The rise and fall of anime trailers

[Dai]

In the 90s, Manga Video took a medium that was barely recognised in the west and marketed it as a genre of adult-oriented SF and fantasy. The late 90s and early 00s saw a shift from primarily OAVs to TV shows being released. While there was growing familiarity with the scope of the medium and some specific titles through magazines and the early Anime Web Turnpike era of the internet, these were still primarily blind buys for people due to a lack of broadcasts on UK TV and the bandwidth of dial-up modems meaning that a blurry, postage-stamp-sized fansub of one episode could take hours to download. Just one decade later, by the mid-2010s, we had somehow shot up the vertical spike of an exponential growth curve to a situation where most anime home releases were now shows that western anime viewers had likely already watched legally on translated streams released within a day of the Japanese premiere. That's become the norm now, though I still kind of can't believe it happened. As each of these shifts happened, the way UK and US anime distributors presented their products on home media changed with it.

Video tapes offered some opportunities for promotion, but needed to factor in that increasing runtime with extras meant increasing the amount of tape needed per unit, and thereby increased the production cost. The result was that smaller operations like Anime Projects and Western Connection just put the main feature on the tape, while larger companies like Manga Entertainment and AD Vision dabbled in pre-show trailer reels. These served the dual purpose of cross-promoting a company's other releases without needing to pay for magazine/TV ads, while also giving a sense of the scope of their brand.

The first and perhaps the most (in)famous of these was Manga Video's eye-catching, cringey, and sort of genius "Uh! Uh! Uh!" trailer. It featured clips from their first wave of releases, was never updated in later years, and yet managed to tell you everything you needed to know about Manga's approach to anime in just 60 seconds. This would then be followed by clips from a few upcoming releases. Since these were OAVs and movies that tended not to have TV-style OP/ED sequences, these were either a full scene or a bespoke trailer edit.

AD Vision mimicked elements of Manga's signature trailer by having their own quick-cut intro sequence of clips set to a recurring theme tune. The difference, and perhaps reflective of the wider range of genres in ADV's releases, is that the included shows would be updated occasionally.

As the home format switched to DVD and awareness of the medium grew, the front-loaded sizzle reel became a rarity, and individual trailers started to be filed away in the extras menu. The late VHS and early DVD era was also perhaps the peak for anime trailers on home media, with both Manga and ADV frequently doing bespoke trailer edits rather than just presenting unedited scenes. As the 00s wore on and TV anime became the norm on DVD, we started to see a shift towards lower effort trailers that just used the show's opening sequence.

This trend of slapping the OPs of a few shows into the extras menu unfortunately became the standard for on-disc anime trailers in the early blu-ray era. Then, over the last decade, we've seen trailers for other shows vanish from anime blu-rays altogether. The only anime distributor still doing trailer reels is Discotek, and it's no coincidence that they're the one label primarily targeting older customers with a taste for 20th Century anime. Their retro synth theme Every Night is emblematic of this, conjuring up a past era of both music and pre-show trailers. I always look forward to seeing a new selection of shows cut to that song, and it's a shame that Discotek are the last practitioners of this ancient art.

Somewhere along the line, most anime distributors shifted the onus of show discovery to the customer. It's now left to us to figure out which of the dozens of shows simulcasting each season are worth watching, never mind owning on blu-ray. It's left to us to chase press releases and blog posts to find out what anime distributors are releasing. And if we want to see a trailer for something that isn't on Crunchyroll, well surely the OP is on Youtube, right?

To a certain extent, I recognise that UK distributors specifically are a bit hamstrung on this front. Most of their releases are cloned from US discs, so they probably can't alter what's in the extras menu without making their own menus from scratch. Maybe they think it isn't worth the effort anymore. Or maybe there are some licensing complexities I'm not aware of that weren't an issue previously.

And yet, I can't help but feel that anime distributors are missing a trick. There's nothing but a quick logo animation left on the disc to establish their brand, and nothing to promote their product range. More importantly, they're limiting the discoverability of the range of genres they're offering. I might dismiss a title from a genre I don't normally watch if all I see is a photo of the blu-ray cover in a press release, but a well-edited trailer could grab my attention. I probably would have never started buying kaiju movies if my interest hadn't been piqued by this trailer for Gamera 3 on a completely unrelated anime DVD.

So what do you think? Are trailers redundant in the era of simulcasting? Are they something we should be encouraging distributors to bring back? And which anime trailers impressed you?

 

[cfx]

Interesting topic.

That style of trailer with random shows edited together with quick cuts and some unrelated music never did anything for me. Anime without its own audio tells me very little about what a show is actually like, and that ADV Films one above has so many quick cuts and different bits thrown together it might as well be just still images from a magazine as you barely even see any animation, plus there is so much flashing it's just a sensory overload that feels like will cause me to have a seizure. It doesn't help that the music chosen is typically something that I don't like and would never choose to listen to.

As I was reading, I was thinking "but Discoktek still does this" before seeing you brought them up. Theirs are better as they show more of each anime instead of just trying to mimic a MTV video, but still not having the original audio for what's being shown doesn't give me any real feeling for what the shows are like. My reaction to seeing those when they change is to think "why do they waste their time on making these?"

I'm very glad all this stuff is gone from automatically playing at the beginning of a disc. I shouldn't have to watch commercials on a disc I paid for if I do not choose to. Funimation discs used to have promos for their own shows and put one or more that played at the start of their discs. As someone that strongly dislikes English dubs and would rather never hear them, these ads always were dubbed for any show that had a dub, so I really did not want to hear those promos, and would have to try to remember to press the top menu button as soon as the disc started to skip them; at least they were skippable unlike some Hollywood movie discs that basically force you to watch anything they put on the discs at the beginning.

Funimation also had those promos available via a menu option to watch, and Sentai has those as well for other shows. They're not the custom edited type you are talking about, but they are promos for other shows the companies have. In Sentai's case they're often just the OP which I really don't consider a trailer though they call them that.

As far as I remember though, Crunchyroll stopped putting any of this on discs after Funimation bought them and took the Crunchyroll name. I'm thinking mainly about the US divisions here; I recall comparing the US and UK versions of Shield Hero S1 and the US had beginning-of-disk promos on it while the UK one does not, if I remember correctly (maybe I'm off here). As far as I know, Sentai still does promos via a menu on their discs.

Crunchyroll also puts promos for most of their streaming shows each season on youtube. I always watch those as since I don't subscribe to any streaming service, that helps me decide what to buy on disc if it becomes available. So I understand the value of trailers as a tool to find out about things of interest, I just personally don't find the type being discussed useful for that purpose.

 

[Dai]

That style of trailer with random shows edited together with quick cuts and some unrelated music never did anything for me. Anime without its own audio tells me very little about what a show is actually like, and that ADV Films one above has so many quick cuts and different bits thrown together it might as well be just still images from a magazine as you barely even see any animation, plus there is so much flashing it's just a sensory overload that feels like will cause me to have a seizure.

I hadn't seen any of those ADV compilation edits in a long time, and was surprised at how frantic it was when I looked up the one I linked above. Maybe my brain processed things at a different speed when I was a teenager (probably all the sugary breakfast cereals).

Their trailers for individual titles tended to be better.

I'd also forgotten just how over-the-top the narrator voiceovers were for some of Manga Video's mid-90s titles.

As someone that strongly dislikes English dubs and would rather never hear them, these ads always were dubbed for any show that had a dub, so I really did not want to hear those promos, and would have to try to remember to press the top menu button as soon as the disc started to skip them

That became the norm later on, but I recall Manga Video's early clip reels being the only place I could hear the shows in Japanese, since they used to promote titles before they recorded the dubs.

 

[Professor Irony]

Maybe it’s because I never had many ADV discs, but I don’t think I ever saw much of their marketing material. The famous What is Anime schtick was a running gag at the local anime club, but I only ever absorbed that one through osmosis. I do remember them having a couple of trailers on one of the Gunsmith Cats tapes that were decent enough though - clips from shows with the OP music dubbed over them. Notably they included Blue Seed and a fun looking OVA called Luna Varga, neither of which had a UK release in the end (boo hiss).

One thing did surprise me back when we were doing the Gunbuster simulwatch, was that it turns out Kiseki had a trailer reel and, oh boy, does it ever highlight how… eclectic their lineup was (The Gigolo, anyone?)

I’d love to know what those phone lines were like though. Giving you a paid number to call to explain what the anime you’ve just seen the trailers for were about feels a bit cheeky, and I can only imagine what the gossip chat line must have covered. “We heard Manga UK sent a rocket to the sun once… at night!”

 

[Spark_Heal]

There are two modern anime trailers that really stand out: The Netflix promotion for Evangelion and the trailer for Dragon Ball Super: Broly.

These are both huge franchises that sell themselves so they can’t be used as a baseline example. But they are both effective advertising and each of these videos have millions of views on YouTube alone. Evangelion tells you very little but makes it feel like a huge show that you need to watch. Broly comes across like it’s the blockbuster movie of the year.

I enjoy going through trailers on my various Blu-Rays and DVD. It’s good to see what is getting promoted or what used to get a major push from a distributor (the Ikki Tousen advert on the Serial Experiments Lain boxset is incredibly jarring). So I am of the opinion that there is a real place even in the social media space and the streaming world for specially cut anime trailers.

Maybe it’s a rights issue for the footage. Maybe it’s uncertainty about which audio track to use for dialogue. But when you are using everything from newsletters to podcasts to facebook in attempt to communicate with your audience: a 60-80 advert set to the opening or royalty-free music couldn’t hurt that much.

 

[Dai]

I’d love to know what those phone lines were like though.

I'd totally forgotten about those. They look like premium rate prefixes too, so they would have cost a fortune. Maybe the main VA from The Gigolo was running a phone sex line.

There are two modern anime trailers that really stand out: The Netflix promotion for Evangelion and the trailer for Dragon Ball Super: Broly.

That Broly trailer is pretty slick.

I do wonder if it's just a coincidence that anime trailers became less common around the same time that the fan AMV scene dried up. Maybe it's a skill set that's just less common in the western anime community these days, and that extends to staff at distributors.