I spent most of today working, being ecstatic about Lebron James leaving Miami, and then dealing with a Chris Bosh-shaped knife in my back.* Anime’s happening, though, with today’s new stuff being of the super-volatile variety.
An interesting piece examining efforts by various people within the US anime/manga industry to reach female viewers, which also mentions that female viewers fairly consistently made up about 25% of the 6-11 viewership of toonami around this time (specifically, a 26% value for June 2005 is said to be “fairly consistent” by an industry source).
Short article comparing the US box office rollout of Howl’s Moving Castle as compared with Spirited Away, including the gross and number of screens for each.
Author Kouta Hirano and Yasuyuki Ueda talk about rebooting the Hellsing franchise with different goals and Hirano’s inspiration as an author, and various other things.
A short interview with [the best US voice actor ever] Steve Blum.
Since February, I’ve made it a habit to track R1 anime releases on US Amazon, hoping to get an idea of how sales figures look for specific US series. I recently finished up taking data for the month of June (available here).
Recently, that study seems to have begun bearing fruit. Combined with assumptions about the positions of their blu-ray top 20 versus the overall top 20, I was able to come up with a power law approximating how much a day ranking on US Amazon was worth in terms of disks sold per day (#=300,000/rank). Recently, I got my first substantial bit of proof that this prediction method was at least somewhat viable (to within +/-20%), and I’m at the point where I’m ready to put out very basic estimates of what first-week sales figures for various releases should look like for those series released in June.
It’s been well-established that an anime adaptation of a manga or light novel can be a huge boon to the source material. What’s a bit less obvious is whether or not boosting print material can fuel the production of a second season of said anime.There are at least a few reasons why it shouldn’t; for a manga get adaptation boosts primarily from the first season – afterwards, their sales tend to plateau or drop off (even if the series does get a second season). It makes sense on an intuitive level that there would be some sort of diminishing returns on subsequent seasons of anime; sequels tend to sell between 0% and 50% fewer disks, and people don’t tend to start watching anime from the second season onward. But whether or not those diminishing returns carry over to print sales, and if so to what extent, is a somewhat separate question.
In this post, I’ll be exploring that question, comparing the rate of shows getting sequels with and without print sales boosts over different ranges of disk sales, to get an idea of whether or not print sales boosts actually “matter” towards a show’s sequel odds.*
Samurai 7 character designer Takuhito Kusanagi walks through his thoughts on designing the series’ main cast.
Short interview with US voice actor Greg Ayres.
An interview with the two dub voices of Sophie from Howl’s Moving Castle, talking about how the role was recorded. They had actually never met before this interview, so apparently there was very little interaction between the actors in general (probably a consequence of using more-booked celebrities).
Animetics 