The Merger of Funimation and Crunchyroll and Why Anime Is Still Not Respected

For the past few months, I’ve been receiving emails from Funimation regarding the transition of their anime titles to Crunchyroll.

Funimation and Crunchyroll have the same parent corporation - Sony. As such, it was inevitable that one streaming site would be folded into the other. Unfortunately, the transition process has been clumsy so far.

The Funimation emails stated rather grandly that I could go ahead and cancel my Funi subscription if I was already a Crunchyroll subscriber. However... what they didn’t say was that I wouldn't be able to stream Funimation’s entire catalog at Crunchyroll yet if I did so.

... Which is still the case, and it's now May 2022. It’s been months since the official announcement, but Funi’s titles are being switched over to Crunchyroll at a snail’s pace.

I began to look into this by going to Funimation’s website. Despite maintaining a Funimation subscription for years, I haven’t used it much. My term for it is my “emergency Funimation subscription,” as Crunchyroll doesn’t license one hundred percent of all anime series. They get maybe ninety-five percent (or at least - ninety-five percent of what I would be interested in), and the other five percent was always licensed by Funimation, so I always paid to keep a streaming subscription at both sites.

I looked at the FAQs. Here are two examples of FAQs from Funimation’s website:

Then there's this page:

Once again, they say that we can go ahead and cancel our Funi subscription if we also have a Crunchyroll subscription. But at the same time, they state that “many” (note: not all) of Funimation’s titles will be available at Crunchyroll “by the end of March 2022.” It’s now May, and titles are still in the process of being moved to Crunchyroll.

None of this was really giving me the info I needed, so I signed into Crunchyroll and found this page that lists the Funi titles that are now available at Crunchyroll as of May 17.

The link to this page is here, if you want to read it. This post elicited many comments. I am in total agreement with two of them:

"Some_weirdGuy" [Premium Member]
3/11/22
Gotta say this cause I'm seeing is a lot of "why are people complaining/guys chill out/everyone have patience" type comments -- Why are you doing that? stop that :X - They are a multi-billion dollar company, you are a paying customer, they can shine their boots just fine without your licking. They could have easily uploaded all this content on the back end behind a hidden flag, have everything ready, have all the information/answers written up and ready to go in advance, and *then* in one go make the annoucement and turn it on - thats absolutely possible, reasonable, and indeed what gets done elsewhere. They actively chose to have a messy/confusing, half-baked public rollout - So lets not make up excuses and verbally give them a free pass, they should do better, thats basic quality control/standards. :/ if people have complaints, let them complain, it's absolutely justified to expect better in these circumstances.

"Saryrn"
3/23/22
Can we speed this up a bit, a lot of us have canceled funimation a bit too early it seems as your original announcement made it sound like funimation was moments from shutting off the lights. However at the rate you seem to transfer the shows it sure seems like some people will want to keep funimation for at least one more month if not more at that rate. If it truly is this slow of a process can you at least be more up front about it and announce your intended move schedule, like these shows this week, these shows next week, ect so people can plan accordingly. If you really wanted to calm a lot of the stress people have down, can you just be upfront and let us know what shows will not be making the jump just incase we want to watch them one more time before funimation site truly does shut down. For instance just at the top of my head, I keep waiting to see if slayers is making the jump, I haven't seen it in years and was looking forward to rewatching it before this merge was announced.

Of course, neither of these comments received answers from Crunchyroll. I looked to see which of the Funi titles that I've watched or wanted to watch were now at Crunchyroll. As of May 17, the latest update, both seasons of Muhyo and Roji are now at Crunchyroll, but Sasaki and Miyano, which I’d been meaning to watch, is not at Crunchy yet, nor are Hetalia or Heaven Official’s Blessing. It does look like the entirety of The Prince of Tennis has been moved to Crunchyroll.

If you’re not familiar with the Prince of Tennis series, well... the main canon series took a long time to wrap up. I think the anime caught up with the manga too many times... there were delays... so the canon story had to be finished with OVAs. Then the new Prince of Tennis (Shin Prince of Tennis) manga series began in 2009. There are also several movies that are part of the canon, plus several post-main series seasons, etc. I’ve been in a Prince of Tennis mood lately, so I guess it’s ready at Crunchyroll now for me to pick up from wherever it was I left off at... which I’ll have to figure out. It’s been a while.

This fumbled rollout of Funi titles at Crunchyroll may seem like a minor thing to gripe about. Considering that Crunchyroll began as a pirate site before going legit, and that Funimation’s streaming platform was the buggiest in the business (they did gradually improve it over the years), I understand that this slow transition of titles doesn’t sound like a big deal in comparison.

But in a way, it is. Anime occupies a unique place in the U.S. entertainment industry. It is a significant piece of the entertainment business now in the U.S., not only in terms of revenues generated, but also as something that brings in and engages young fans - diverse fans - the fans of the future, the ones everyone is trying to cultivate. My point is that it’s not pirate sites operating on the fly anymore. Sony is a billion-dollar corporation, yet sometimes the industry still feels like people making VHS copies for their college anime club, with the same level of professionalism and dedication, in other words, not much.

I believe anime could compete on the level of Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, if presented in the right way to the American audience. I really do. So it frustrates me to see this kind of unprofessional treatment of paying customers, as if we should be grateful that we don't have to hunt down fansubs on You Tube anymore and that this is a good enough effort. We're not going to get out of the entertainment ghetto this way, so I hope Sony steps up and takes care of this issue soon.

Anime in the Covid Year of 2020 – Attack on Titan Returns, Muhyo and Roji, K: Seven Stories, Haikyuu, and Thoughts on Boruto

It’s been a year where anime seemed almost beside the point, and yet, by the end of it — for me at least — it felt relevant again in a new way.

Back in March, the production of Boruto went dark for a few months, as workers in Japan hunkered down in the pandemic as did those elsewhere.

When Boruto started up again with new episodes in summer, I recall feeling a little guilty almost. Like, there’s a pandemic on, and I missed anime, but not to the point where I wanted animation workers to go back into production offices and get sick drawing my entertainment.

There’s never been an experience like the pandemic of this year, and some of my reactions to things were all over the place. I’ve since settled down, remembering that people in Japan - like people here in the U.S. - actually wanted to return to work, so it’s okay.

The big news about Boruto is that Masashi Kishimoto is returning to write the manga. I’ve written here before about how Boruto has never lived up to Naruto, but the totally obvious reason for that never occurred to me before I heard this news.

One of the main reasons that made Naruto/Naruto Shippuuden so awesome was its storytelling, its amazing world-building. Konoha, the ninja village of Naruto and his friends, felt as real as anything with its large group of characters and all of their fascinating backstories. Not to mention the ninja universe itself, the five great shinobi nations and their histories.

When the Boruto manga began, I recall reading that Kishimoto was going to be less involved with it, but I didn’t really get that he wasn’t writing the story, and nor was he doing the art.

Well — no offense to the people who were, but — now I understand why Boruto’s storyline moved so slowly and had so much filler (or what felt like filler).

The fact that Kishimoto is taking over again would be cause for unmitigated celebration... save for a rumor I heard. The rumor is that the two most important characters in the Naruto/Boruto universe are getting killed off.

If this turns out to be true... let’s just say that I will genuinely freak out. Although it makes sense in story and mythic terms to have Naruto Uzumaki and Sasuke Uchiha, the two main figures in the backstory of Boruto’s universe, die so that Boruto and Sarada and others of the new generation can step up, for me personally that would leave too big of a hole in the whole universe. It would basically hollow out Boruto for me, because the series has for too long traded on our nostalgia for the old characters and their history without building its own standalone resonance with solid storytelling and character development. Without Naruto and Sasuke, Boruto would be like an aftereffect in the Naruto universe, one without a lot of meaning for me.

I can only hope that Kishimoto doesn’t do it.

On a lighter note, Muhyo and Roji’s Bureau of Supernatural Investigation had its second season on Funimation this time instead of Crunchyroll, so what I call my “emergency Funimation subscription” came in handy this summer. (I keep a paid subscription year-round to Funimation for those occasional anime series that Crunchyroll doesn’t license.)

Muhyo and Roji is one of those anime series that is enjoyable and not too cliffhangery when a season ends, meaning you can look forward to it coming back at some point without being anxious about it. It’s weird that Crunchyroll had its first season, but Funimation got its second season. Apparently, both companies will be under Sony’s umbrella soon, so I suppose it doesn’t make much difference either way in the ultimate sense.

In this covid year of 2020, a lot of us ate comfort foods while stuck at home. The same principle was followed for entertainment. People watched their favorite movies and TV shows for the enjoyment of the familiar.

I did the same with one of my favorite anime series, K, or rather K’s final iteration—K: Seven Stories, a post-series set of six episodes that beautifully finishes the K universe.

K: Seven Stories is a send-off or coda that brings closure to the entire world of K in a way that respects each character and each clan in all their quirkiness. The characters that intrigued you the most while watching the two TV seasons and the movie K: Missing Kings are explored in greater depth. Knowing how the main story ends, the opportunity to see these characters in their full humanity adds poignancy to the viewing. Even Gojo Sukuna, the young brat in the Green Clan, gets a full episode where we see how he longed for a sense of family and found it in the Greens, the most oddball clan of them all.

The final episode of K: Seven Stories is wonderful. It presents a mysterious situation where characters you know are dead are somehow alive again, and everyone is enjoying themselves in a sort of timeless Groundhog Day world where each day is fun and there are no lasting consequences for anything you do.

Eventually, of course, everyone tires of it, and begins to seek answers and a way out. The final scene brings the curtain down on K as the mysterious observer who has briefly appeared in all six episodes reveals his/her identity as the one behind the timeloop. The universe of K ends with its most emotional episode, one that has the characters affirming life even with its painful losses as something beautiful to be treasured. I love K. It’s a seriously underrated anime series, one that I wish more anime fans would watch.

That being said — a weird thing happened recently with K’s producers, the Go Hands animation studio. Some Go Hands designers were found to have plagiarized character/costume designs from other sources for its upcoming Tokyo Babylon 2021 anime series based on CLAMP’s original Tokyo Babylon series from the 1990s.

This amazes me for two reasons. First, K had awesome character and costume designs, meaning that Go Hands is perfectly capable of doing great original designs themselves. In fact, one of the distinctive things about K was that director Shingo Suzuki was also credited as K’s character designer — which I imagine has to be the only time in anime when those two very different jobs were performed by the same person.

The second thing that makes this odd is that CLAMP has always been known for fantastic character and costume designs. Couldn’t they have asked CLAMP to do these new designs?

Go Hands is hardly the first case of plagiarism in anime and manga — it happens occasionally and it’s always unfortunate. Hopefully they will get beyond this, and we’ll all get to see Tokyo Babylon 2021 sooner rather than later.

Haikyuu returned this fall. I enjoyed this season, though I’ve lost track of which level of the tournament they’re at given the huge gaps of time between each season.

Haikyuu finally got hit by the curse that hits many anime series at some time or another: the badly animated episode. A few weeks before the season ended, there was one episode where the character faces looked a little off, and the comments ensued on Crunchyroll as you might expect.

Production I.G. is known for its quality animation, but many production companies farm out some of their animation work overseas to Korea or Vietnam. Not to blame the overseas contractors, because who knows where the fault lay this time, but it seems production deadlines affect even the best of shows.

So now, Haikyuu is over once again, and who knows when it will return for another season. There was a four-year hiatus before it resumed again this year. Let’s hope it’s not another four years before the next season.

Onyx Equinox is Crunchyroll’s first original series. The story is based on Mesoamerican mythology and represents a departure from the site’s main focus on Japanese anime.

I have a lot of thoughts about Onyx Equinox, so I’ll be doing a post on it in January.

One of the delights of anime is the short-episode series, like Yamishibai (returning in winter 2021!). It’s hard to resist a series with a good premise that gives you five-minute episodes. Who doesn’t have five minutes to watch anime?

With a Dog AND a Cat, Every Day Is Fun has even shorter episodes — about a minute and a half apiece. Astonishingly, not only is it very funny, but its more serious episodes actually have me tearing up.

It’s about a young woman and her overeager, happy-all-the-time dog, and her evil but somehow adorable cat. As one Crunchyroll commenter put it, after watching an episode about the young woman’s former dog who passed away, “GREAT, NOW I’M CRYING INTO MY FOOD.” That's a tribute to the power of anime, seriously. What other form of entertainment can do that to you in 90 seconds flat?

And finally — Attack on Titan is in its last season.

Attack on Titan is unlike any other series, defying easy categorization. It’s shonen, sure, but its alternate Earth setting and those amazing, horrifying titans put it into a category of its own. Not to mention how the show’s popularity basically saved the U.S. manga localization industry in the early 2010s, and by association, anime in the U.S. as well.

The fact that Attack on Titan is ending makes me a little nostalgic. It was around the time of Attack on Titan’s initial popularity that I began to feel out of step with anime in general. My posts on this blog were spotty from 2015 to around 2018, when I came back to anime with renewed enthusiasm.

This is the 11th year I’ve been writing this anime blog. I don’t know what the future holds for this blog or the editing work I do in this industry. Like many, I suspect, this covid year has led to some soul searching for me as to how I want to spend my time going forward.

But for now, there will be no big changes. I’ll continue to blog here on anime and manga as my work schedule permits. I still feel that anime is relevant in my life, and every year there are series that surprise me. Anime can still surprise me with its variety and artistry, so there’s life here yet. And thanks for continuing to read this blog – it is much appreciated. :-)

Summer 2018 Watchlist

My summer anime watchlist includes catching up on seasons of series I missed these past few years, continuing with new seasons of ongoing series, plus a surprise.

I recently watched the second seasons of Attack on Titan and Free—two very different kinds of shows. ;-)

I saw that Attack on Titan’s third season was about to start and wanted to get current on it.

Attack on Titan’s second season felt as fresh and exciting to me as the first season. The shock of seeing the titans in all their grotesqueness has worn off a bit, but the reveal that several characters we trusted were actually titans kept the story taut and tense. There was quite a long layoff between the first and second seasons, but you wouldn’t know it from the second season’s production quality. It’s like no time at all elapsed between the two seasons.

It’s great to experience Attack on Titan and its dizzyingly fast action scenes, its epic feel again. For sheer intensity, it’s a must see.

Free is one of those series that falls into the “like” category for me, rather than anything stronger. It’s slice of life and I seldom get excited by that kind of anime. The characters are pleasant enough, the story—what there’s been of it—is fine.

Each of the first two seasons focused on one central issue. In the first season, it was whether Haru and his former friend Rin would reconcile their friendship. The second season was a little more involved, as third-years Haru, Makoto and Rin were set to graduate from high school and their close-knit swim teams prepared to face the future without them.

The second season finally did something with the show’s protagonist, Haru.

Free’s blank slate of a main character never interested me much. I always thought it odd that Haru, who speaks and expresses himself the least of all the characters, was the focal point of the show.

In season two, Haru experiences trouble competing at swim meets. When questioned as to his plans after high school, he responds badly to being pressured.

Since Haru doesn’t talk a lot, we don’t know what’s driving his behavior until Rin takes him to Australia where Rin attended school. When Haru sees where Rin used to compete, including an Olympics-worthy pool and stadium, he suddenly wants to compete again. Being shown a larger world makes Haru realize he can live a bigger life, and he snaps out of his funk.

Free’s second season didn’t turn me into a rapt fan, but it was definitely more interesting than the first season. And apparently the third season—now airing—finally introduces a real antagonist. So I’ll be getting caught up on season three soon.

I’m also working my way through the second season of Kekkai Sensen (Blood Blockade Battlefront).

As with Free, Kekkai Sensen is on my like list. The story is set in an alternate-future New York City in which paranormal beings and events are commonplace. It’s one of those series that is strange enough and has sufficient action scenes that it intrigues and entertains, even if lots of things are left unexplained.

Yamishibai is now in its sixth season.

I find series like Yamishibai irresistible. Yamishibai gives you horror stories, each four to five minutes long, usually with a twist at the end, and narrated by a sinister figure with a smiling mask. They’re short slivers of stories, some terrifying and some sad. Most leave you concluding that “hell is other people” as Sartre said, so if you’re looking to be uplifted, I suggest you find some other anime to watch for that. ;-)

My two favorite series this season are Boruto and Gintama.

Boruto, the sequel series to Naruto/Naruto Shippuuden, is about Naruto and Hinata’s son and his teammates Sarada, daughter of Sasuke and Sakura, and Mitsuki, Orochimaru’s created son.

Naruto, as we remember, was the orphan hated and shunned by his fellow Konoha villagers. Young Boruto has the exact opposite problem. As the privileged son of the greatest hero in the ninja world, how does he distinguish himself from his old man and forge his own path?

The best moments in Boruto for me are when we get to see the characters from Naruto, now grown-up Konoha citizens and parents to ninja students of their own. Kishimoto’s story universe has been a part of my life since I became an anime fan. Boruto is a good series, but I suspect even if it weren’t I would watch it anyway, because it feels like coming home to a place I know, with characters I love.

After 12 years, Gintama is in its final story arc.

And it’s a pretty grim arc. Many characters I didn’t expect to die have died already in the battle for planet Earth, with the last boss still undefeated.

There’s nothing else in the anime/mangaverse like Gintama, with its mix of alternate history, zany comedy and dead-serious drama. This sixth season took an unexpected hiatus in spring, splitting the season into two cours. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same thing happened soon and the conclusion was left to a third cour later this fall. But for now, Gintama is live and careening toward a bloody and fantastic finale.

Finally, something that is both old and new for me.

When I discovered anime and manga, I used to walk the manga aisle at a Japanese bookstore near my home. I’d pick up manga volumes and stare at the covers, flip through the pages and, not able to read a single Japanese kanji or kana at the time, mainly look at character designs.

I remember one character design in particular.

I fell in love with Toru Muhyo. His chibi size, turnip-shaped head and little cape were so cute. I had no idea what the story was about, though I could tell it had fantasy and paranormal elements.

And now, more than ten years later, Muhyo and Roji’s Bureau of Supernatural Investigation is an anime, Crunchyroll is airing it, and I’m going to watch it. It’s a late-summer surprise, an unexpected gift bestowed by the anime gods. It’s good to be an anime fan. =D