Retro Anime, Kickstarter, and Broken Promises – This Week in Anime

senpai September 6, 2024

0 2 11 minutes read

Retro Anime, Kickstarter, and Broken Promises - This Week in Anime

This week, Steve and Chris use the whole Dirty Pair Kickstarter/Crunchyroll acquisition fiasco to look into the relationship between crowdfunding and anime.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.

Gene Shaft is on Tubi, while Dirty Pair is on Crunchyroll.

Chris

Steve, it seems like every other week here I’m pitching another moneymaking scheme to buy ourselves back from Kadokawa. And this one is no different. Picture this: TWIA launches a crowdfunding plan for a new release of an old anime that fans are jonesing for. We wait a while then, while they’re not looking, pocket the money and head for the border! We score the cash we need and everybody conveniently forgets we ever promised them Gene Shaft: Evolved Edition.

Get Gene-shafted, suckers.

Steve

I’m not so sure, Chris, you know we can’t upset the Gene Shaft fans in our audience. I don’t think we can afford to lose all seven of those readers.

Well then, I’m out of ideas. If even a good-natured Kickstarter cut-and-run can’t make an honest buck these days, it looks like my only other option is going to be to finally sell my Dirty Pair DVDs since, relatedly, those probably aren’t going down in value anytime soon.

Now I know there’s been a lot of recent hub-bub about those fancy dubbed Dirty Pair Blu-rays that have been m.i.a. for a few years, but I actually have it on good authority that they’re already in transit and have been handed over to a team of experienced, dependable couriers. Don’t believe me? I have a picture of them right here.

Given the way Kei and Yuri’s missions often end, maybe it’s for the best that they never land on our planet, actually.

All opening kidding aside, this situation has taken a turn for the tensely serious. In case you hadn’t heard (or forgot about it somewhere along the way due to sheer length of time), a quick recap: Way back in late 2021, Dirty Pair license-holder Nozomi launched a Kickstarter campaign to dub the original TV series, release it, and all other Pair-aphernalia in a fancy new Blu-ray set!

The campaign was smashingly successful, garnering over $700,000 from backers (including yours truly), recruiting classic voice actors who’d dubbed the characters in OVA releases, and trucking along with steady updates.

Until they weren’t anymore. Three years and a Crunchyroll acquisition later, some…antsiness has started emerging in the past weeks.

This isn’t new antsiness by any means—backers were expressing skepticism as soon as Right Stuf (and, by extension, Nozomi) was bought out by Crunchyroll. The day of, the campaign posted an update to reassure backers.

Over two years later, though, the discs have yet to exit the proverbial oven (or however they author Blu-rays). The most recent wave of outcries seems to have been precipitated by this Justin Sevakis tweet from a week ago.

Now, in the interest of fairness, we at TWIA HQ can’t confirm what the current situation at Crunchyroll actually is. Maybe they are done, and they’ve just been dragging their heels getting the updates out. Maybe they’ve gone with a different workflow. Maybe they have given up. What is certain, though, is that people are mad. They’re beating CR in the QRTs. And they have a right to, imo.

Oh yeah, it’s been kind of wild to see every attempt at social media engagement from Crunchy the past few days be quoted on my feed with some kind of callout about what they did with our 700 grand. And really, the orange box’s radio silence in the face of all that just makes this more concerning to me. At least back when they shifted storefronts and people’s orders for the Dirty Pair sets didn’t transfer over, there were attempts to answer support tickets and questions.

Today, all we get is a legacy open order page on what’s left of Right Stuf. As Sevakis said, the last time we heard anything about this from anybody was back in May.

I’m not a backer myself, but regardless, the lack of communication and transparency is galling, and I’m not surprised it’s fomenting so much resentment. We also have to consider that the worst-case scenario, i.e. Crunchyroll abandoning the campaign, is A-OK by Kickstarter‘s policies. You can read a saccharinely corporate non-explanation on their help page if you’d like.

This is technically an accepted component of Kickstarters. They put “Risks and Challenges” in the main body of almost every campaign for a reason. But there are layers to these standards, I think, and having to abandon a project is more understandable for something like an underdeveloped indie comic studio that got in over its head, and not so much for the biggest name in anime licensing that just needed to get a project out the door after it already seemed to be on track.

Especially since Kickstarted anime releases had proven to work out plenty of times!

And, in that way, I think this Dirty Pair fiasco is a tidy microcosm of how both Kickstarter and people’s attitudes have changed since the advent of online crowdfunding. This is a space that I, personally, approached with a lot of optimism back in the day. I used to be excited about Kickstarter projects! Now, it’s been over four years since I last pledged to one. What happened?

It’s definitely wild to look back and find some direct contrasts to what Pair fans are going through right now. Back in 2016, Funimation (who wound up absorbed into the Crunchyhole themselves) used Kickstarter to fund their new dub of The Vision of Escaflowne. They had it done and out in less than a year!

If you’re asking how Kickstarter‘s trajectory started trending following that, well, the next year, Mighty no. 9 happened.

Going back even earlier than that, the first anime Kickstarter I ever contributed to (and it might also be the earliest anime Kickstarter I can think of, period) was Kick-Heart, a short film about wrestling and sadomasochism. It whips. It Irish whips.

Now, this was a project where crowdfunding made a lot of sense. Production companies weren’t (and aren’t) rushing to fund short films. Masaaki Yuasa wasn’t a “household” name yet in 2012, but he had a devoted following of weirdos (hi) who loved his style. There was a scrappiness to this. It had that indie spirit.

That was the raison d’être for Kickstarter back in the day: letting smaller creators source funds directly from a potential audience to bring something to life without needing to rely on major publishers.

That made it weird when several of said major publishers started using Kickstarter more like a glorified pre-order platform.

And it’s not like there weren’t legitimate reasons for that evolution. Turns out, making stuff costs a lot of money, and if you’re an independent creator without a lot of experience, it’s easy to underestimate your budget. Even if you can rope a lot of individuals to throw $20 at you, to actually finish a project, you might need an order of magnitude more dollars in your pocket. Lots of video game Kickstarters, for instance, only raised a fraction of their budget through crowdfunding. After that, they’d use the success of their campaign to appeal for the lion’s share of their funding from more traditional publishers. That’s not quite what I’d call dishonest, but it does kinda go against the spirit of the thing.

You see that encroachment upon the territory by the corporation continuing to this very day. Ablaze is a solid-sized manga publisher in the market these days. But apart from their other regular releases, they opted to take to Kickstarter to “campaign” to translate and release Masaaki Ninomiya’s Gannibal.

Did Ablaze really think that the grindhouse sensibilities of Gannibal would render it more niche than other manga they’d published? Or was this just a maneuver to position it that way? I’m not on the inside there, so I don’t know.

I do know the schedule on this one also slipped a bit before actually releasing too, though.

I mean, schedule slips and feature creep ended up being par for the course for most Kickstarters. After a couple of pledges, I figured out that those delivery estimates were often wildly optimistic. I have one campaign on my list about a decade overdue, but that’s the extreme case. I don’t mind delays if there’s transparency and eventual delivery. Little Witch Academia: The Enchanted Parade, for instance, ended up being several months late, but the folks at Trigger provided updates in the meantime, and the final product was wonderful and adorable.

And, as a special treat for the TWIA audience, here’s a perfect drawing of Sucy I got from Yoh Yoshinari at a con a couple of years later. She offers me a mushroom every time I open my Blu-ray case.

I’m insanely jealous of that. I missed out on those ones, myself. Man, who do I gotta throw money at now to make the old Little Witch Academia shorts properly watchable again?

I’m still waiting for a physical collection of the Netflix series. Being a Little Witch fan is suffering.

That is, as you said, part of the epic highs and lows, the triumphs and defeats of Kickstarting releases from anime creators. Sometimes you get a couple of amazing shorts from Trigger that spin off into an equally amazing series. Other times you throw a bunch of money at Kenichi Sonoda, and four years later you get…whatever Bean Bandit was.

That was definitely a pattern for a good while across all Kickstarted media. They’d get one industry titan (or “titan”) who hadn’t done anything noteworthy in years/decades attached to the project, use their name to garner support, and then ultimately deliver a decidedly mediocre product that reminded you why they hadn’t been working recently in the first place. The ur-example of this is definitely the aforementioned Mighty No. 9.

The full story of Mighty No. 9 is both too long for and a bit outside the wheelhouse of this column, but if you’re somehow unfamiliar with the grisly details of that one there are plenty of sources out there. Though more on the subject, it’s worth noting that one of the many sub-projects to Keiji Inafune‘s would-be comeback tour, the anime iteration of Red Ash, actually did get successfully funded and released where its game version failed.

Don’t know that you can actually watch it anywhere anymore, but still.

The grander point here is that Kickstarter, like all products of the 2010s tech evangelism that sought to disrupt the status quo, eventually became just another arm of that status quo. There are, certainly, still interesting and scrappy projects being put forward on it, but the site’s design encouraged bigger and safer projects that could bring in bigger and more reliable revenue for Kickstarter itself. That’s how you get policies that purportedly protect the little guy, while in actuality they now protect one of the biggest media conglomerates in the biz.

Also, like all great nexuses of disruption, Kickstarter became a magnet for scams too.

Oh come on, what could possibly have been suspect about a company asking for a cool $50,000 to license all the anime?

Sorry, for real, I’d somehow forgotten about this particular shitshow. Reminding myself of the details, it’s amazing to think that something this brazen could garner so many supporters and financers, and also that just three years ago I’d be siding with Crunchyroll on the subject of an anime Kickstarter fiasco.

How the turntables…

God, it was so funny. Like, full credit where it’s due, Kickstarter shut that shit down, and now the only thing you see when you go to the campaign is the copyright violation letter. That’s hilarious.

At the same time, though, yeah, it’s mind-boggling to think Anime Tube could have initiated their campaign in the first place. An unbelievable oversight. I imagine things are probably even worse now with generative AI spewing piles of slop everywhere. I wonder if Kickstarter even cares about moderating all that.

It’s frustrating because it can crowd out the kinds of creator-centric projects that Kickstarter was, ostensibly, designed to uplift. I’m out here watching my buddy’s Cowboy Bebop-inspired RPG project just barely managed a few hundred backers to make it over the finish line for an installment, while “Anime Tube” somehow racked up over a hundred grand before it got slapped?

And that’s to say nothing of how scams like Anime Tube or the current misgivings over Crunchyroll‘s management of the Dirty Pair release might affect faith and interest in Kickstarted releases from other, more mid-sized publishers down the line.

I mean, they have for me! Most campaigns I pledged to over the years worked out fine, but my overall perception of Kickstarter grew more skeptical as the site grew bigger and attracted more questionable producers. I didn’t have any reason not to trust the Dirty Pair campaign when it was active—I’d had nothing but good experiences with Nozomi—but I still had that nagging feeling in the back of my mind. When I saw it was already funded (and then some), I figured I’d just buy the Blu-rays when they were finished. I didn’t really care about being a “backer” anymore.

That’s a point. Even the licensors who have become regulars on Kickstarter, particularly longstanding institution AnimEigo, are reliable enough in the support their releases receive that you can expect you’ll be able to get an edition of their latest Blu-ray from their webshop later even if you don’t pledge. Hell, we’ve got a refreshed release of their Riding Bean Blu-ray on the horizon soon here—no Kickstarter required.

Back in the day, I certainly got some satisfaction from seeing my name immortalized on a site like this (ctrl+f “vestenet”).

But man, I don’t need any more postcards or digital wallpapers or special thanks or small licensed tchotchkes anymore. I’m fine with a silicon disc or two in a modest plastic case that can be shipped within a few business days of my credit card being charged. I’m boring now.

Being boring is fair! We have finite space on our shelves for trinkets, after all. In theory, Nozomi’s refreshed take on Dirty Pair would have benefitted you as well as the superfans like me who smashed that pledge button as soon as it went up. In theory, these new dubbed Dirty discs would be as persistently available from the publisher for as long as those old DVDs that regularly went on Right Stuf discount. And hey, it even got the TV series streaming on Crunchyroll, after so long.

Pre-acquisition, that might have seemed like a show of good faith.

At least that’s something! Still, though, maybe crowdfunding has inherently limited applications in the anime sphere. I’m going wayyy back again, but AnimeSols seemed to do everything right. They went after niche titles. They let you stream the anime from the campaigns. The discs were nice and reasonably priced, and you could buy them off Right Stuf after they were fully funded. AnimeSols was especially dear to my heart because they were the first to give Dear Brother a physical set in the US. And they still folded after just a few years.

That precedes the fickle field the physical anime market has become today. Crunchyroll‘s acquisition of Right Stuf/Nozomi didn’t just disrupt the Dirty Pair Kickstarter, it seems it may have scuttled several other home video plans the company had cooked, like their announcement of Macross Blu-rays.

Pour one out for Nick.

Macross just can’t catch a break on this side of the Pacific. One hopes, though, that this recent groundswell of public callouts will force CR to do the right thing, for the sake of PR if for nothing else. After all, if a crowd can come together to fund an anime, then that same crowd can certainly come together to bully a large orange monopoly. The best part is, it doesn’t cost anything to do the latter.

As we’ve seen this past week, that already seems to be happening. We can hardly @ Crunchyroll in a column as well as one can on social media, but I hope our smack-talking of them might encourage them to at least open up the communication channels in the name of accountability. Beyond that, I fully encourage the continued call-outs on the parts of the posters. Look, my name’s on that backer list too, I’ll participate in any hashtag or e-mail campaign y’all come up with.