Rob Bakewell talks about directing the English dub of Trouble Chocolate.
Via Newtype USA: Rob Bakewell (January 2003)
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Via Newtype USA: Corrine Orr (January 2003)
Canadian Voice actress Corrine Orr talks about her role in classic anime dubs, old sound engineering setups, and how she made relatively little for her part in the production.
Fun With Numbers: Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods Sold 24,689 Copies in Week 3
More sales data, as is kind of expected at this point. DBZ: BoG sold a total of 24,689 copies (18,296 BDs+BDDVD combo packs, with the remainder being DVD versions) on the week of October 20-26, bringing its cumulative total to 144,981 copies sold. As with the previous week, these numbers handily surpass what would be expected from amazon ranks alone, as the best ranks its amazon versions had over that span were 121st and 988th.
Next week’s data should also be interesting, as the final volume of Hellsing Ultimate ranked well enough to be a likely candidate to make the charts, spending all of the weeks before and during its release in (mostly low) triple digits.
Data is currently available here, and is screencapped after the jump.
Fun With Numbers: Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods Sold 29,558 Copies in Week 2
Pretty much what the headline says. Following a first-week total of 86,735 total sales, the movie added an additional 29,558 units to its US sales total (now 118,280) in the week of October 13-19. These second week sales consisted of 21519 BDs (including BD/DVD combo packs) and 8039 DVDs. It’s already interesting enough to mention how non-frontloaded these sales were, though DBZ is possibly an exception to the norm for anime releases; it remained in the Amazon top 200 for 5 days of its second week out, while most other anime releases are lucky to keep out of 5-digit rank territory.
The strength despite the lack of preorders also points to a possible heavy non-amazon bias for DBZ – its amazon versions were, at best, 86th and 677th in rank during the relevant week, yet it was 14th in actual total video sales overall. It’s very possible a large fraction of those copies were moved via b+m retailers.
Screencaps of the relevant charts (which can also be found here while they’re available) are included after the jump.
Active Engagement Through Timed Comments: Gochuumon wa Usagi Desu Ka?
Gochuumon wa Usagi Desu Ka? is a consistently funny and incredibly charming show about five girls who work at a total of three coffee shops between them. Tapping a solid cast, the show was able to ride a bunch of group-driven cute humor to a considerable degree of commercial success, averaging roughly 10,000 disks sold over 6 total volumes. The combination of individual flavor and audience satisfaction makes it another interesting candidate for the following question; which moments in the show went over best with the audience? I’m going to attempt to prod at the answer to that question by making use of the series’ himado timed comment data.
For more information on this analysis method, see this similar post on Ping Pong The Animation, or this introductory post covering particular episodes of Shingeki no Bahamut and Carnival Phantasm.
Fun With Numbers: Dragonball Z: Battle of Gods Sold 86,735 Copies on Week One
So yeah, the most recent Dragonball movie sold a healthy amount in the US: 24,589 DVDs and 62,146 BDs (including BD/DVD combo packs), for a total of 86,735 copies. Even if it doesn’t immediately top the US totals of the series’ older movies, that’s quite a lot. For example, it’s over ten times that of One Piece Film Z’s first week total.
To reiterate, that’s a huge number there, possibly large enough to have a second week and definitely large enough to sandblast parts of my still-in-development formula (which pegged it as closer to 20,000 in likely first-week sales). Best guess at this point is that some combination of being a movie, ranking extremely highly for an anime release, and being from the most popular anime franchise the US has ever seen pushed it closer to the storefront-heavy curve for mainstream movies, as opposed to the amazon-heavy curve other anime releases have seemed to follow.
At any rate, screencap after the jump (original chart here while it lasts).
Fall 2014 Watch List
I haven’t really kept up on posts of what I’ve been watching this season, so I wanted to put up a quick post just listing what I’m keeping up with thus far. Split the list into tiers based on how in love with/likely to finish the show I am.
Active Engagement Through Timed Comments: Ping Pong The Animation
Anime, unlike a game, a sport, or mechanical tinkering, is a fairly passive hobby. You plop yourself in front of a screen, press play, and maybe livetweet about the episode as it’s going on. But most people watch shows straight through. Outside of refreshing crunchyroll streams frozen for too long to plausibly be a dramatic pause, an average anime requires very little user input to run from start to finish (even books and manga at least require readers to turn pages). That doesn’t mean anime is a shallow hobby, or a passive one, but it does mean that the big moments in anime, the ones that suck the viewers into the screen like some elastic pink thing, are pretty important, since viewers typically aren’t doing anything that would serve to distract them from how tacked-together and plodding a subpar sequence is. A good anime will have a few moments capable of forcing viewers to snap to full attention, and a great one will have several per episode.
These moments are often obvious to whoever experiences them, but because so much subjective and personal experience goes into how one person experiences a work of entertainment, it can be difficult to isolate these on a macro/crowd level. If attainable, that information would be useful in a number of discussions, notably in those trying to tie a particular sequence into discussions of how much it might have meant for the show sales-wise.* Participating in discussion of an episode is a way to suss out your thoughts on a show, but a lot of that discussion is per-mediated in the sense that you’ve had time to digest before you speak your piece on it. By contrast, commenting systems built into video streaming platforms offer a fast-reaction look at how specific moments or intervals in a show evoked strong, immediate reactions. Which, in turn, makes these moments likely candidates for ones that pushed people over the top from being interested to being locked-in.
Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be taking a look at the timed comment data for several successful shows to get an idea of which moments may have been “high-leverage” ones that brought more fans into the show’s big tent. First up, the eleven episodes of Masaki Yuasa’s Ping Pong The Animation. Full disclosure: I’m writing this having seen the show, and assuming you’ve seen it too. Since this is essentially a list of scenes of importance from a slightly atypical perspective, there’s obvious spoiler potential below.
Fun With Numbers: One Piece Film Z Sold 6,199 Copies on Week 1
Another datapoint from the late September-early October rush of titles with early ranks made the charts. This time, it’s One Piece Film Z, a release split between DVD and BD/DVD combo pack sales that totaled a little over 6000 between them in their opening sales week. You can check the full list here while it’s up (screenshot after the jump).
Fun With Numbers: Scrolling Comments As a Function of Time
If you’ve immersed yourself in the culture surrounding anime more than a little, you’re probably aware that Japanese video sharing sites operate their comment sections a little differently from the way Crunchyroll does. For the uninitiated, while sites like Youtube stick their comments underneath the video for viewers to scroll down and see if they want to, sites like Nico Nico Douga have user-submitted comments scrolling across the same screen playing the video. I personally prefer this style of commentary for a variety of reasons,* and I sometimes miss the feature when transitioning to official releases. Just recently, I realized fully functional logs of these comment tracks are actually available for download at himawari douga, a fairly large** and in-no-way-legal video streaming site.
These himado comment tracks have a particularly neat (if totally necessary) feature – each comment keeps its 1/100th of a second timestamp, which usually corresponds fairly precisely with the thing in the video being commented on.*** Thus, these tracks, properly analyzed, have the potential to provide an interesting window into which moments in an episode most engage the audience. I built a very basic code**** to analyze the data, and I came up with some fun plots.
Animetics 