Forum - View topicTales Of The Industry - They Shoot Their Hostages, Don't They?
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mbanu
Posts: 159 |
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I agree that it was an office culture translation error. In the States, playing blame judo can advance one's career in the short-term, but squash it long term, as it gives one the reputation of being untrustworthy. So it can be hard to put on a different set of cultural lenses. |
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PockyCrusader
Posts: 18 |
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What an aggravating experience! I wonder if this kind of thing would happen now, though. After the anime bubble burst, I'm sure a lot of companies, both in Japan and in the West, were a lot more hesitant to make licensing and distributing more complicated than it needed to be.
I do enjoy these stories. I think that the insight gives fans a better understanding of how unique and complicated the industry is. It might make them more patient in the future once they see what kinds of hoops their local area companies have to jump through to bring them the products that they want. |
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Ushio
Posts: 635 |
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So is this what animenewsnetwork has become? resorting to posting fanfiction?
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Takkun4343
Posts: 1546 Location: Englewood, Ohio |
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Well that was certainly an exciting story. Shame I can't ask anyone what series it was, because of privacy and all that. Still, makes for an interesting (if not aggravating) search to figure out what show it is.
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thenix
Posts: 265 |
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On second thought that's very true. I was thinking of more of these anime businesses at least at the time being smaller companies. Bigger companies do the same amount of finger pointing and political sacrificing. And at the same time these Japanese companies are large too so it might be about the same. |
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addiemon
Posts: 93 |
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Remember that the licensor is not necessarily the studio that actually makes the show and art, since licensing committees are typically a dozen or so companies (IIRC? Don't have time to run through all of Answerman), so it's not a given that they just have all of the official art and the pantones or whatever identifiers they use for colors readily available. Sure, it seems easy to just ask for it, but anyone who's worked in b2b can probably attest that those requests rarely get turned around as easily and quickly as one would hope. If said licensor only provided whatever they had on hand to the licensee, said licensee may not be aware of all art available, and as stated in the column, the images were not high-quality and reflected different color options. |
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HeeroTX
Posts: 2046 Location: Austin, TX |
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If you think there was an "acceptable" solution to the problem, I'd note that from everything we're given in the story, it's analogous to this: http://retailcomic.com/comics/march-11-2014/ |
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Greed1914
Posts: 4560 |
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And you're basing that accusation on what, exactly? It is well-known that issues crop up all the time that people can't/won't talk about in the anime industry, and in business in general, without a certain level of anonymity. It isn't so strange that sometimes problems get blown completely out of proportion, and "Brad" even mentioned that this situation was actually more of an anomaly than indicative of the usual business dealings his company had. |
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Touma
Posts: 2651 Location: Colorado, USA |
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I think that there was an error in the article. Judging from the disconnect between "dub" and "art" I am guessing that a line of text, possibly more, got lost when it was copied at some point.
Even if the story was fiction, how could you possibly know that it is not true?
Well, the article does say "In some slides, he looked eggshell, almost beige. In other shots, he was optic white. Sometimes he even seemed to have a blue tinge." Apparently the material that he had was contradictory, so he asked about it. |
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samuelp
Industry Insider
Posts: 2242 Location: San Antonio, USA |
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Usually, special goods that are pack-ins with the DVD sets and "not for sale" separately can get by without separate merchandising rights contracts. They're treated like anything else like an insert pamplet or postcards or other DVD-packins that are not separate goods from the DVDs themselves. So even if Kazuhiro and his company didn't control merchandising rights something like this is _probably_ okay for them to approve, as long as they asked approval to the rest of the committee first, since they weren't being sold separately from the DVDs. |
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Agent355
Posts: 5113 Location: Crackberry in hand, thumbs at the ready... |
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The problem with just switching the blame around is that it wouldn't have appeased the people who most objected to the miscolored mascot toy-presumably, the original licenses holders and content creators. In Japan, as far as I can tell, content creators such as manga-ka have the absolute say in how their creations are portrayed both at home and abroad. Supposedly, that's why it took so long to get Sailor Moon relicensed in the US (Naoki Takeuchi had the approve of all the details) and why we can't get the Rose of Versailles manga legally released in English. It may be why the third Evangelion movie is taking too long to come out.
So if the original manga-ka was supremely unhappy with a "counterfeit" mascot being distributed with his/her show, no amount of blame judo could make it better. Recalling the thing directly from consumers *might* have worked, but at what cost (financially for "Genon")? Anyone else reminded of the episode of Shirobako in which spoiler[the manga-ka of the anime they're working on decided the character designs weren't "cute" enough, and threw the whole production in flux?] |
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rizuchan
Posts: 979 Location: Kansas |
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Remember that "Brad" said they had to recreate most of the artwork because they were given low quality originals. If the show is what I'm thinking it is (apologies if we're talking about completely different shows) a lot of the promo pictures they used did have "Mu-sama" a more eggshell color, while others were more snow white. Actually, if you were to ask me what color "Mu-sama" was before I read this article, I probably would have said eggshell white too. It's also very possible that "Brad" had ordered these keychains well before the final artwork was finished which could cause a discrepancy. |
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Redbeard 101
Oscar the Grouch
Forums Superstar Posts: 16961 |
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This is not fan fiction actually. It's a new column created to post about REAL (not fan fiction or made up) stories in the Anime Industry that are either funny, weird, amazing, etc. Names are changed to protect anonymity of the people involved, but the stories are all 100% real. Not fake. It's not supposed to be a serious news or review column but rather an inside look into the anime industry via stories of experiences people inside it have had. Not all of the stories are directly related to or involve ANN staff. |
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HeeroTX
Posts: 2046 Location: Austin, TX |
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That IS the point. Let's be realistic, there was ZERO possibility of the company (even "at great cost") recalling every single piece of product sold. There would just be no way to find all the buyers and a "voluntary" recall wouldn't get everyone whether due to "hoarders" or "people who don't get the message" or any other reason. So at that point, the American company has 2 options: 1. Lay the blame on the Japanese person who is at "fault". This keeps the angry person angry at the "correct" person but doesn't solve the problem and makes the business contact (correctly or incorrectly) resentful of the American company, hurting future relations. 2. Give the business contact an "out". This allows the business contact to talk to the angry person about "other" people while maintaining the American company's relationship with the business. This is ESPECIALLY true if it was a manga-ka. Outside of Rumiko Takahashi (or a situation like Dragonball where it's a cash cow that is ALSO really long, in which case you DEFINITELY bend over backwards to not lose that license/hurt the relationship) having a single manga-ka mad at the American company is COMPLETELY irrelevant. At WORST, American company loses rights to "RINNA-CHAN" but how many other titles does a single manga-ka affect? The POINT is that from an American perspective, the number of people who can have anything besides "impotent rage" about the issue is VERY small. I'm saying if the American company NEEDS to keep working with a middle man and never sees/interacts with whoever is ACTUALLY mad, then which one is it better to not anger? If we assume it is impossible to keep both happy, especially if we note that option 1 probably leaves BOTH unhappy, what's the better course of action? |
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Kougeru
Posts: 5556 |
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So far these articles are timing very well with episodes of Shirobako in that the fanficiton accusations are not entirely off-base.
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