Answerman

Why Can't Western Publishers Make New HD Remasters of Anime?

Several times you've mentioned studios relying on Digital Betacam ("Digibeta") or HDCam masters as sources for video releases of shows, but what about the film masters from which the Digibeta was made in the first place? What happens to those, and are they generally available in case the Digibeta copy is missing or damaged?

Film materials for older anime are virtually never available to American publishers. If the Japanese rights holders don't have access to a new, spotless transfer for a show, the publishers are pretty much out of luck. There are a handful of cases where Americans have gotten access to film materials, but these cases are very rare and usually involve a lot of money. (Funimation with Dragon Ball Z, for example.)

The sad fact is that back in the 80s, nobody was really thinking too much about preserving higher quality versions of anime made for TV and home video. Sometimes the original film elements were properly archived, sometimes not. Sometimes the production company that made the show got bought out or went bankrupt, and so the film elements were scattered to the wind. In a few cases they were damaged.

It's impossible to tell what shows are genuinely lost forever in film form. American companies have often been told a specific classic show they're after has no good elements, or that the film has been lost, and then a brand new HD version magically shows up on Japanese store shelves a year later. I've heard gossip that "Show X had its masters lost in a fire," so many times, only to later be completely proven wrong, that I've stopped believing it. What, are Japan's anime film vaults just constantly burning to the ground? (Film vault fires are more of a thing where nitrate film was used, but nitrate film stopped being produced in the 1950s.)

Are the American publishers being lied to? Probably sometimes. "Those elements don't exist" is a nice and polite way of shutting down a proposal from a zealous and possibly annoying American, and licensors do it all the time. But sometimes licensors genuinely don't know what exists, or what might be lurking in the vault somewhere. These are big companies, and it's pretty common for things to fall through the cracks. Frankly, I don't blame them for not wanting to trust their precious and completely irreplaceable film elements to FedEx and international customs.

Then, you have the complications that arise when a particular show isn't clearly owned by just one company, but several -- often as part of a Production Committee. Often, in times like this, the licensor company is not the same company that owns the physical film elements (or even some HD remasters), and the better materials simply aren't available to them.

There are a number of shows that I'm sure film elements are completely lost for. You can tell because Japan keeps re-releasing ratty old analog masters of them, even on Blu-ray. But every once in a while, we get a surprise. And you always have to be ready to accept that your assumption of what was available was wrong.

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Anime News Network founder Justin Sevakis wrote Answerman between July 2013 and August 2019, and had over 20 years of experience in the anime business at the time. These days, he's the owner of the video production company MediaOCD, where he produces many anime Blu-rays. You can follow him on Twitter at @worldofcrap.