Anime News (245)
Fall is shaping up to be an amazing season for anime with many titles to keep an eye out on! Supercell fans are probably already aware of Guilty Crown, with original designs by redjuice and music by ryo both members of the musical group. Persona 4 based on Atlas hit PS2 game. Personally, I am very interested in seeing what all the fuss is over Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai, which is already having an insane amount of merchandising set to release in Japan. There also looks to be other awesome titles including a second season of Working!! (Wagnaria!!), the prequel to the hit Fate/Stay Night: Fate/Zero, Last Exile: Ginyoku no Fam, Mirai Nikki, and Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon.
This is still just a small sample, check out the chart inside. What are you looking forward to seeing?
(Edit: Corrected title, this is Fall 2011 not 2012...)
The hit school romance, Amagami SS will be getting a second season. The news was announced earlier this month on August 13 at the TBS Anime Festa 2011 held at the Bunko Civic Hall in Tokyo. The singer for the opening theme songs for first season, azusa will return to perform for the new season. No additional information has been released yet but we will update this post as more information arises.
Amagami was originally an all age dating simulation game for the Playstation 2 developed by Enterbrain which was later adapted into an anime, Amagami SS. The series was broken up into several different chapters with each following the same time frame with the exception of the main male protagonist falling in love with a different female classmate.
I am definitely hoping to seeing more of my favorite character, the eccentric Haruka Morishima (pictured) in season two! Announcement trailer included inside.
Source: Famitsu
U.S. Man Arrested in Canada for Possession and Importation of Manga
Stephen Bajza
The title may sound too ridiculous to be true, but it's not. According to the Comic Books Legal Defense Fund, the CBLDF, a U.S. citizen was flying from his home in the States to visit a friend in Canada and, while at the airport, security searched his laptop, iPad, and iPhone. Customs determined that the manga found on his laptop was child pornography, and he is now being charged with possession and importing these materials.
There's no mention of what type of manga the man, a computer programer in his mid-twenties, saved to his laptop. It's possible that Canadian officials determined ecchi, titlating but not erotic situations, or moe, situations involving cute girls, were actually erotic, or worse yet, they opened the wrong page in any number of Japanese titles containing benign child nudity. In the event that he was in fact holding on to lolicon or shotacon hentai, pornographic manga involving underage girls or boys respectively, support for him may wane drastically as was the case in 2007 with Christopher Handley who ended up serving a six month sentence in jail.
If the accused man had saved something not meant to be erotic, then the comic book, anime, and manga fan communities will need to act in unison to defend materials that may be perceived as illicit or perverted. However, if the manga in question are fully pornographic and involve small children, the issue becomes far more complicated. Many would say art is always art, and censoring any form of it is wrong and that there is no crime committed in simply looking at the materials. On the other hand, others would say that such materials are indicative of pedophilic tendencies or are in some way morally harmful to living children.
The debate is ongoing, and as anime and manga becomes more prevalent around the world and government actions against lewd or indecent materials and behavior seem to step up in intensity, what the future will bring is a matter of theory.
If you would like to support the unnamed U.S. citizen, you can donate here to the CBLDF to support his case, and you can read more from the original article and another that provides additional information.
Viz Media LLC has been a long time rock in the North American anime and manga industry. Titles like Naruto, Bleach, Death Note, and Dragonball have all helped keep the titan afloat despite major setbacks that seem to strike out each year. Viz Media is known for publishing kid and teen friendly titles, so it comes as somewhat of a surprise that they are currently seeking an editor specifically for the yaoi/BL genre. For those who don't know, yaoi is a term English speakers use to define male homosexual content that typically involves erotic situations of widely varying degrees of graphicness. The BL stands for Boys Love.
It seemed possible, given the squeaky clean track record Viz has in regards to mature content if we're not counting Black Lagoon and Biomega, that this posting may have referred to manga involving homosexual romance devoid of erotic content. However, it specifically states that, "Knowledge of yaoi/BL genre and market, and ability to work on adult-oriented materials A MUST." There is little room for interpretation, but again, due to the nature of the yaoi/bl genre, the graphic nature of such "adult-oriented materials" may be nothing more than suggestive dialogue and titilating imagery.
What this means for Viz Media's future publication choices is left to speculation. It's possible this is an attempt to corner areas of the manga market left previously untouched by Viz to make up for losses in teen and young adult entertainment. The anime and manga industries in North America have been suffering losses for the past few years, the reasons for which are as divergent as they are complex. You can check out the job posting here.
Summer is around the corner and that typically means reruns on TV, but not for anime! Fans of the all female mangaka group CLAMP will be please to learn that they have provided a new original story and character design for the Blood series (Blood: The Last Vampire, Blood+). It will be interesting to see CLAMP's take on the gory natural of the original movie. Appleseed makes a return in the form of a new animated series, while Nuraihyon no Mago and Baka to Test gets a second season. Other series to keep an eye out for is the child raising series Usagi Drop, R-15, and Kami-sama no Memo-chou.
The full chart can be viewed inside. (Update: Fixed image from expanding)
While the final full volumed novel of Full Metal Panic! written by Shoji Gatoh ended on August 2010, the 15th volume of the manga adaptation, Full Metal Panic! Sigma, released earlier this week announced a new novelization for the series.
The new story will take place roughly 10 years after the events of the original series and will be written by Naoto Oguro while Shoji Gatoh, will supervise. Kanetake Ebikawa, the mechanical designer for novels posted an image for the project on his twitter.
Source: Yaraon
Katanagatari & Arakawa Under the Bridge Licensed
Written by Theodore Mak
NIS America has announced that they will be releasing a Blu-Ray and DVD combo premium set complete with hardcover artbook of the popular anime series Arakawa Under the Bridge and Katanagatari in English. Arakawa Under the Bridge originally was a manga created by Hikaru Nakamura while Katanagatari was a novel written by Nisio Isin (NisiOisiN) who also wrote the popular novel, Bakemonogatari.
The combo premium sets will retail for $69.99 each with a release date of July 5th, coinciding with North America's largest convention, Anime Expo.
Last year, NIS America released Toradora! in July during the weekend of Anime Expo and brought 2 key voice actors from the series to the show, Yui Horie and Eri Kitamura. For the perceptive folks out there, feel free to speculate in the comments.
FUNimation Entertainment announced today that its previous owner, Navarre Corporation, has sold them to a group of investors for $24 million. The investor group includes Gen Fukunaga, FUNimation's chief executive officer. Navarre Corporation is a distributor of electronic goods and entertainment with a 25 year history. Although FUNimation Entertainment has been sold, Navarre will continue to act as the exclusive distributor. Much more after the jump.
Spring is here which means another season of exciting new series and continuing series. Food hunting series Toriko makes it's debut as an anime this season and is definitely worth keeping an eye on. Deadman Wonderland is a rather disturbing series of a young boy who was framed and ends up in a Battle Royale style prison for the murder of his entire class. As for continuations, borderline hentai Seikon no Qwaser, The World Only God Knows, and gender bender Maria Holic and Kampfer are all back with a second season.
For Macross Frontier fans with a Playstation 3, there will be a 'live' concert held in Sony's virtual online world, Playstation Home. 3D models of the characters Ranka and Sheryl will be performing on stage based from the movie.
Also as part of the celebration, Japanese Playstation account holders can also purchase Ranka and Sheryl's outfits for their avatars which started earlier last week on February 24. The concert will be held on March 26, 2011. Note, interested viewers must sign in with a Japanese Playstation account in order to watch the concert.
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Via Anime News Network, Funimation has recently sued 1,337 Bittorrent users for illegally stealing episode 481 of One Piece. Whether this is a reaction to the recent Fractale debacle is unclear, but the events seem too closely related for Funimation's legal action to be coincidental. The suit requires the defendants,
"shall destroy all copies of Plaintiff's [videos] that Defendant has downloaded onto any computer hard drive or server without Plaintiff's authorization and shall destroy all copies of those downloaded [videos] transferred onto any physical medium or device in each Defendant's possession, custody, or control."
Aniplex USA will be offering a limited quantity of The Garden of Sinners (Kara no Kyokai) Blu-ray collection on sale at Rightstuf. The set contains all 7 movies originally aired in theaters in Japan including a special bonus chapter included in an 8th disc. Apparently this is a direct import from the Japanese edition but will include English subtitles and a separate booklet in English with all the translations for the included artbook. Hardcore fans will be pleased to note they will be able to purchase the collection at a discounted $398.98 opposed to the 52,200 yen (roughly $638 USD as of this post) price tag in Japan.
The Garden of Sinners was originally a light novel written by Kinoko Nasu and illustrated by Takashi Takeuchi. Both men are probably best known for forming the visual novel game company Type-Moon which produced the popular Fate/stay night series.
Chances are, if you're hardcore into anime, you know where to browse for deals. However, since not all anime fans are as fanatical as the rest of us, it's worth mentioning how to obtain some decent quality shows on the cheap. I'm not talking about browsing through eBay for someone's old collection or finding that "good-enough" bootleg, but directly supporting licensors by hitting them up for sweet deals.
Earlier this month, the January issue of Newtype Magazine mentioned a new collaboration project between visual novel game maker Type-Moon and animation studio ufotable would be announced in the February issue. Apparently the game maker's own magazine, TYPE-MOON Ace has taken the early initiative and announced an anime adaptation of Fate/zero.
The story details the events that took place prior to the original plot of Fate/stay night during the 4th Holy Grail War. Fate/zero originally was a collaboration project between Type-Moon's illustrator Takashi Takeuchi and Nitroplus' Gen Urobuchi that started in 2006.
Source: Moetron