For the Fans[ervice] – This Week in Anime

Chris and Lucas plumb the depths of fanservice and censorship and the lengths some shows will go to to avoid showing nipples.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.

Ranma 1/2 (2024) and Delicious in Dungeon are available on Netflix. Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World is available on Crunchyroll. Gushing Over Magical Girls, Immoral Guild, and Urusei Yatsura are available on HIDIVE. Uzumaki is available on Max. The original Ranma 1/2 is available on Hulu and Tubi. Interspecies Reviewers is in horny jail.

Lucas

Oh man, Chris! We’re talking fanservice AND censorship in this one!? I’m all for stickin’ it to (hopefully) hypothetical corporate overlords, but I worry that the SEO for this column will be too good! We’re gonna get people checking this out because they’re angry, horny, and maybe even because they want to learn about these divisive subjects! And the suits don’t care why people show up, so long as those sweet clicks come in.

Ah, Ranma 1/2, it inspired countless anime fans to begin exploring their gender and sexual identities back in the day, and it still inspires new questions in it’s remake!
Jerome Mazandarani did a fantastic job breaking down the multiple explanations for this change in the related Answerman column. Though, for my money, I think the answer is as simple as television broadcast standards becoming more stringent across the globe. This change has pros and cons, but, to echo @literalgrill.com on Bluesky, the characters in Ranma are mostly high school aged children and it might be a little weird that they were ever shown fully nude on TV.

Then again, I did complain about nipples and genitals not being present in the Uzumaki anime, so maybe I’m a hypocrite, lol.

For my money, it’s worth noting that Ranma 2024 has also excised the essential male nipple, so I consider it cowardly on all fronts.

Still, the point about broadcast standards is one I tend to return to when these discussions flare up. Ranma may be a streaming show here, but it is airing on TV channels over in Japan, which aren’t all as cavalier about casual nudity as they were up through the late 90’s or so. Though I don’t know that I’d say the ages of the characters are the biggest factor, given this is also the year that gave us uncut airings of Gushing Over Magical Girls and all its molested magical middle schoolers.

Ugh, I promised myself I’d watch Gushing Over Magical Girls, but it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to get to it until Thanksgiving break. There’s so much interesting anime this year that I’ll feel like I’m choking on them if I try to watch them all at once!

At this point in the convo, it’d probably be beneficial for us to distinguish the difference between the word “censorship” as its used colloquially, vs it’s actual definition. In the anime space, people will say something was censored if it’s less risqué, graphic, or otherwise “adult” than its source material. The 4KIDS dub of One Piece where Sanji’s cigarette is changed to a lollipop was the go to example of this when I was first getting into anime.

However, actual censorship has to come from a governing authority figure and is usually done to prevent ideas that people in power deem harmful from spreading. Technically, someone could argue that Ranma characters having Ken doll anatomy is censorship, but that imagery was changed because of the medium, not the context. If the good folks at MAPPA wanted to release this new anime in a medium other than Japanese TV, I’m sure they would have been free to give the characters as many nipples and ass cracks as they wanted to.

It does seem that there are levels at play here. Previous Netflix hit Delicious in Dungeon also aired on Japanese TV networks alongside its streaming, and that one at least got episodes with all the uncensored harpy hooters that bird-pervs could ask for!

At last, some real racy content for this column. Drink it in.

For real, though, the streaming distinction mostly seems to be the easiest one to decide what winds up “censored” or not. We all saw DEVILMAN crybaby. However, airing on TV, especially nowadays comes with requirements of imposing some standards that still get colloquially referred to as the “censored” versions, irrespective of any actual government interference.

People probably just default to calling these “censored” because “slapping some stickers over anything slightly salacious to meet broadcast standards and entice you to buy Blu-rays later” doesn’t roll off the tongue as well.

I also wonder if a part of these changes depend on the target demographic a production team settles on? DinD is a seinen series that’s geared towards a presumably older audience, while Ranma 1/2 is a seminal shonen series.

Though, I do see how less-than-creative efforts to cover up nudity come to be associated with censorship. Especially when, and I say this with all the affection and sex positivity in the world, most anime that get the sticker treatment are selling themselves entirely on sex appeal! Covering up the naughty bits to reach a wider audience could replace “cutting off your nose to spite your face” as an expression!

Yeah, it’s one of those recurring oddities that makes you wonder why they go through all the trouble to get them aired on TV in the first place. Though the answer is almost certainly, “Because you’re not getting any kind of funding as a purely direct-to-video release anymore.” Have you seen the minuscule budgets and episode counts for hentai these days? Another tragedy chalked up to the modern anime production pipeline, but a win for whoever out there is satisfied watching the stickered-up versions of Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World or Immoral Guild.

Hey, I’ve been around the block enough to know that people into censored adult content or bubble porn are, in fact, out there! However, it’s also important to remember that sometimes these stickers aren’t enough to skirt broadcast or platform policies.

Famously, Funimation canned Interspecies Reviewers after picking it up and releasing a couple of episodes on their streaming platform. Apparently the series was much raunchier than they expected, motivating the cancellation of the US release. Which is a shame, because mankind deserves to see what might be the best dirty-hot fairy design humanity has ever conceived!

That’s right! Iirc, this was also a rare instance of the anime actually being more explicit than the manga, which is probably how it managed to get so far along without different versions of standards and practices departments catching on. Interspecies Reviewers even had an English dub! Funi was banking on this being the ecchi-fantasy hit of the season, and then yeeted it away when they realized they had something a lot closer to hentai on their hands.

At least all that build-up didn’t get totally blue-balled, since Right Stuf snapped up Interspecies Reviewers and released it here on Blu-ray, completely uncensored, under their hentai-friendly Critical Mass label.

That whole sequence of events does make you wonder if something like that could ever be pulled off again though, as the Crunchyhole has since consumed both Funimation and Right Stuf.

While this increased infamy also meant that Interspecies Reviewers became a focal point of most pirate sites after this all went down, the anime industry isn’t amazing about documenting its history in the best of times, and there do seem to be fewer actors today capable of keeping IR from falling into an NSFW induced obscurity.

This is why, despite some of their other foibles, I’m happy to have HIDIVE around. Their handling of the aforementioned Gushing Over Magical Girls, wherein they specifically got the uncovered AT-X airing of the show and streamed that, was effectively the opposite of how Funimation treated Interspecies Reviewers.

It took them a while to get there, admittedly. Only a few years ago they were still showing the heavily-cut versions of stuff like Redo of Healer (which makes Gushing Over Magical Girls look even more cheeky and fun, by comparison). Given how much notoriety the fully-gushing version of Magical Girls seemed to get them, we’ll see if that leads to them sourcing the saucier versions of their salacious shows for subsequent seasons.

Now, these degrees of simulcasting do make me think of another point that’s come up with these covered-up crude cartoons. I’ve seen several commentators fall under the misaimed notion that it’s the streaming networks themselves, like Crunchyroll or Netflix, covering up series like Ranma, rather than the Japanese teams producing and broadcasting the anime.

Yeah, I hate to break it to those folks, but the days of Japanese media being “censored” as a part of the localization process are long gone. Sure, you sometimes hear about a character in a video game with a T for Teen rating having their costume tweaked or their age artificially bumped up, but I’m struggling to think of a recent anime that got that kind of treatment lately.

I agree with that sentiment, especially as cases like this recent Ranma situation should show that these days, depictions or no of naughty bits are entirely down to the decisions of the Japanese teams themselves. Hell, the old nipples-out version of Ranma is still accessible in all its glory on several streaming platforms. For free in some places, even!

You’re right that it’s important to remember how far past the days of airbrushed Tenchi Muyo! on Toonami we are.

Hey, those beams of light that inexplicably obscure nipples and crotches aren’t going anywhere, but I’m confident in saying that today their presence denotes a Japan-side desire to bump up Blu-ray sales or squeak it into a slightly more accessible TV timeslot.

While we’ve given western distributors of anime plenty of guff in this column (and I’m sure we will again!), they aren’t the people making anime slightly less horny in 2024. If you made it this far into the column, I’d encourage you to think about what benefit almost full nudity adds to a children’s show like Ranma, and if the remake removing nipples makes the show demonstrably worse. I also promise you that anyone using anime “censorship” as a part of fear mongering rhetoric isn’t worth listening to, and that they don’t actually have your best interests in mind.

Considering context is always important. I find it interesting that the 2022 reboot of Rumiko Takahashi‘s Urusei Yatsura also scrubbed out the nipples compared to its classic version, and there was way less of a to-do then compared to Ranma today.

Maybe Urusei Yatsura represented less of a formative awakening for still-online anime fans compared to Ranma? Maybe Ranma being on Netflix versus Urusei Yatsura on HIDIVE made it more visible? Who’s to say, but both reboots turning out pretty well-liked after all the nipple and diming does prove that maybe this isn’t as much of a priority as some make it out to be.

Oh god, I forgot I still have to finish the Urusei Yatsura remake! But yeah, as someone who pretty firmly believes that anime dubs should have fun with thier localization process and even add some new personality to a work, I don’t jive well with the idea of treating source material like a sacred text. Japan was a lot more casual about nudity in the 70s and 80s, and now cultural has shifted to thinking that there might be some issues with showing naked teenagers on TV. I don’t think there’s a morality to a change like that and, if anything, it makes these remakes more reflective of the modern enviorment they were produced in, which is what a good remake should do, imo.

Even through various reboots and reinterpretations, I guess it’s only natural that anime is, somehow, still spurring conversations about what’s appropriate to put in cartoons on western TV.

The more things change.