AnimeVision

UK satellite channel Pop Girl (Sky channel 626 / Freesat channel 604) will begin airing the English dub version of Pretty Cure on Monday 6th September. Daily showing will be at 7:00am, 5:30pm and 8:30pm (with the channel's +1 variant screening them one hour later, as you'd expect). My love for the Japanese original means I'll probably only watch out of a morbid sense of curiosity as to how bad the adaptation can be (memories of Tokyo Mew Mew's hackjob still pain me), but at least one channel is giving anime a decent outing...

Ah, Twitter, how you trump other news sources. For some subjects, anyway. Manga UK have confirmed, via their Twitter feed, that they'll be bringing Hetalia: Axis Powers to the UK, with the DVD release appearing "hopefully, just after Christmas". The show, which has become something of a fandom sensation over the past year or so, takes the various countries of the world, anthropomorphises them, and then has some (often politically-incorrect) fun at their expense. If you can't wait until the DVD release for a taster, the series is currently available (legally) via YouTube. So far at least they'll just be releasing season one - presumably subsequent seasons will depend on how that fares.

We've known for a while that Viz Media had the first season of Vampire Knight (which has been picked up for UK release by Manga Entertainment). Now there's confirmation, by way of an incidental post on their Facebook page, that they'll also be releasing the second season of the series, Vampire Knight: Guilty. I haven't seen any of the VK anime myself, but the first few volumes of the manga were certainly intriguing enough to make me interested - despite it being a rather angsty shojou series at heart. The series will make its first appearances on Viz's online streaming service, although since that's based on Hulu it won't be available to the UK. Hat-tip to @AnimeNewsdotbiz on Twitter for spotting the announcement.

This little snippet first broke on ANNCast, Anime News Network's weekly podcast, a few weeks ago but has now been picked up by the 'mainstream media': the streaming service that we seem to love to hate (or maybe that's 'hate to love') is now breaking even, at a time when most of the rest of the western anime industry would have us believe that the sky is falling. Wired UK takes a look at the development - and some of the reasons behind it - whilst wryly noting that Shinji and co have managed something that certain larger, higher-profile video services (::cough::YouTube::cough::) are still trying o do.

I'll admit that I've always viewed Crunchyroll with a certain amount of disdain - I'm still not comfortable with the way they built their audience on mass piracy before completing their miraculous turnaround into a legit business. That said, they're the best example of an anime streaming service out there, with their simulcasts leading the charge, and for that they've been getting my subscription money for quite a while now. If the money is now rolling in instead of out, it looks like they'll be with us for a while, too.

The Blu-ray release of Makoto Shinkai's latest work, 5cm per Second, which was tentatively scheduled to be released along with the DVD edition next March, has been shelved by Manga UK. The decision appears to flow from Japanese concerns over reverse-importation - as Western releases carry a Japanese soundtrack and are significantly cheaper than their Japanese equivalents, there's a fear on the part of the licensors that the discs could be imported back into Japan, affecting sales there. How justified those fear are remain to be seen. Manga have said that a Blu-ray release will happen "eventually", but that may be as far as a few years away.

With 5cm per Second being the first of Shinkai's movies that was created specifically with HD in mind, preventing a Blu-ray release seems rather harsh of the Japanese licensors. Not that there's much we can do about it.