Forum - View topicInterview: Aniplex of America President Henry Goto
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Kougeru
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The "problem" is that you're not unbiased. You're most likely either a healthy human being, or you have extremely good health care, no children, ect. The average American has only a few thousand in savings. A large % of the rest have no extra money due to mostly health care costs, and other issues in our broken system. I know that's "not their problem". But they wouldn't charge this much if the few people that can afford it would stop supporting the horrible tactic. As mentioned before, the money isn't even really going to the creators for the most part. There's no reason the prices should be even half as high as they are. This is why I don't care when I see them whine about pirates. I can't feel sorry for them when they don't make their stuff affordable to the AVERAGE American. You're doing better than most people if you can afford to spend over 80 dollars on 13 episodes of anything. |
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Kougeru
Posts: 5539 |
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I love how he completely avoided the actual question. Should run of office somewhere. As usual, AoA showing how little they care about actual fans. He's making great money while the animators that make the anime probably can't even afford their own works. I've said it before, but if Aniplex really cared about "entertainment" they would price things in a way that's profitable while still reaching as many as people as possible. Their current model is no where near that. Every other company can afford to sell for a quarter of their prices so there's no excuse...their works (on average) not any better than other company's. |
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Primus
 Posts: 2779 Location: Toronto |
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This was posted 12 days ago: http://www.animeherald.com/interview/meeting-aniplex-america-president-henry-goto/
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Jonny Mendes
 Posts: 997 Location: Europe |
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I don't mind anime becoming mainstream. The more people like anime, the better. But, like i said before, people should like anime because of what it is. There is no need to anime to change to become mainstream. Anime have so many different genres that is possible for different people relate to. Bakuman is a good example. Also something like Angel Beats is good to show how good anime is. This season you have shows like 91Days for a more mature audience. Or Sweetness & Lightning, a charming slice of life show. If you like musical you have Love Live! Sunshine!! And so on. There are something to everybody. We as fans can help, showing to other people that they can be wrong about what they think about anime. I had friends that after know that i watch anime said that anime is for kids. I show them SAO and Angel Beats. Now both of them are fans not only of anime but manga too. If you know what kind of things your friends like you can show anime that are related to that because there is so many different anime out there. |
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DuchessBianca
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Haha I wish, I may be generally healthy (I do have a variety of treatable and non life threatening medical conditions though) and too young to cast aside my future raising a child but I'm hardly anywhere close to the average American. I have decent health insurance but only because I make well below the poverty line. Once bills, rent etc... are all accounted for I'm lucky if I have around $250 in spare money throughout the entire month and that amount rarely ever factors in food or other household weekly expenses. My bank account sits at a pretty $5 most of the time but I'm not complaining there are plenty worse off then me as I have food, a roof over my head and more so yes I perfectly know what it means to have no money. Everything I do own anime wise is from months and months of saving and doing few odd things here and there to get some extra money, if it's something I want I'll do what I can until I can afford it, thats how life works. Regardless extremely niche anime blurays regardless from Funimation, Sentai or Aniplex are not vital for life, even cheap Funimation or Sentai prices are still luxury items and trying to compare not having health insurance or other VITAL necessities is just extremely silly, no one NEEDS to buy anime bluray's. It doesn't matter if a bluray set is $1 or $10,000 animes sets have been and always be LUXURY items. Just like no one needs to pay 100k for a car that will get you point A-B just as good as a 20-30k car, or buy a multi hundred dollar bottle of wine. Luxury items are luxury items for a reason and it's beyond silly to compare necessities to them. Do I like AoA's prices? No but that IS the current market situation. This thought process that if people stop buying AoA products somehow prices will lower is beyond silly. AoA's prices are what they are because they are a subsidiary of the Japanese branch and UNTIL Japan decides they are fine with cheap prices (never going to happen) then AoA's releases will always be priced at what they are. If no one buys AoA's releases all that will happen is the Japanese branch would close up shop and there goes a bunch of titles that will never get released in NA. AoJ isn't going to magically give them all to Funi to sell for cheap they'll just be not released in the west at all or streaming at most if your lucky. Long story short I have plenty of sympathy for people with no money as I AM one of those people most of the time but I'm not going to sit here like a child throwing a tantrum because other people are buying LUXURY items. There are plenty of things I'll never be able to afford but I'm not going to get mad at someone with a nice house, jewelry etc... because they can afford it and I can't, that would be extremely petty. I'm glad there are people much more well off then me the last thing I'm going to be is upset, being poor sucks so I woudn't wish it on anyone and I'm happy for successful people. Anime may be my favorite entertainment medium out there but there are many more IMPORTANT things in life then anime or expensive pieces of plastic. I'd take a guess many of AoA's titles are available for streaming in NA so there are much cheaper LEGAL alternatives for watching said titles,so if owning a bluray of an anime (again a luxury item and not one needed in life) that you (or anyone else I'm speaking in generalities) is so vital that you must attack or think ill of other people because they can afford it then that says a whole lot about your character and that's really not a good thing. |
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Redbeard 101
Oscar the Grouch
Forums Superstar  Posts: 16941 |
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This is one of the biggest disconnects I have complained about for years now. How many in this new generation of fans have such an entitlement mentality. As if it's their right to own everything they want and companies should bend over backwards for them. The idea of saving up to many is a foreign concept as is waiting more than 1 week for anything. I remember the days of saving up for dvd single releases and vhs releases. I am in much the same boat as you Duchess. I have little extar disposable income I can spend on luxuries I want. My gf and I live together and we barely get by. What we do is we work over time. We work extra to make more to afford the luxuries we want. We also wait for sales and pick and choose what we get. One month it might be anime. The next it might be manga or maybe American comics or a video game etc. We save up (already starting to right now) for RightStuf's annual X-mas sale and splurge then when we can get stuff for 50% off. The point is just because someone can AFFORD to buy some AoA titles does not mean they are well off or wealthy at all. Some might be. Plenty though simply take the time to save up and manage their money to be able to afford those luxuries non-essential items they want. People who Insult and demean those people for doing that to afford those titles are just simply being mean spirited and ignorant. |
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xchampion
 Posts: 370 Location: Idaho Falls, Idaho |
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Yeah, I know it's your opinion but Edge of Tomorrow is considered good at worst. I'll even give you several sources that prove it. 90% on Rotten Tomatoes with 287 critic reviews and a user rating of 4.2/5 on 144,000 users. 71% on metacritic from 43 critic reviews and 8.7/10 of 1501 user reviews. The last source I will give is 7.9/10 on imdb from 436,411 user reviews. Which comes out to an average of 8.2/10 from these 3 sources and 5 data points. It's probably the best US adaption from a Japanese property. |
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relyat08
 Posts: 4125 Location: Northern Virginia |
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Great comment DuchessBianca! Not just the part I quoted, either. I think you really hit the nail on the head with the whole thing. I am not well off by any means myself, and times have only gotten harder, but rather than get mad at AoA for their prices(or even more irrationally, at their customers!), I've just had to get more selective and save up more for each release I want. That's how life tends to work. I don't need any of these things, but I want them enough to save up some times. Last edited by relyat08 on Thu Sep 15, 2016 1:13 am; edited 1 time in total |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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If it means it can have a bigger budget and a lower price point, then I'll be all for it. Having been in a few niche hobbies, they are invariably hamstrung by the limited budget the creators have. (One such hobby fanbase I'm in is desperately trying to be mainstream, and collectively, fans and creators alike are willing to make whatever compromises are necessary to break back into the mainstream, knowing full well that the mainstream looks for different things than they do. Probably because they used to be mainstream but suffered a horrific industry crash in the 90's that nearly drove every manufacturer out of business.)
Another thing, regarding the second season, is that Sinon resonates far better with Americans than with the Japanese, and this all stems from how Americans view guns versus how the Japanese view guns. A defining part of her character is that she gets caught in a bank robbery at a young age and manages to get ahold of the bank robber's gun and shoot him. In Japan, this destroys a person's image, but in America, she'd be seen as a hero. Sword Art Online undeniably takes Sinon's side and considers her behavior justified, a stance an American is far more likely to accept than a Japanese.
Give it time. The only media Hollywood is currently able to adapt well is media that has been around for decades. Only now are they doing comic book movies well, and they tend to be based off of work from 30 or 40 years ago. I really liked Speed Racer though, but I know the Wachowski...sisters? changed it heavily.
Well, DC may have had a spotty track record at best, but Marvel's had way more hits than misses. As far as the stuff directly under the Marvel team goes, it's been just Ang Lee's Hulk and Iron Man 2, possibly The Avengers: Age of Ultron. But Marvel's had hit after hit, and for the most part, go over at least decently well with critics and at the box office. That's why they can now take risks with stuff like Guardians of the Galaxy, which would have never been greenlit if not for their prior success.
I think right now, the reason anime is niche in the United States is mainly because it has a hard time getting the attention of the mainstream and not because the enture industry is inherently niche. The days of DBZ and Sailor Moon are over. Anime is no longer the talk of the schoolyard or the office. You have shows like Firefly and Avatar: The Last Airbender, which are about as anime-like in their narrative structure that western companies have produced that have become hits, even if they might just achieve cult classic status. But the fact that these shows caught on suggests to me that the American mainstream is open to an anime-like story. They just have to be aware that anime isn't all trying to sell children's toys or made up of naughty tentacles molesting girls in sailor fuku. Then you have stuff that got close but not quite mainstream, like Attack on Titan, Death Note, and One-Punch Man. These are shows that, well, aren't offputting to someone who might have never seen anime before. Their characters and themes are easily relatable to lots of people around the world. But they spread mainly through word of mouth. That is, I think anime's biggest problem is exposure. Hollywood is mainstream because each major release gets literally hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing to make absolutely sure you know it exists and you know what it's about (or what the marketing people want you to think what it's about). The anime business can't afford to spend nearly that much. But I think that, theoretically, if you advertise something like My Hero Academia or JoJo's Bizarre Adventure to a saturation point the way Hollywood can do so, telling people to watch it on some streaming service or Toonami or whatever, lots of people WILL tune in. It's kind of like when Pokémon Diamond and Pearl came out. People around me thought that Nintendo had gone out of business or at least that they stopped making Pokémon games, solely because they had become too niche for it to be word on the street. They thought Nintendo suddenly popped back into existence and started making Pokémon games again. They didn't know Nintendo and Pokémon were never gone. They just tuned out because they stopped hearing about it and thus stopped thinking about it. |
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NearEasternerJ1
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@leafyseadragon Pokemon Diamond and Pearl sold 5.3 million copies in America alone. Though that's less than the 7.6 million that Generation II sold or the 9.85 million that Red and Blue sold, Pokemon's sales in the US are still massive. It isn't dead.
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Alabaster Spectrum
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100% completely agree. Anime industry in it's current state and especially companies that are run like Aniplex is from a pure callous business perspective are a bloody sham and I'd probably complain more about their Western prices if I gave a damn about any of their recent titles but IMO they're almost all trash carried in the communities by hype. I mean they're REALLY good at hyping (though fans do plenty of work on that front as well) which is all a lot of current fans are looking for though so at the end of the day that's all that matters to most. Never mind that so many of their titles crash and burn on a storytelling front and are overpriced as all hell inside and outside of the market. If you hold this sort of position on the status quo though you're apparently anti-anime, a hater and a horrible person as long as companies like Aniplex and the current generation of hype mongerers control the message and hold all the influence so their hype and leeching based strategies unfortunately work and will keep working as long as they stay on top of the hyping and out-advertise everyone else even if not as well as they used too. At this rate though it really does look like they plan on selling their products purely through a combination of hype, having big names attached to everything they try to run as an anime original and selling event tickets as part of the package that have carried some of their releases hard in Japan in recent years.
Like I keep insisting and will keep on insisting that's because their current business model is based around whaling and market hyping (convince the market your releases are better than the competition by constant advertising to that effect and always making sure to roll only the most popular brands and industry people on a project) and trying to stick to easy money type affairs. There big release this season was B-Project a title backed by T.M Revolution that is selling event tickets packaged in similar to Love Live and Macross Delta. Their "next big things" are un-coincidentally another Nisioisin title aimed at his niche but extremely loyal group of fans that buy everything he makes, Granblue Fantasy one of the most popular mobage titles in Japan and Touken Ranbu, again one of the most popular browser games out there especially with devoted and loyalist fujoshi crowds. Then after that it's more Fate/Stay Night (see Nisioisin situation only bigger international fanbase and arguably even more fanatically and blindly loyal buyers) and SAO....again, and they even tried to align with Key (Rewrite) and some popular LN writers (Qualidea Code) this season and again see Isin and Fate situations again. I'm also convinced the only reason they signed onto Thunderbolt Fantasy at all is because they hoped that the Gen Urobuchi name would mean easy instant high disc sales....it didn't and neither did their latest iteration of Generic Sawano Hype Soundtrack #4,000. Aniplex just latches itself onto whatever is popular and trendy like Persona 5 or FFXV or copies whatever is popular (Girls und Panzer->Haifuri, Attack on Titan->Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress, Code Geass->Valvrave, Gundam Unicorn->Aldnoah.Zero) or uses whoever is currently popular or delivered a hit for them in the past for originals (why so many of their shows feature some combination of Urobuchi, Yuki Kajiura, best selling LN writers and Hiroyuki Sawano that make people instantly and proudly proclaim things like "OMG Hype! I will support this product for this person alone") and cranks out something usually pretty soulless and messy but which is affiliated with those people or at least claimed to be (see Urobuchi and Aldnoah.Zero or Gunslinger Stratos where they literally had to change the advertising for the latter when he called bullshit on them claiming he wrote the story for the anime out of A-1 Pictures) while promising to host an event for their fans if you can kindly just buy the overpriced BD's in the hopes that fans of those franchise will shell out and lets not forget the aggressive marketing and "friendships" with sites like Yaraon and ANN for advertising purposes. Does this look like a company that cares much and is pushing boundaries and blazing a trail of progress for Japanese animation or a company chasing after easy money and trying to take shortcuts to get their by carefully managing affiliations and marketing messages. To me that's why this guy ducks questions about expanding anime's interests and influences abroad, when your business model is essentially based around whaling fanatic groups what purpose does trying to appeal to people that don't fit into that demographic serve and how does it prove cost effective in the long term? This might be a bold statement but as long as companies like Aniplex remain at the forefront of the animation industry it has no future beyond the purely commercial and self serving for big production companies, but people seem just fine with that as long as they get their seasonal doses of hype messaging and get to act like big shots on the internet about said hype. |
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dragonrider_cody
Posts: 2541 |
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Thank you both for this! There's no need to attack someone because they are willing to work and save money for a "non-necessity" product that they really want, regardless of what that product is. Honestly, attacking someone for spending money on an Aniplex release is about as ridiculous as the people that attack those that spend money on Apple or Samsung phones, when they can get phones from HTC or Lenovo/Motorola for less. Everyone has their own preferences on what they spend their money. Just because they are buying an Aniplex release doesn't mean they are rich, anymore than buying a Funi or Sentai release means you are poor. And while Aniplex may price their releases in the premium segment, they do go above and beyond any other R1 company when it comes to streaming availability. Almost their entire catalog is available, sometimes for free, between a multitude of websites. |
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Top Gun
 Posts: 4639 |
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^ Y'know the massive, glaring flaw that analogies like the above all seem to have is that, when it comes to anime, each individual series is its own unique product. It doesn't at all compare to smartphones, where while you have varying price points and individual features, they can all run the same apps (the majority even run the exact same OS), they all have the same features, and hell, most of them look pretty much exactly the same. Even when looking at the massive quality and performance gulf between a Ferrari and a Kia, both serve the same function and are made up of the same basic components. But a work of fiction like an anime series is very much its own entity. If I want to purchase Kill la Kill, I can't find another option somewhere else that is still Kill la Kill, that has the same plot points and dialogue and acting in a cheaper package. There is only one show that is Kill la Kill, and there is only one company selling it, so by the very nature of the situation I am held hostage by that company's whims.
And it's also not about entitlement, or not being willing to save up money, or any of those things. I mean, I have purchased a lot of anime. (Seriously, a LOT of anime.) Every month I set aside at least a little bit of my paycheck to grab something or other from whatever the RightStuf sale du jour happens to be. I like many shows out there, and I want to own them. So when I see other companies that offer multiple price points, from fancy limited editions down to budget full-series sets, and whose products frequently go on sale, and I see how far my money can get me there...and then I look at this one other singular company whose products are NEVER on sale, whose "cheapest" options are still twice again as expensive as any other companies...well tell me, what am I supposed to do then? Why would I blow my entire luxury discretionary budget on a single thing I like from that company, when for the same amount I could purchase several things I like from other companies? No one has ever answered that question satisfactorily. |
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Crisha
Moderator
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Well put, DuchessBianca. I am not be a fan of AoA's prices either, but neither do I equate them as monsters for a luxury product. It just means I have to be more discerning and selective in what I buy. My biggest issue with Aniplex is their reluctance to release catalogue titles or sub-license them out. That's one part of the Japanese business model I don't want carried over here.
When it comes to collector's editions of series I want though, I do tend to put AoA's and Ponycan's releases closer to the bottom. I'd rather buy anime from a US company that isn't just catering to the niche collectors. The Funis, Nozomis, Sentais, and NISAs (despite how dead NISA has been with anime releases lately) - they are the ones I want to see with more longevity. I think there's a place here for AoA and Ponycan to exist, but I don't want to see the others lost to the tide due to other Japanese companies coming over and giving their own try at what AoA was able to accomplish. The general consensus is that AoA puts out releases that are better quality (in terms of video and audio) than Funi's and Sentai's. And while I can see the differences in side-by-side screenshots people post up, I don't notice any of these issues while actually watching the shows. So, for me, the difference in quality isn't apparent enough to give AoA releases that edge. The anime itself would either need to be something I REALLY want or the extras in the collector's edition would need to be impressive enough to make up for the cost and have me put them higher up on my list. |
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Stuart Smith
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Anime is a high-end hobby. Home video releases, figures and other merchandise that costs in the hundreds of dollars. It might be elitist to say so, but it's not really for poor people. If someone cant afford BDs, just watch it on TV or download it, but the industry is for those with money, and their voices are the important ones when it comes to the direction of the industry since it rides on BD and merchandise sales.
-Stuart Smith |
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