Tag Archives: Anime

Via Newtype USA: Mahiro Maeda Interviewed (June 2003)

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Maeda Mahiro discusses his work on The Second Renaissance portion of the Animatrix, which took a draw-first, write-later approach to creation. It also (weirdly) contains the other half of the director-CG guy conversation started by Hiroshi Shirai in the [inside] Gonzo article. Also has one of the better quotes I’ve read so far; “That’s all anime is – something you do to kill time when school sucks.” (Talking not about the viewers, but how animators get to drawing and how then-modern technology had made it easier to create things with that lackadaisical, bored-during-class feel.)

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Fun With Numbers: The West-Side All Stars

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Something I stumbled onto a while a go that made me curious was a seemingly non-trivial connection between myanimelist popularity in the sales boosts of both novels and manga attached to a given anime, which led me to some speculation as to how different Western and Japanese fanbases’ preferences really are.

This time, I’m taking a look at a similar question; how many shows with high levels of Western popularity truly bomb in Japan? To answer this, I took the TV shows in the top 200 most popular on myanimelist, and excluded the ones attached to any series that averaged over 4000 in disk sales, or had a novel or manga chart in its first two release weeks at 20,000 copies or more. What remains is, theoretically, a list of the series which failed to catch on in Japan despite catching on in the West.* Data via myanimelist, someanithing, and the Japanese BD/DVD sales wiki. Note that I count the box releases as part of the disk average for pre-millenial series.

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Via Newtype USA: Morio Asaka and Nanase Ohkawa on Chobits (March 2003)

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This is a neat interview tidbit showing off some of the thought processes permeating earlier era Madhouse (the [inside] article on Madhouse, in another issue, elaborates a bit on their clamp connection). Morio Asaka talks about the blurred line between manga for girls and manga for boys (considering Chobits as a shojo manga even though it ran in a shonen magazine). Hidetoshi Abe mentions a post-credits revision to the second CCS movie’s ending that never made it in. Nanase Ohkawa talks about how she depicts male characters and the less intensive role (relative to CCS) she played in the anime’s production.

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Via Newtype USA: [inside] Gonzo (March 2003)

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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 latest of what will hopefully be a couple more posts archiving articles from Newtype USA’s [inside] series of articles written by Amos Wong. This one talks about what-if superstar studio gonzo, years before bankruptcy filings forced their biggest talents to split off into David Production and Studio Sanzigen.

Note: Pictures are scans of the article made on my crappy scanner, which cover the article text but not the entire page. They’re also in greyscale, because I’m interested in archiving interview text and color scans make the process more of a headache than it needs to be. Apologies for that. Scans after the jump, along with comments on the contents of the article.

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Fun With Numbers: Pays to Shop Around

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In my post-March piece on US amazon rankings, I noted there were other retailers that sold anime over the internet. I figured it was an important enough point that I took a look at the prices offered for the releases I’m tracking in April. Specifically, I took the MSRP for each of these 32 releases, and compared it to the actual prices offered at Amazon, Right Stuf, and Robert’s Anime Corner Store. Even a look limited to these three stores shows a pretty significant variation in which one offers the lowest price and how much (prices are in dollars and rounded up, lowest price in blue):

April-pricesNo one store has the consistent lowest price title sowed up. RACS seems to have be the bargain more of the time, and the amazon releases that are lower than the competition are much lower, but the relative price being offered really seems to depend on each release. Beyond helping me tweak my model and expectations for what US amazon can and can not be used for,* this list makes the millionth version of this point; if you’re going to shop for R1 releases, shop around.

*The rankings could still potentially be very indicative of the relative strength of similarly priced series, as stuff like shipping and service can cause people to prefer certain retailers. It comes down to whether amazon popularity is indicative of popularity elsewhere or not. Either way, it’s probably smart to expect Sentai releases with their lowest prices offered elsewhere to be underestimated by an amazon-only model.

Via Newtype USA: [inside] Bones (February 2003)

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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 latest of what will hopefully be a couple more posts archiving articles from Newtype USA’s [inside] series of articles written by Amos Wong. In this one (the first chronologically in the series) President Masahiko Minami talks about the studio’s origins and namesake, Hiroshi Ousaka talks about research trips to Morocco, and Toshihiro Kawamoto talks about using digital effects to produce more effective POV shots.

Note: Pictures are scans of the article made on my crappy scanner, which cover the article text but not the entire page. They’re also in greyscale, because I’m interested in archiving interview text and color scans make the process more of a headache than it needs to be. Apologies for that. Scans after the jump, along with comments on the contents of the article.

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Via Newtype USA: Toshihiro Kawamoto on the Cowboy Bebop Movie (February 2003)

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I wasn’t planning on scanning this until I read it, but this one just so happened to contain some juicy tidbits. Toshihiro Kawamoto not only opens up a little about what the job title “Art Production Director” entails, and has a cool point about the cost of extra lines in character designs for anime movies (the more times you have to draw it, the more expensive it gets). He also mentions that Shinichiro Watanabe tends to be more hands-off in handling his staff, hence some of the fanservice in the motion-heavy scenes (in other words, kind of an entertaining polar opposite to Tsutomu Mizushima in 2012).

Note: I switched to greyscale here because I kept making mistakes in scanning the pages with small margins and it takes significantly less time than color per scan.

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Via Newtype USA: Hanada Shonen-shi (February 2003)

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Hanada Shonen-shi is an oft-overlooked series that holds a few unique fun-trivia attributes; it was one of the earlier shows in the awesome NTV 24:50 Tuesday slot and put up 3%+ ratings long before doing so was cool, and it’s got the only opener done by the Backstreet Boys. This brief spread talks about how the manga creator, Makoto Isshiki, was the one who pushed for that opener. There’s also an interesting comment on the voice actors practicing for a body-swap sequence. Not much text, but it’s neat.

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Via Newtype USA: Yutaka Izubuchi and Ichiko Hashimoto on Rahxephon (February 2003)

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Yutaka Izubuchi jokes about the length of the Eva manga, goes over designing his preferred style of face-bearing robot, mentions his Sunrise Production Planning Division connection with the director of Gundam SEED, and talks about getting gently nudged into the director’s chair by Masahiko Minami (President of Bones). Also, he get a pretty hilarious congratulatory card from Mamoru Oshii; “I don’t know why you don’t just quit… and don’t come crying to me when you fail!” More refuse for my “Is Mamoru Oshii just affecting that cranky demeanor he always has in interviews, rather than being legitimately bitter?” pile.

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Sell Me in 20 Minutes: Mekaku City Actors

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Mekaku City Actors packed a number of strong-side points, the mos enjoyable of which was hearing Asumi Kana at full blast. Just having her go at it with one-way dialogue did a great job of lightening up the atmosphere after that story-heavy intro. It’s fun to watch a character just grab the reins and take charge of a scene the way he computer avatar character did. A star-studded cast is almost a given for a high-budget production, but not everyone really makes use of their veteran VA’s strong points the way those minutes did. That’s one of the really fun parts about the deliberately minimal rorschach-blot style that has come to characterize that one studio whose name everyone has heard several times at this point; when it doesn’t work by itself, it’s setting a really open stage for writers and seiyuu to just jam. Oh, and it makes flipping the script on a dime doable as well (visibly useful in the second half). Warts be damned, I’m all-in on this one; it’s getting at least 3 more episodes.