Section 23 has sent over their November 2010 release schedule and we've got it posted to the store site.Here's what's coming:
Ghost Sweeper Mikami TV Series Collection #1 (Eps #1-11)
Hell Girl Three Vessels (Season 3) Collection #2 (Eps #13-24)
Taisho Baseball Girls Complete Collection DVD (Eps #1-12)
UtaKata DVD Collection #1 (Eps #1-12)
Xam'd DVD Collection #2 (Eps #13-24)
Xam'd DVD Collection #2 (Eps #13-24) (BLURAY)
UtaKata
On the last day of the school year, 14 year-old Ichika Tachibana comes across an old, busted mirror in an unused campus building. When Manatsu, a mysterious girl from inside the mirror, steps out and offers her friendship for the summer, she also offers Ichika magical powers. Now, Manatsu must help Ichika unlock the powers of the 12 Djinn in order to complete her magic training... but perhaps this is something that will prove too difficult a task. Some offers may appear too be good to be true and this one just may turn out to do more harm than good.
Taisho Baseball Girls
In 1925 (year 14 of the Taisho period), after being told by a baseball player that women should become housewives instead of going to school, two 14-year-old Japanese high school girls named Koume and Akiko decide to start a baseball team in order to prove him wrong. During this time, when even running was considered too vulgar for women, baseball is known as "what the boys do" and they face many difficulties when searching members, getting permission from their parents and when learning about the sport itself.
Ghost Sweeper Mikami TV Series
Reiko Mikami is a very beautiful, greedy and skillful ghost hunter, and her dream is to have more and more money. Her assistant is Tadao Yokoshima, who is very perverted, but very loyal, just because he desires Mikami, although she treats him like garbage, and always manipulates him to do the dangerous tasks.
2 comments:
Robert,
Your comments in the latest newsletter about the state of the industry have prompted me to ask a question about something which nobody seems to be discussing anywhere:
Aside from the negative effects of file-sharing and the slumping economy, how much damage is being done to the anime industry by everything seemingly being driven by the most extreme fetish/moe niches? How many potential fans are turned off by shows because of egregious fan service or too much focus on fetish/moe tropes?
The new series High School of the Dead is a case in point. It's a cool zombie story, with a smart take on the genre. Yet I can't show it to anybody because of the ridiculous amount of high school girl panties, the ginormous tits with their own sound effects and laws of physics, and the sexualization of a little girl urinating. If it was all adults, it wouldn't bother me, and I wouldn't have to hide it from potential girlfriends.
I would imagine that the producers killed a huge percentage of their potential audience with this stuff. Sure, there's going to be a certain amount of young adults who get a kick out of the big cartoon boobies, not to mention those middle-aged men who live and die for fan service while claiming that they really like stories with strong, believable characters. But is this enough to sustain an entire industry?
And Funi chose to pick up a show about a high school girl fighting competition where their clothes come off all the time instead of a good zombie story? They must know something I don't.
I've lost count of how many shows I've dropped after a couple of episodes because I'm really not interested in seeing sexualized young girls. Sure, Chu Bra and Strike Witches are going to make money off these people, but this will only force more shows into these narrow markets. I don't see how an entertainment industry can sustain itself like this in the long term, never mind grow enough again to make up for lost ground.
I'm sure you can come with a long list of shows created entirely as moe niche projects. While I realize that the sponsors kind of force animation companies to add in these things because they think the audience demands it, is it possible that the industry is moe-ing itself to death?
I can also think of quite a few excellent shows that would never get licensed for the US (Uninhabited Planet Survive, Hanada Shonen Shi, Mononoke) because they aren't filled with fan service or harem comedy or magical teenage girls. It's a shame.
I suppose the companies are desperately clinging to whatever they can flog these days to the few middle-aged men and teenage girls still buying anime. But it's not a good long-term strategy at all.
Sorry for the rant, but it's been getting worse every season.
PS: Obviously I download stuff, but DVDs (I never download scanlations, always buy manga. But I can have a look before I buy, or read a friend's copy first, you know?) are too expensive to try new shows unsampled. Been burned too many times in the past. But I do buy everything I end up liking, or watch most of even if I don't like it so much. Increasingly, I watch legal streams if at all possible, and would do that exclusively and stop downloading if more things I like get picked up. That would mostly kill the fansub scene (and might even employ a few of them).
how much damage is being done to the anime industry by everything seemingly being driven by the most extreme fetish/moe niches?
It's one of the dirty little secrets no one wants to talk about publicly. Everyone in R1 that has invested lots of dollars and years in this industry and yet will always be completely shackled to the 'quality' of the product they create in Japan - for the Japanese market. I have no doubt that the last few years preponderance of MOE and Fetish titles, while driving sales in Japan, have alienated a lot of the casual fan base in the US. I ask myself all the time – where are the new shows like Ghost in the Shell and Last Exile? It's like normal SciFi and Drama almost ceased production in Japan around 2007. But the end game is that the Japanese will create what works in Japan, and since they just don’t care much about the export market because it's so tiny, they won't be changing that anytime soon, and there are a lot of people here in R1 that really do like MOE and other kinds of Fetish shows. This should not make fans that don't like stuff uncomfortable. I just hope the Japanese can get the industry back to more 'something for everyone' type of release seasons. I'll tell you the truth I've been a fan so long that copious (and even weird) fan service hardly causes me a glance, but I imagine some of these shows could be rather shocking to newbies.
Hey, Strike Witches was a great seller. I enjoyed the series too - the panties really didn't bother me as much I thought they would. Maybe that says something about me as a fan.
And I don't think any fan, even the ones who attend a lot of cons, really gets to the see the collective 'whole' industry and fan base like we do, so when some fans makes these grand statements about what ails the industry, we often just have to roll our eyes.
And Funi chose to pick up a show about a high school girl fighting competition where their clothes come off all the time instead of a good zombie story? They must know something I don't.
Oh, they do. They know what's going to give them the highest ROI on capital.
I suppose the companies are desperately clinging to whatever they can flog these days to the few middle-aged men and teenage girls still buying anime. But it's not a good long-term strategy at all.
I think the downloaders will never realize the damage they've collectively done to the industry. Come on, no one should be able to sample a show via anything more than a trailer and maybe a few reviews. It's like anything else in life, you gotta spend a few buck to find out if you're going to like it. And the downloaders always say they would buy if the shows I want were released, but they wouldn't buy them anyway, that's just them bullshitting the industry (it's the ultimate Red Herring of Anime fandom), and the industry hard heads are finally catching on to that. Frankly, as a whole, fans who are into MOE and Pantsu (for instance) are much more willing to be paying customers than comedy or drama or horror fans. I've been telling the studios for years to just write these non-paying fans off as they are no use to anyone except themselves - not even other fans.
Increasingly, I watch legal streams if at all possible
I don't think that model will last more than a couple more years. Eventually those streams will all have to be monetized through subscriptions or advertising or pay per episodes or a combination, especially as DVD and BD revenue continues to decline.
That would mostly kill the fansub scene
Well, that will never happen. Fansubbers are a fan base all their own, kind of like dealers and users. And to be fair, they most certainly did help expand and promote the Anime industry – back in 1996, but since then - not so much. -_^
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