The Dish on Fansubs
Anxious times in the cartoon underground | CNET News.com
Hat tip to Reason’s Edge for emailing me the link to this article.
Certainly this article has some valid points, but I would like to address one. The amount of DVD sales.
Bill from Reason’s Edge had this to say:
I’d dare counter that with the observation that the sheer volume of anime being distributed to the U.S. has exploded over the last few years, with studios even resorting to recycling old material. Couple that with the fact that the target “price” for a series is around $150-$200 ($20-$30 a disk, almost always 7 disks) and you get the buying public making decisions and deciding more carefully where they’re going to spend their money. In other words, to the consumer, “Wolf’s Rain” is worth $200, but “Battle Programmer” is not.
I have to agree with that. As much as I enjoyed watching the Fansub of “Twin Spica”, it’s not worth 20$ a disc to me for a seven volume series, in fact, most of what I have watched fansubbed so far falls into this category with the exception of “Bleach”.
To add insult to injury for anime hobbyists is the fact that there are some companies that license anime for the US market, and then promptly butcher it to make it more “America-fied”.
I think that these companies have failed to realize that anime is a niche market. Much like publishing an RPG, you have an audience that is established and is interested in the Japanese product. Let me say that again, the Japanese product. The person who is going to go out and buy anime on DVD is going to be between the ages of 20 and 35, have disposable income and by and large, does not watch these series in English. We’re not all that interested in the English dub unless you do a good job, “Fruits Basket” and “Saiyuki” come to mind. We also get really, really peeved if you edit footage from the show!
If you’re going to cut the show to shreds, we’ll go download the fansub and maintain a copy of that on our hard drives rather than buy a “watered down” product.
Google Naruto. Check all the message boards around the web where otaku around the country are scared that the show will be dumbed down, as was done with “One Piece”. It’s even more disconcerting now that Adult Swim has announced that they have no intentions to acquire the USA-TV license for Naruto. At least Adult Swim has some respect for the integrity of a product.
The moral of the story: The anime importation industry needs to learn to listen to the fans a little more and allow the fans to expand their customer base. One otaku is an infectious thing that will creep into the minds of others and spread the love for anime.
February 1, 2005 1:26 pm 
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By Dave Justus, February 2, 2005 @ 7:00 am
Hmmm..it is possible that the Anime ends up getting ‘Americanized’ because the hard core fans get free downloads before an American release and don’t buy Anime when it comes out through the legal channels.
I stand by the statement I have made to you before, if the price of something isn’t worth it to you, the correct option is to go without it, not to steal it.
By Random Gemini, February 3, 2005 @ 4:23 pm
Well, that’s actually untrue. I am referring to some specific titles that have been Americanized due to the target audience of the company that acquired the license (children aged 6-10). I’m referring to things such as “Yu-gi-oh!”, “Pokemon” and “One Piece”. Scarily enough, “Yu-gi-oh!” in its original form is actually a VERY cool show.
The rumor mill also has it that “Naruto” will join this list. Given that “Naruto” is a story about 12 year old kids running around trying to kill each other… I’m not entirely sure that this is appropriate for airing on television in the US at all, except perhaps on Adult Swim. But… 4kids or Funimation, whoever has the license, will try to air this thing on FoxBox and market it to children regardless.
You are also grandly overestimating the quality of fansubs. Most fansubs suck compared to the professional work done by ADV, Geneon and Bandai. Fansubbing groups go out of their way to release avi files that are impossible to view on a television, the translations are mediocre at best, and they are not dubbed. For the quality, the extras, the premiums, the translations and the addition of halfway decent dub-work, it is far superior to buy a series on DVD.
The reason these midline titles aren’t selling, in my opinion, has nothing to do with the fact that people are downloading anime. As stated in the article, the industry clearly feels that fansubbing prior to US licensing being acquired is actually helping the anime business, rather than hurting it. They consider it free advertising.
The midline titles aren’t selling because it still costs 25-30$ a disc regardless of the quality of the series and the length of a series is 7 discs (meaning that the average series costs about 200$). So if you’ve got enough cash to buy one series and your choices are “Dragonball GT” and “Cowboy Bebop” which one are you going to pick?
By Dave Justus, February 3, 2005 @ 7:58 pm
From the article:
“But even with this new interest, sales of DVDs–which amount to about 5.7 million copies a year, according to internal industry estimates–are holding steady or dropping. Companies worry that the easy prerelease availability of fansub versions means that the otaku class has already seen their products, and no longer need to buy anything but the must-haves.
The result has been growing anxiety in the industry, although little in the way of direct action. Anime distributors don’t have the financial resources for protracted copyright lawsuits, and for the most part, the fan communities are diligent about pulling down titles once they are licensed for distribution, leaving American companies diminished ground for legal action.”
I certainly don’t know if they have the cause and effect right, but I think it is a pretty decent arguement.
I don’t see how in one moment you can argue that the fansubs are a superior product to the watered down version and then in the next say they are poor quality and far less desirable than the for profit version.
I agree that the fan-sub community is sincerely trying to promote the medium and certainly arn’t trying to hurt distributers. Indeed, they should be commended for that. However, what they are doing is in fact illegal and in my opinion immoral.
It would seem to me that if the industry did in fact like these fan-subs and wanted to promote them, a special derivitive copywrite and distrubution agreement could be created for them. Ideally a system could be built where the people who downloaded could register and recieve notices (if they wanted) of when new material is availible for sale. If the anime industry was smart, they could use this as both a marketing scheme as well as market research to determine what would sell well.
By Random Gemini, February 7, 2005 @ 3:18 pm
As I no longer allow anonymous comments, I have received some commentary on this post via email and was asked to post it for Ibycus, who does not have a blogspot account.
Personally I liked the statement earlier in the article: “… But the event is also triggering broader discussions over the role of the Internet fan communities that have become such a critical factor in the success of some media companies and a thorn in the sides of others.”
Sounds like the internet communities are both Saints and Sinners.
> I certainly don’t know if they have the cause and effect right, but I think it is a pretty decent arguement.
Yep it is. Well thought out, nicely executed.
> I don’t see how in one moment you can argue that the fansubs are a superior product to the watered down version and then in the next say they are poor quality and far less desirable than the for profit version.
You go to buy yourself some hard alcohol to drink. You have your heart set on a specific mixed drink. Do you go to the grocery store and buy the generic bottle labelled “Rum”, the bottle of Bacard Superior, or do you spring for a bottle of Bacardi 151.
This is an over simplified example of course but the fan-subs are equivalent to the bottle of Bacardi Superior. For some anime titles the Americanized versions are no better the the generic bottle of “Rum”
because scenes have been deleted, or editted so you don’t get as full bodied an experience as you do with the fan-subbed copy which shows the full, uncensored original with fan generated subtitles.
Other titles, the plot, the animation, and the dubbed dialog are equivalent to the Bacardi 151. All because they were translated properly, the graphics are astounding, the soundtrack and sound effects are clear crisp, and exceptional..
Another example, Movies:
Recently there was a movie called “The Ring”, an americanized version of “Ringu”. Imagine that a year before the Americanized version was released in theatres a fan-dubbed version was put out by Mike Nelson, of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 fame, with no real effort put towards understanding what was actually being said but what he thought they were
saying. I’d watch it just out of curiosity, probably laugh until my sides hurt,and then go watch The Ring in the theaters to see what they really said.
> It would seem to me that if the industry did in fact like these fan-subs and wanted to promote them, a special derivitive copywrite and distrubution agreement could be created for them. Ideally a system could be built where the people who downloaded could register and recieve notices (if they wanted) of when new material is availible for sale. If the anime industry was smart, they could use this as both a marketing scheme as well as market research to determine what would sell well.
Would actually love to see this but it’s unlikely to happen.
By Dave Justus, February 8, 2005 @ 1:15 pm
I am not an anime fan, although there is the occassional anime I enjoy very much. I have never watched a fan-sub and don’t have any plans to. As to the quality of fan subs and whether they deliver what the audience wants or whether the commercial releases do a better job I must remain agnostic.
However, there is a contradicition in the posts and comments by Random Gemini about this and it seemed to me that fan-subs were superior when that fact would help her points and inferior when that would help her points. The Rum analogy does not clear this up very much for me.
I would certainly accept the basic idea that some fan-subs are superior to the commercial product and some are inferior because of changes that have been made.
While I am not an anime fan, I am very interested in the way copywright and media will have to adapt to the modern technologies. Certainly I am open to arguments that the media companies have on the whole not adapted well to the new realities and have hurt their own cause. Nonetheless, I think any argument that takes this fact and uses it for justification for stealing rights that are someone elses property is mistaken and that attitude has a real danger of doing more harm to the availibility of media in a variety of forms than just about anything else.
By Random Gemini, February 8, 2005 @ 5:49 pm
Then I did not make myself clear.
The quality of audio and video in fansubs is not to the level of a professionally produced DVD. However, when chunks of the story are removed by the company who has licensed a particular title (this is only the case in rare circumstances and is usually the responsibility of 4Kids Entertainment) for the US market, I would rather watch the fansub than receive a dumbed down version for my 25-30$ a disc.
This is actually why I have stopped watching anime on TechTV. I discovered that they cut 10 minutes per episode out of “Last Exile” to fill it with commercials, and the story in “Last Exile” is so complex and intertwined that they really did the show a disservice with the things they chose to cut. There are whole scenes missing that are critical to a person’s understanding of the story. (For a point of reference, consider “Last Exile” the “Dune” of anime.)
Rather than downloading a fansub (though this certainly was an option for me if I decided to debase myself by going to one of the markedly illegal filesharing sites), or watching it on TechTV, I bought it on DVD instead.
I will buy a title if it is available on DVD and I have some assurance that I will receive the complete story when I purchase the title. Most anime fans are painfully aware of the fact that animators in Japan make minimum wage and scarcely more than that. While my buying anime here does not send directly send money to Japan, it supports the medium and allows Japanese companies to continue to make lucrative contracts with ADV and Geneon for the USA DVD market.