Copied from the temporary forum, so please excuse the format!
Just Passing Through said:I loathe the Kaze release of Princess Jellyfish, for reasons too numerous annoying to list here, so I'll just mention that I asked the most likely Australian fit for the show if they wre considering licensing it...
Anyway, Siren Visual gave the tantalising response...
watch this space for upcoming title announcements you might be happy!!!!!!!
Instant purchase for me if/when this happens.
(New members aren't allowed to post links for seven days?)
take "facebook" stick a ".com" on the end add a "sirenvisual" "posts" "406041809459667" stick some slashes in the middle
Rui said:They must like you to have given an interesting response like that! I have the US version so I'm happy, but the more options the better when there are questionable decisions made with disc authoring. I wish Siren would pick up more new stuff, though.
Just Passing Through said:I think they liked the review I gave their Usagi Drop release.
kaze_andrew said:Although busy in many different areas nowadays - this and the Black Lagoon comments concern me.
If you could fire away with a list either here, by DM or email me at andrew DOT partridge AT kaze.fr then I'll look into what I can do to either get answers for why and ideally remedy them in future.
As for the Black Lagoon extras situation - the production teams hands were tied by what the licensor could provide them with. There's a very long set of reasons for that but in short none of the extras were provided in English nor was any offer of supplying them made - which was highly frustrating and is on its way to being fixed for future shows.
Hope this helps and happy to answer anything more in detail. Sorry I've not been around as much for the last while too - there are two huge projects I'm working on outside of Kaze and SLA right now and both I should be able to talk about soon...
Very best,
Andrew
ilmaestro said:Very good of you to sign up to the temporary forums, but now you put us on this cliffhanger!
kaze_andrew said:Watch this space - mid-cliffhanger entertainment!
Andrew,
Rumours of his demise are greatly exaggerated.
ilmaestro said:Now I'm all ears. So to speak.
reborn! said:Hopefully it's some positive news for Anime On Demand for a change?
kaze_andrew said:There is definitely that for starters .
Andrew
Rui said:Since you asked, Andrew (I fancy that Just Passing Through will be forthcoming too)...
I feel that the uneven treatment of foreign anime companies by the contracts they are bound to is incredibly frustrating.
We're in region B for BD, which is an inconvenience necessitating the purchase of dedicated hardware in my case (I'm into other hobbies which would be impossible to enjoy without a region A player), so I'd hoped that it would mean that we wouldn't end up with the short end of the stick this time around while the US is having a terrible time being in region A with Japan. Of course, region locking is a joke to begin with and easily circumvented, but the hysterical panicking we've seen from the Japanese side over US BD releases in recent history implies that on the highest levels, the companies in Japan are taking the situation very seriously this time around. Talking to my dear friends in the Japanese fandom immediately shows that the companies have a case, because when a certain US BD release became available on Amazon Japan, dozens of them started ordering it as quickly as they could. This particular release had a less desirable Japanese BD edition, which couldn't in any way compensate through its meagre extras for the joy of getting it for a fraction of the cost at zero effort.
So, if the regions are the problem with the US wrangling with Japan, surely being trapped in what is, from the perspective of an anime fan, a fairly rubbish region overall should mean we are able to enjoy a respite from some of the harsh licensing requirements the US has faced. I'm largely happy with US BD releases. Until the Persona situation, which is so frustratingly offensive to me that I no longer want to touch any release with the Persona name attached to it at all any more (game or anime), the worst that would happen would be that subtitles are locked to specific language tracks. Some things don't come out on BD at all, but there's still a possibility that they might do later, and I'm happy to be patient if it means getting something good down the line (especially now we have streaming so we don't get completely left behind).
So, setting aside Persona, which you've explained might be a rare case of being in this barren region paying off, I'd expect region B releases (and PAL DVDs) to be at least equal to the quality of US region A (and their region locked DVD) releases. If this was the case and we continued to get interesting, quick releases such as Black Lagoon, I'd be preordering every single one. But whereas in the US, subtitles being locked to language tracks is out of the ordinary and a point of great contention (so much so that NIS America even include the information about whether subtitles will be locked to appease their fans), Kaze releases have them locked as standard. I don't like this, because I am hard of hearing and I understand very well that someone watching the dub might want subtitles. Furthermore, I might want to turn the subtitles off if I'm watching in Japanese. I have a very practical example of this too. I watched Professor Layton (excellent that we had that so much earlier than the US!) with my mother-in-law once. My mother-in-law is not of British birth and she speaks zero Japanese, so we put the English dubbed version on to give her a chance. We wanted to put subtitles on too, because that's how she watches everything at home to follow the dialogue better, and we couldn't, even though the dub and the subtitles both existed on the same disc. In the end we had to keep pausing it to help her keep up. Argh.
It doesn't make any sense, because a casual Japanese buyer isn't going to turn down the option to save £300 in order to avoid having to tolerate a few subtitles at the bottom of the screen. And unless they're physically burned into the video, they can be removed on a computer. So all this accomplishes is inconveniencing dub fans with poor hearing, people who speak English as a second language, and people who simply want a nice version of a product. I could understand why Kaze has to do it if it was commonplace in American releases, but it isn't. Given that we're in a different region, I cannot understand why we have more restrictions than the US does.
Other player restrictions such as the timer clock being frozen on DVD releases don't make any sense to me either. Again, this is something which is almost never done on foreign releases which I buy, only in Europe. Individually these are tiny, incredibly nitpicky things, but when I'm spending money, being given the choice between an effectively perfect edition of something and a version which has niggles, I've come to prefer to spend the money on the best version possible. The price is irrelevant. I thought the Samurai Girls pricing was extremely reasonable, but it turned out to have some subtitle glitches (there was a discussion on the previous forum) which made it come off as inferior to the American release. If anime companies hack the world up into regions like this it's only natural that similar products end up being compared
Of course, if the UK received completely different releases to the US, there'd be less need to compare, and the constraints of the attractiveness of dubs versus their restricted availability means that each region wants to release the same desirable licenses where possible. Princess Jellyfish has a special edition here so I feel both versions exist for a reason, for slightly different types of buyers. One thing I did love about Beez releases was the additional languages they sometimes contained (Polish! Brilliant!), so if the basic specification and contractual stranglehold issues can be dealt with there's definite value a European-created disc should be able to add over a US one.
Anyway, going back to the disc restrictions, using different players and the legitimate discs I paid for - and with the absolute bare minimum of technical research - I can circumvent any restriction that is contractually required by a licensor (short of them actually failing to include content at all). I can force subtitles and audio tracks to play when they are locked, and watch discs from other countries, and do the really unreasonable things like seeing how far through the disc I am when I am watching an episode. All these deliberate flaws in the product accomplish is to annoy the user by introducing additional hoops to jump through which illegitimately obtained anime is not subject to. Buyers are even made fun of by online communities for being crazy enough to pay money for something which is in many cases no better than a stream due to its restrictions. We're reminded by industry reps that we pay less for anime so we need to accept that our versions are inferior -- yet anime series function like monopolies, and in the majority of cases we don't have any option to hand over more money in order to get a better edition. The trend lately for Aniplex to actively restrict UK fans from getting a premium edition is completely illogical, to me. I've become perverse and started wanting the restricted items more just because they don't want me to have nice things. I want nice things. I want to be a statistic in the purchasing figures, voting for nice things rather than hurried releases or locked disc features.
I don't understand what anyone high up in the industry is thinking any more.
To use a rather different non-anime example and attempt to steer it away from being personal, my other half is deeply in love with the One Piece manga. He was importing Shonen Jump USA until it stopped, exclusively to read One Piece and nothing else, and then it went digital-only. He immediately went to sign up for the digital version and found it was impossible. He contacted Viz in Europe who said they weren't planning on making it available. Who is going to bring it to Europe if Viz isn't? And if nobody is, why is the only legal English version being withheld by the companies? Someone somewhere owns the UK digital rights to the series, even if it's still the Japanese side, and we aren't being allowed to pay to see it when the rights are out there and the technology exists.
He could probably still pay to read it by using dubious region-masking techniques and risk throwing his credit card details across some dodgy overseas relay, but when things get to that point just to be allowed to pay for something, it's questionable. This wasn't an issue when things were physically produced since we could throw money at the problem and import a paper edition from whichever region was producing a product. He'd be more than willing to hand the same money to Viz Europe if they set up the service, but they don't seem to want to, so as a result he has no One Piece at all until the significantly slower collected volumes are published and ends up feeling sidelined and disenfranchised by an industry which constantly laments its shrinking fanbase.
As a consumer, it's extraordinarily difficult to understand why things always have to be this way when I have a wallet full of money and a desire to own a lot of nice anime releases. My faith in the industry is at the wobbliest it has ever been and I've just given up and switched to buying directly from Japan in many cases because I want every penny I spend on my hobby to go towards the least crippled versions possible.
I'm sorry for complaining, Andrew, because you are easily the most accessible and well-intentioned rep around and you're doing brilliant work with things like the film roadshows and answering questions (and I still attribute the fact that I am lucky enough to own The Tatami Galaxy with English subtitles entirely to your hard work). And none of the things I find annoying are actually your fault. I just wish that some common sense would enter into the equation somehow at a high level before the anime industry keeps burning its bridges with the people who want to buy their stuff :s
Sorry also for rambling. This entire post might make no sense when I look at it again in the morning.