Director Yoshimitsu Ohashi and tie-in manga artist Sumita Takeru (who is actually a follower of western comics) talk about story details and the degree to which they had to keep their plots true to the original work.
Director Takahiro Omori gives quotes on Baccano.
Writer Dai Sato talks about his career, his background as a musician, how Eureka Seven’s pre-production slot switch influenced its story, and his feelings on adapting manga (as opposed to adapting novels or writing original material).
Aya Hirano, Yuko Goto, and Minori Chihara talk about their different voice-acting backgrounds; Hirano was a child actor, Goto was a college dropout and ex-AD, and Chihara started after graduating high school.
Producers Joseph Chou and Jeff Conner talk about the Appleseed movie.
An article on Crayon Shin-chan that includes an interview with Hiroshi Ogawa, who didn’t think the show would last a year.
A short interview with NA voice actor Chris Patton.
An article on the evolution of the demographics making up the North American anime fanbase.
As you may be aware, I track US anime releases on amazon, ostensibly to get a rough idea of how much particular lower-end titles might be selling. However, the titles I track each month come from amazon’s anime tag, which is not always applied to all anime-related releases. That’s what happened with the US release of prequel movie Appleseed Alpha on July 22 of this year. This is an issue because the BDs of this movie sold over 11k units in their first week on sale, via TheNumbers. It’s a lost opportunity because I could have used it to test predictions, but the datapoint itself is still somewhat interesting in its own right.
AA’s total is only 655 fewer copies than that of Attack on Titan’s first set, and that’s without accounting for the fact that the movie’s release was split between BD and DVD versions (as opposed to AoT, where the release was a BD/DVD combo pack counted as BD sales). Attack on Titan may well have the longer sales tail, though; it’s currently ranked at 1,022 while Appleseed Alpha fell back to 6,819 in Movies and TV. It’s worth noting the potential contrast between the two fanbases, one older (and presumably salaried) versus another younger and more casual.
(A screencap of relevant week’s BD sales chart is included after the break.)
As an addendum to the stuff I’ve been doing on anime timeslots in the mid-to-late 90s, it’s interesting to note that Kansai-based broadcaster Sun Television Co. actually had a little anime slot of its own, set at Thursday 24:35, which aired a few new shows. Sun TV was not the only current broadcaster of what were presumably UHF anime, and it shared part of its broadcast order with KBS Kyoto as well as Television Saitama, but their slot was listed as the primary one for To Heart by the tv-drama db, a generally reliable source.
Let me be the first to say which station broadcast what first and in what relation to the others is a question that is almost certainly more complex than I treat it as here. I know these shows were aired together on one channel, and not all shared Legend of Basara, so I’m going to define SUN TV as the primary broadcaster for the purpose of outlining the slot.
Since it was broadcasting to a much smaller region of the country (as part of a larger group of stations targeting several regions with the same block), information on it is more fragmentary, but we know it aired the following series during the 90s:
Legend of Basara [04-1998]
Dokyuusei 2 (OVA rebroadcast) [07-1998]
Kakyuusei (OVA rebroadcast) [09-1998]
(Unverifiable period)
To Heart [04-1999]
Kakyuusei (1999 TV Series) [07-1999]
As a 10k+ hit and something of a spiritual successor to many early-2000s Kyoto Animation works*, To Heart stands out a bit from the rest of the list. I find it interesting, though, that they first aired a pair of TV-edited Elf-franchise adaptation OVAs in the slot, perhaps partially to test the waters for the upcoming one-two punch of To Heart and Kakyuusei in consecutive seasons.
*In an admittedly primitive sense – much of the in-betweening and motion work for the final 3/4 episodes was outsourced to their studio.
Animetics 