AnimeEigo opinions

[raiderfan99]

What has been going on with AnimeEigo the last 5-10 years?

For many years, I always advocated them as the best American Anime Distro company. Their releases were always full of interesting titles and generally the "pre 2000" variety. Besides that, they were a company started by otakus, ran by otakus. They never had the "cutting edge" titles like ADV, but were known for the quality of their releases. The cultural notes they packed with releases were unique and informative.

During the last few years, they lost the rights to several anime titles they were known for, including Urusei Yatsura, Arcadia of my Youth, even one of my favorites genesis survivor gaiarth. DVD releases from the early 2000s were never re-released on Blu Ray or even newer editions. Couldn't Vampire Princess Miyu be contained on one dvd or one discounted boxset?

Is the result of the Anime bubble market of the late 2000s? Is the company going out of business, or have they re focused on their Samurai Cinema titles? Searching online did not give much information other than most of their titles are going out of print soon. Was UY too expensive to license? I heard even when they had to liquidate their UY DVD stock they would not even discount it. Are they still living on those Otaku No Video royalties?

Anyone in the know have answers?

[davemerrill]

From what I gather, their declining anime catalog is a combination of the decline in the anime market in particular and the decline in overall DVD sales generally, and also is a reflection of the growing interest the company's CEO has in the live-action samurai films.

Keeping a title like UY in print is a massively expensive undertaking, and it's to their credit that they managed to release the entire series, but I don't think anyone expected them to continue to license the title in perpetuity.

When you look at some of the really miniscule sales figures for some DVD releases, their decision to pull back from anime releases isn't very surprising, really.

[greg]

They will always hold a special place in my heart. They were one of the first few anime companies, and all of their releases are a labor of love. Back when ADV only had a few titles like Sol Bianca and Battle Angel and were inventing unnecessary profanities in their subtitles just to make them seem "edgy," AnimEigo had some great titles like Bubblegum Crisis, Miyu, Riding Bean, and Urusei Yatsura. They also released Otaku no Video, Kimagure Orange Road, a cleaned-up version of Macross, and Yawara. It's a shame that they did not obtain the second season of Yawara, though. But yeah, their exensive liner notes and such were excellent and it showed how much they really cared for their viewers. Not only that, but the opening and end credits remained unaltered (US Manga Corps/Central Park were also good about this), whereas ADV would go to great lengths to try to remove any trace of evidence that anime actually came from Japan by eliminating the credits and even covering up on-screen Japanese text and such (Evangelion, Sakura Wars, etc).

[raiderfan99]

They will always hold a special place in my heart. They were one of the first few anime companies, and all of their releases are a labor of love. Back when ADV only had a few titles like Sol Bianca and Battle Angel and were inventing unnecessary profanities in their subtitles just to make them seem "edgy," AnimEigo had some great titles like Bubblegum Crisis, Miyu, Riding Bean, and Urusei Yatsura. They also released Otaku no Video, Kimagure Orange Road, a cleaned-up version of Macross, and Yawara. It's a shame that they did not obtain the second season of Yawara, though. But yeah, their exensive liner notes and such were excellent and it showed how much they really cared for their viewers. Not only that, but the opening and end credits remained unaltered (US Manga Corps/Central Park were also good about this), whereas ADV would go to great lengths to try to remove any trace of evidence that anime actually came from Japan by eliminating the credits and even covering up on-screen Japanese text and such (Evangelion, Sakura Wars, etc).

I HATED when ADV would do that. I remember when ADV first released Evangelion on DVD, the first volume contained that horrid paste-over text.

ADV always kind of seemed sleezy to me. They're kind of like that cheese pizza left out overnight, you eat it, but know its just not right to. I remember the days when their flagship title was Devil Hunter Yohko, a borderline hentai title. Soft Cel picture titles often had those "black" cardbord sign things over them in suncoast/Saturday matinee, for obvious reasons. In later days, after gaining all that money and marketing power from Evangelion, they went on a crazy licensing spree. Obviously, the power went to their head, and the fish got too big for the pond that only had a limited amount of water.

Maybe thats why I respected AnimeEigo so much. All through the 90s and 2000s, they always appealed to that small niche' crowd, a few titles released with detail and in entirety. To me, the day they stop releasing anime will be the end of an era, perhaps the final chapter of the so called "anime bubble" market we are experiencing now.

How is Yawara anyways? I've been lightly interested in it being a former Judoka myself.

[greg]

ADV always kind of seemed sleezy to me. They're kind of like that cheese pizza left out overnight, you eat it, but know its just not right to.

That is a perfect analogy! Yes, I remember Devil Hunter Yohko. That was the title I was trying to remember. At first, ADV only focused on pseudo-sleazy titles like that, gearing towards "adult" tastes. They just seemed to crap all over the titles, removing title logos and replacing them with their own English version ones, replacing credits with English language credits, and of course that terrible paste-over text. I think they did a lot of that paste-over text for Nadeshiko too, on the computer monitors and such. AnimEigo never did that, and to the best of my knowledge, neither did CPM. I was sad when CPM died, but I did not care when ADV bit the dust. Plus I hated how every ADV DVD had that terrible advertisement for NewType magazine, beginning with, "What is ANIME?"

How is Yawara anyways? I've been lightly interested in it being a former Judoka myself.

I received the free volume 1 DVD they were giving out at the San Diego Comic Con '07 as well as other cons that year. I really liked it a lot. I bought the box set, but honestly I haven't watched a ton of shows since my daughter was born. She is 4 now, so we are slowly introducing her to more stuff and it is keeping her interest, so that's good.

[Daishikaze]

Animeigo is my company of choice, I'll buy anything I can from them. Sadly I missed alot of titles because I was and unemployed house husband for the better part of a decade (The Canton of Bern is not the easiest place for a high school educated American to find work, but thats behind me now). But I did acquired a good deal of their titles before they lost most of them (including ALL of Urusei Yatsura ) I'm also a fanatical Classic Chanbara movie fan so I have a good deal of their samurai titles, so if they stop with the anime they haven't lost me as a customer.

As for ADV, I hated their practices too, but they did put out a lot of titles I liked (hell, I liked Devil Hunter Yohko once they toned down the Ecchi stuff). But like their rivals, they also licensed a metric ton of lousy titles that were never going to sell well outside of the pervy crowd. They over-saturated the market with these titles and did the industry no good in the end. So yeah, they deserved to go under.

[llj]

Just to get some chin rubbing going, there was a post by a fan on the Discotek facebook page suggesting that Animeigo might be considering a Bubblegum Crisis BD release.

This is pretty much unrelated, but since the fanbase for this one crosses over with Discotek's fanbase, I asked Animeigo about Bubblegum Crisis on BD, and Woodhead e-mailed me the following response: "Of our current titles, it's probably the most likely thing to get Blu-Ray'd. But more than that I won't say. R"

Could be helpful in making people think twice about shelling out more than they should for any of the current BGC DVDs.

[greg]

Well, that would be cool. BGC was released on BluRay a few years back. I even have a neat little poster announcing its release.

[Animusubi]

AnimeEigo is one of my favorite distributors, and always will be. One of my favorite things about them was their translation notes in different color text subtitles. And I love probably a good 80% of what they put out. Their releases are high on my "to find on VHS" list.

[_D_]

Got a list? My bud's video store has lots of old VHS releases. Also DVD and 2,000 laser discs (though few of those are Japanese). He might have what you are looking for...