A short article with Sanzigen bigwigs talking about how they got to where they are, and hyping themselves up in the runup to their 10th anniversary work Bubuki Buranki.
Started this on an impulse and ran through the whole thing in about 90 minutes, so apologies for any errors that didn’t pass my second edit.
The holidays may be over, but we’re still dealing with pre-shopping season data here at the US amazon formula lab. This batch of data is the last one from before Black Friday, and also includes DBZ:F DVD data for the first time. I’ll also take my first stab at using newer data to guess at the top of the amazon rank scale.
Moving on to a pretty blah January, where a dub track makes Hanayamata cost 10 dollars more than Locodol and only 3 releases have chances to sniff notable sales.
…Meanwhile, on the actual sales front, we’re still waiting for data on Black Friday. Fun!
Manga artist Kumeta Kouji gives a rather hilarious interview where he talks about terrible editors, his relationship with his partner in Joshiraku’s creation, and a bunch of trivial nonsense.
Original Article: http://natalie.mu/comic/pp/joshiraku
Got two weeks’ worth of amazon/sales correlations in this post, and they’ve got a couple little weird data nuggets buried inside ’em. Get ready for a quick data-dump followed by some wild child speculation. Same as usual, really.
Asano Inio did an interview with Comic Natalie on Madoka Magica in the presser lead-up to the third movie. The process of how they arrived at that particular person for that particular interview subject is quite fun, and outlined in the article. The main body covers how Asano came to try the series and which parts stood out the most to Asano personally. Nothing too revolutionary in the article itself, but it’s just generally fun to get great creators’ perspectives on great things, involvement be darned.
The interview is conducted in the leadup to the third film, so Asano hasn’t seen it as of this interview, though it does come up. As an amusing aside, while googling to see if it had been done, this article erroneously citing it as a source for Asano’s approval of the movie popped up.
Original Article: http://natalie.mu/comic/pp/c_madoka_magica
A translation of a 1999 interview done by director Takahashi Naohito and chief animation director Chiba Yuriko for KSS Perfect Collection books focused on To Heart. It’s a long interview, touching on a bunch of topics pertinent to the show and their attitudes towards various aspects of story structure and animation.
As a general note, some of the original dialogue in the interview is pretty obtuse and/or meandering. I inserted some punctuation and made minor structure alterations to a few sentences to make sure the meaning came through.
As of last Friday, I was only about 40% done with my little vanity translation project. Now it’s at about 80-something and progressing rapidly. I would be legitimately shocked at this point if it weren’t up by, at the latest, the end of next weekend. This project involved about 20,000 characters worth of Japanese and will probably cash out in the neighborhood of 6000-7000 words if my fuzzy math is right. In the course of working on it, I’ve been able to streamline the hell out of my process and I’m itching to try it out on something smaller-scale.
Since my current “short anime/manga articles I want to take a stab at” list is about 50 deep, I thought I’d toss this one to the crowd. Here’s a list of 10 articles, with links, that I’d be super-hype to translate after finishing my current thing. I’ve googled all of them to check and I don’t believe any has been done yet, so they should all be fresh. And a there’s a poll so you can vote, of course. I’ll definitely translate whichever article gets the most votes, and anything that gets votes I’ll think about doing. Poll will stay open until I finish my current project, and then I’ll get cracking on the leader.
The most recent week of reported US sales data (10/26-11/01, 2015) was a big one for some notable deviations from the norm, some bigger than others. A bunch of Funimation titles outperformed both their rankings and their typical weekly performances, which I might be able to explain. The Wind Rises, on the other hand, dropped over 17,000 copies from its BD total, which is a little bit of a head-scratcher. I have some thoughts on each case.
The most recent 3 weeks of sales data were tumultuous, seeing 6 new releases of 3 different movies and some serious chart variance. I’m dumping the data and running through the highlights – there are interesting hints that might help the predictive formula, but all are more suggestive than definite.
Animetics 