AnimeVision

One of these days I'll cease to be surprised at the subjects that get the anime treatment - but not today. Naisho no Tsubomi is a manga aimed at primary-school girls (P4/P5 level), and features lead character Tsubomi having to deal with issues such as her mother's pregnancy, her first period, and budding feelings for boys. It's billed as a "sex education" manga - and now it's getting the anime treatment, through a 3-volume OVA that will begin release in April. Perhaps it's just because I'm an old git at heart, but aiming such things so young generates an involuntary squick with me - although the devil would be in the detail of how sensitively it's all done.

A trailer and wallpaper image for the show are now available.

Following on from ADV's statement yesterday, there are more details sneaking out about what's going on behind the scenes - although as ADV aren't confirming anything, take it as you will. But the issue seems to be that Sojitz, the Japanese investment company who took a stake in ADV a while back in exchange for a cash injection, looks to have taken fright at the state of the R1 market and is trying to get out. Ordinarily, that wouldn't be a fatal problem - but the terms of the investment have seen a lot of ADV's current catalog licensed not to ADV themselves, but to a holding company owned by Sojitz and Klockworx, meaning that if Sojitz pulls out it takes the licenses to a large chunk of ADV's catalog with them. That would, of course, be disastrous for the company - and explains why so many titles were removed from the ADV website recently. They can't promote, stream or sell what they no longer have the rights to.

So now we're waiting on the behind-the-scenes negotiations to complete. If Sojitz are truly trying to get out, they'll be wanting to do so on the best possible terms. For ADV, the priority will be to regain control of as many of their catalog titles as possible - and securing the funding needed to do that. There won't be any news either way until that process is complete. In the meantime... don't panic!

Anime fans can be great fun to watch, especially at the moment. Ever since Geneon USA shut up shop, they've been especially twitchy - and so when ANN reported yesterday that a large number of titles had seemingly been purged from ADV's website, the jitters well and truly began. Was the biggest R1 distributor of anime about to go under?

On one level, I can understand that response - add this to the closure of Anime Network's linear services in the US & UK, the replacement of Newtype/USA with PiQ, the end of ADV's European operations, the closure of the ADVocates scheme... Put it all together, and it really doesn't look good. But hold on: if the company was in that much trouble, surely they'd just kill AN and Newtype/USA completely? Surely they wouldn't continue signing new carriage agreements for AN's video-on-demand service? Cue the scratching of heads. If you want to see the end result, pop over to AnimeOnDVD and read this rapidly-expanding thread. It's fun.

Perhaps I'm just a glass-half-full person, but from here I see a company that's seen the way the market is going and has decided it needs to cut its cloth to fit, to make sure it can ride out the hard times. That means trimming the fringe projects like AN and their overseas operations, and by the looks of it may have extended to handing back licenses for a number of shows - but if that's what the company needs to do to ride out the current stormy times, then that's what they've got to do. That's not to say that there's isn't the possibility the company will still fail - just that it's doing what it can to avoid the possibility, and that the end - if there is one - may still be a way off.

But one thing has annoyed me greatly about this: I've seen a number of comments around the place from people pointing out that the possibility of companies going bust and not completing releases is the reason why they're not buying, and sticking with fansubs. These people are creating a self-fulfilling prophesy: if you don't buy the product out of fear that someone might go bust, the companies will go bust. Get out there and damn well buy something, instead of whining about it - do your part to help the situation, instead of hindering it.

Rant over. In terms of what I buy from them, I probably wouldn't miss ADV myself - my fondness for them is more down to the people connected with them than the titles they've released - but they're such a mainstay of the English-language anime scene that we'd be in real trouble if they disappeared. The best way to make that happen is to retreat into some sort of "it's-all-their-fault", fansub-downloading haze. Fans hold the pursetrings of all the US releasing companies, in their own way - and only the fans can ensure whether they live or die.