Wild cries of joy were to be heart at Chez Genji after Sentai Filmworks announced it had clinched a licensing deal for the Guin Saga anime. A splendid time will be had by all (who can afford it).
There are two things I hope come from this.
The first is wholly optional: the possibility that Sentai offer a BD set for the series as well as conventional DVD. I've seen episodes in HD and they're stunning; this feels like a show that was authored from the inside out, from the backgrounds to the characters themselves, to be shown that way. Many anime that have HD editions still have that simplified, for-TV look to them, since they were created at a time when the average display was low-def.
If we only get a standard-def set, I won't cry into my beer: the mere fact we have the show in a licensed version at all is enough to be happy about. But it would be nice to have the option, now that there's a sizeable market for it. I just hope the touch-and-go situations involving reverse-importing don't make this unfeasible.
The second item on the wish list is the real doozy: bring us more volumes of the original novels, in English. That's something more in Vertical's hands than Sentai's, and from all that has come back my way it is tough to say they could ever fulfill such a wish with the sales of Guin Saga being what they were.
Here's an idea, which I freely admit may be impossible to enact, but I'll toss it out there anyway: a rolling licensing deal for the Guin books, one pre-paid by fans.
The process would go something like this:
- Crunch the numbers and figure out how much it costs to put a decent number of copies of the next five books in the series out into the marketplace. The books are licensed in batches of five, since the plot arcs tend to span five books at a time as well. The costs should include everything — licensing of the translation, translator's fees, licensing for artwork, etc.
- Set up an account somewhere — maybe with Kickstarter — to pre-fund the licensing and production of each set of books.
- Do some grassroots campaigning in and among fans of both the books and the TV series to get them to contribute.
- Once the funding limit is met, roll the books out into the marketplace.
- Lather, rinse, repeat.
The production costs could be further alleviated by using print-on-demand, especially since we're dealing with a series that has over 120 books plus side stories and bonus material. I don't know that the Japanese licensors would be willing to set up a more flexible licensing deal, allowing for low-volume printing, but the idea is certainly worth floating.
I suggest this approach as a way to break the peculiar stalemate that has arisen with this series, where a great deal of it — over a hundred books — remains behind the wall of another language. I know I want to read it, and I'd bet there's enough people out there willing to pony up ahead of time to see more of it.
What say you good people?
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I have my doubts about anyone starting legal fan-funded translations any time soon, but more than that I don't think the Guin Saga animation would be worth releasing on Blu-ray — not to say that it wouldn't get a Blu-ray release, since that's becoming the new standard. There are good moments here and there, but it's really not a good show and it has very inconsistent animation quality.
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You've seen more of it than I have, but what I have seen looked more than adequate -- although I imagine that's because I have a long memory for bad animation, and it takes a lot for a show to live down to the worst examples I can think of.
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I wouldn't say it's the worst example, but it's grossly inconsistent. The first episode of the series looks the best; there are times you can tell no effort was put into it at all. I like the designs and style more than the actual animation overall. The story's also muddled in large part due to trying to move the plot forward while glossing over major elements, so there are several points where — as someone who hasn't read the novels — you find yourself thinking, "Wait, what??"
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I'll be asking myself that very question as I watch: Would someone need to read the books to know what this means? (I was asking myself something akin to that with "Blade of the Immortal", but it was phrased differently: "Why doesn't this have the impact it did on the page?")
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I'm pretty jazzed to hear about the domestic release of the GUIN SAGA anime. To be honest, I have only seen bits of the first ep, but it looked quite impressive to me (and I do have experience in working in television animation).
It's still a head-scratcher that it took at least 30 years for an anime to be produced based on the novels, since the first was published in 1979. And I would love to see more of the novels translated--it would be a fitting tribute to Kurimoto, who passed away last year. I also think your ideas on how to fund definitely might be worth looking into. This is a well-written fantasy series that deserves to have a wider audience.
My first encounter with GS actually came back in the late 1990's, thanks to an art exhibition by Yoshitaka Amano, who had created the illustrations for several volumes of the series. The art was intriguing, as was the brief synopsis that I saw about the character, but I never imagined that anyone would translate the books. I'm glad to have been wrong. Even if the first five books are all we'll see of GS, at least it's better than nothing.
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Turns out that one of the Yoshitaka Amano artbooks I'd collected way back when, "Shadow of Heroes", sported several "Guin Saga" illos long before I knew what "GS" was. (I only had the most general idea of who Amano was, on top of that; I'd bought the book 'cos it was cheap and the art spoke for itself even without a name attached to it.)
I suspect the reason a TV series wasn't more quickly forthcoming was because its biggest surge of popularity predated the current wave of cross-media pollination, where you have TV shows derived from various properties because there's no other way to increase the market share for them.
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