the history of anime are almost indisputably Neon Genesis Evangelion and Mobile Suit Gundam, a pair of robot shows which showcased the buying power of Japanese otaku and led to an explosion of new material being produced. I’ve written previously about the late-night boom fueled by Eva’s success, but to say Gundam deserves less credit is to ignore one of the best–dramatized underdog stories in anime history. Then-16-year-veteran Yoshiyuki Tomino straight-up flipped a series meant to sell toys to kids for a realistic science-fiction epic in an era where the main thing robots did on TV was wrestle with one another for the spectacle. The results of Gundam’s eventual success were many; it spawned one of anime’s longest-lived franchises and has accounted for tens of billions yen in model sales per year to this day. But it had another key effect on the industry – it got people thinking about how to harness the fans with a serious sci-fi bent that Gundam had shown to be there for the taking.

Towards the end of 1983, one year after the final installment of the Gundam movie trilogy was released, the recently-formed Studio Pierrot released the first episode of what is considered to be the first OVA series ever, Mamoru Oshii’s Dallos. The series enjoyed healthy success, and several other companies began commissioning OVA projects. What followed was a surge in the amount of new original and manga-spinoff adaptation projects marketed chiefly towards older audiences, both hentai* and not (per myanimelist, charted here). The yearly abundance of non-hentai OVAs is plotted below, along with the number of TV anime and ONAs (included mainly as a curiousity) in that same period.

FWN-TV-OVA-ONA

Continue reading →

Breif Reaction to Tiger and Bunny’s Fire Emblem Movie-Episode

Posted on by
Reply

I just got back from a screening of Tiger and Bunny: The Rising. I don’t have the articulation to review it in full, but there is a point I’d like to get off my chest. While it was generally about the caliber of an average episode of the series (the fight choreography was a little sloppy, and it never felt like the villains were particularly threatening) it shined for two key reasons. First of all, that cast, with all their quirks and human aspects, is still extremely likeable. Tiger and Kaede’s father-daughter tension, Rock Bison’s fruitless struggles with unpopularity, and newcomer Golden Lion’s best Gilgamesh impersonation all made for some prime-time viewing outside of the action bits.

Second of all, the significant portions of the movie where Fire Emblem was in a coma confronting his personal demons were heavy, complicated, and absolutely engrossing. The nightmares he was having, aside from being effectively creepy, also doubled as a way of delving into his (perhaps unsurprisingly) harsh past, doing so in a non-obnoxious yet very direct way. Too, his character had both the best dialogue and best one-liners in the movie (a brilliant translation pun and an ass-kicking mini-speech). As the only hero not to get an episode devoted to him in the TV series proper, he was due for some attention. The Rising isn’t the crown jewel of the franchise, but it did his character justice; I didn’t expect that to be my main takeaway, it just ended up that way.