Back in February, it was announced that AnimEigo would be bought by MediaOCD, run by Justin Sevakis. Nearly a year later, I caught up with him to see how he’s been doing.
AnimEigo is a very special component of anime history outside of Japan. As one of the first official distributors, he laid the foundation for much of the infrastructure we all take for granted today.
So taking over a company like AnimEigo is by no means trivial, and I’m curious to ask Justin what the overall transaction went like.
“I made a documentary work about the birth of the anime industry in the English-speaking world and arranged an interview with Robert Woodhead in Washington, in Otakon. We finished the interview and he told me that he was in a position to retire and asked me if I would be interested in taking over the company. I was absolutely honored. Together with Natsumi, who ran much of AnimEigo’s day-to-day operations, we brainstormed what it would look like and about 7 months later we signed the agreement.
“Honestly, it’s taken over a lot of my day-to-day. There’s a staggering amount to be done. Luckily I have an incredible staff who have been able to take up the slack, but we were already working very hard before all of this, so it’s been an adjustment. We don’t want to cut any corners.
“We also continue to do a lot for Discotek, so there will be a lot of overlap, but each boutique publisher will be, to some extent, a reflection of the tastes of its owners. Since we also do all production in-house, we may take greater risks with titles than Discotek. We’re also going to focus more on marketing individual titles, partly because the big “mainstream” anime are already largely eliminated and out of our diversity of values for now, but also because locating buried treasures is part of our goal. our DNA. We will also use our resources to make payments and produce more bonds, whenever possible.
Justin also to create AnimEigo. As he explains, he already has projects for the coming years.
“It’s a long story, but since the DVD crash in 2007, AnimEigo has generally been one-off projects funded through Kickget Starter every year or two. At that point of production, it simply wasn’t a sustainable business in itself. I spent a maximum of 2024 trying to get us a launch a month, get back on people’s radars, change brands and modernize ourselves. By 2025, we’ll see if all this work will pay off, we’ll start creating more titles that haven’t been released before, we’ll do more on social media, and we’ll see if we can get enthusiasts excited about awesomeness. anime that they may have never heard of before.
“Looking back, it’s such a different world from 1988 I’m not sure how you even compare them. When AnimEigo started, there were no uncut, subtitled, or even faithfully dubbed anime available, period. Even VHS fansubs weren’t really a thing yet. This kept the fan community very small, and it was very hard to get Americans to take Japanese popular artistic styles seriously. Japanese video games would have different artwork for American release because people were scared we wouldn’t like the art style. Now you can find anime related stuff at half of the stores in the mall. It feels like I’ve entered Bizarro World sometimes.”
That Bizarro World also feeds into the current challenges facing the anime industry outside of Japan, and Justin had some very valid points on some of the bland Western IP adaptations we’ve been subjected to.
“The biggest problem is that, for new stuff, there’s just too much. There are 60+ shows released every season, most of them don’t find an audience, and the vast majority are forgotten a few months after they finish airing. It’s a huge waste of effort and just not sustainable. Individual titles can’t be marketed, and it’s very hard to create new “classics.” Then you have the issue where most of the business is run by Crunchyroll/Sony Pictures, which don’t get me wrong, they do a great job at what they do, but often times they’re spread too thin, and many great shows sort of slip through the cracks.
“On the other hand, laughing at cartoons outdoors has been a real double-edged sword. Sometimes it leads to amazing things, but more often we’ve had a lot of half-hearted adaptations of Western intellectual assets that no one really wants. I think there’s a certain respect that Western movie studios and streamers have given animation studios for allowing artists to do what they do, but I’m equally concerned about the greengentleing process and how they decide which new challenges to invest in. in. These decisions lead to the creation of many “safe” titles that end up being quite bland. Even the decisions about which manga and soft novels to adapt, what new concepts to try, and who to hire, those decisions can be artistic too, and I think a lot of the laughter and wonder in any foreign country’s artistic output comes from those decisions. . . decisions about what stories will be told. I’m pleased with anime’s popularity in the entertainment industry as a whole, but I still worry that seeking success with a broader audience will lead to lowest common denominator storytelling. Surely this is what happened to the American film industry and many others whose anime has followed a similar path over the past five years.
‘Otaku no Video’ is a fan favorite and is a fun chronicle of the formation of GAINAX.
“When cartoons were only for the domestic market, there was a sense that no one else was seeing what they were doing. Many creators found this frustrating, but in hindsight, I think it would have possibly been creatively liberating. TV series have been about promoting sponsored products, especially toys, but content for the direct-to-home video market can also break even by promoting a few thousand copies in retail rental outlets across Japan. For a couple of years there, they produced some really crazy stuff, and that’s a big component of what broke into the U. S. markets. The U. S. and the U. K. in the 1990s.
“Nowadays you see a lot of Western fans trying to dig into the past, and falling in love with the rougher, hand-drawn feel of the pre-digital era. So shows like Bubblegum Crisis and Vampire Princess Miyu are finding a new life with fans that weren’t even alive when they came out. But there are great and interesting works from all over anime history that need preserving and being made available again, and that’s what we’re about.”
“My favorite works are usually airy and introspective works. Movies like Isao Takahata’s Only Yesterday, Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell, and Patlabor 2: The Movie, and harder-to-understand things like GoShogun: The Time Stdiversityr. But I like anything that evokes a strong emotion, it can range from sports anime to exhibitions of magical women. I’ve noticed that a lot of those exhibits are about kids going through hard times.
Finally, I tried to find out what Justin thought about the appeal of old anime and why young audiences are so interested in consuming it so much.
“Broadly speaking, there is a generational nostalgia for an era before smartphones and the Internet. We know that the lifestyle we have followed around those things has been harmful to our intellectual aptitude and that nothing is so special or strange anymore. The Japan beyond was a little more mysterious to Westerners, it was just more culturally removed from us, and I think other people are also nostalgic for that feeling of mystery about something so special. Anime, in particular, has been about escapism, and combining anime with a pre-smartphone afterlife feels like a hot bath of nostalgia. On top of that, there’s so much to explore, thousands and thousands of titles from 40 years of anime production, that it’s highly unlikely you won’t find anything that catches your eye in it all.
“As for what this means for the future, I can’t say. But I find it very encouraging that the younger generations don’t hesitate to appreciate the media of their parents’ generation. In fact, I didn’t think that was true when it was developing.
If you’re curious about AnimEigo’s recent output, then feel free to check out my Blu-ray reviews for Riding Bean, Otaku no Video and Megazone 23.
Follow me on X, Facebook and YouTube. I also manage Mecha Damashii and am currently featured in the Giant Robots exhibition currently touring Japan.
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