Forum - View topic

Answerman - Why Does Anime Have "The Motion Picture" In The Title?

I remember going to the Twin Cinema ( 2 whole screens, wow! ) to see "Star Trek : The Motion Picture", which being a theatrical adaptation of a television series makes sense. That's the only time I can recall actually going to see a picture titled that way.

I'd always wondered why titles like that were used so much in Japanese releases.

Mark Gosdin

mgosdin wrote:

I remember going to the Twin Cinema ( 2 whole screens, wow! ) to see "Star Trek : The Motion Picture", which being a theatrical adaptation of a television series makes sense. That's the only time I can recall actually going to see a picture titled that way. I'd always wondered why titles like that were used so much in Japanese releases. Mark Gosdin

I think the original of the "gekijouban" postfix being so common in Japanese movies stems from their more stringent copyright laws.

Almost always a movie version of a franchise that has had a manga or anime on which it is based is funded by a separate production committee than the original anime/manga. (There is usually 50-60% overlap but it's often quite different).
If you look carefully in the credits you'll note that the production committees always have unique names for each show even if the companies involved are the same, that's because each work needs to be separate under Japanese copyright law if it's controlled by a different committee. That also means having unique names even within the same overall franchise.
So in other words even if it's a movie of a tv show, there is strong pressure under the copyright law to make sure the official names are distinct from each other. And it can't just be a "on paper" thing either, the official name has to be used in all cases of PR, etc...
Adding in the "gekijouban" is a simple way to do this and seems to be the standard in Japan. Sometimes there are other choices (for example, the Space Brothers movie added "#0" to the name instead), but that's why it's so prevalent in Japan.

Remember "Sakura Wars: The Movie"? That's one time "The Motion Picture" would've been better, since the original title, "Sakura Taisen: Katsudou Shashin," was using an outdated term to try and capture the flavor of the Taishou Period:

Katsudou shashin: (obs) moving picture (i.e. a movie; term esp. used during the silent movie period) (Source: Jim Breen's J-E Dictionary Server)

In Japan, the series is well-known enough that it sometimes doesn't need a title (like Pokemon: the Movie or Yu-Gi-Oh: the Movie were over here), or simply with an "episode title" after (like our "X-Files: Fight the Future").

In the 90's, anime movies were often licensed in the US before series, as test-pilots, and sometimes by different companies. (Like Software Sculptors might have the Slayers series, but ADV had to release the OVA/theatrical features as "Slayers: the Movie") The company that was releasing only the movie or the movie first might find it too confusing to use the episode-subtitle yet, but wanted to clearly bill that this wasn't the series collection.
Nowadays, we have companies that get the whole package, can release the series first, and save the movies for the fanbase later.

Do anime distributors still do that? I thought that was more a 1990s thing, like re-releases on Blu-Ray or DVD might still get the "The Motion Picture" subtitle, but I can't say I've seen it affixed to any recent anime films made during the past decade and a half so far as I can remember.