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HENNEKO Author: Anime's Foreign Product Placement to Be Removed
posted on by Egan Loo
HENNEKO (Hentai Ōji to Warawanai Neko.) light novel author Sou Sagara commented on his Twitter feed on Thursday about the recent use of product placement in the anime adaptation of his novel series. These comments arose less than a week after the airing of the third episode of the anime last Saturday, which featured a product placement poster of Korean band INFINITE's “Be Mine” single that was released on April 18.
Sagara wrote on his Twitter:
I was told that the anime world is low on staff wherever you go, so it's quite normal for productions to insert product placement into their works. However, I really wish people wouldn't put something like a foreign band no one's ever heard of or seen, and something that wasn't even in the original novel, storyboards, or photo materials to boot.It looks like it's going to be removed from the Blu-ray and DVD releases, but because of that, the staff who already have no time at all to even sleep will have their workload increased, and honestly, it makes me think, “Why?”
Well, on the other hand, it looks like this has made the anime very talked about, so I'm not going to touch upon this anymore!”
Sagara's original light novels center around a second-year high school boy named Yōto Yokodera (played by Yūki Kaji). Yōto is always thinking about his "carnal desires," but no one acknowledges him as a pervert. He learns about a cat statue that supposedly grants wishes. The boy goes to pray that he will be able to express his lustful thoughts whenever and wherever he wants. At the statue, Yōto encounters Tsukiko Tsutsukakushi (Yui Ogura), a girl from his high school with her own wish — that she would not display her "real intentions" so readily.
The anime began airing in Japan last month, and Sentai Filmworks has licensed the anime for release in North America. Digital Manga published the first volume of Okomeken's manga adaptation in North America last November.
[Via 0takomu]
