So the good people at Crunchryoll (or rather, their parent company Ellation, but that seems to have flown over everyone's head), decided to launch a brand new animation studio to create original content to run on Crunchyroll and VRV alongside their normal selection of anime. To go along with this, a brand new original project entitled High Guardian Spice was announced for a 2019 release. The show is apparently about four girls, each named after spices for some reason, going to a special school to become fantasy heroes or something. And as they girls go on their journey, they will "form allegiances and comical kinships, uncover legacies and betrayals, and discover their true identities while preparing to protect the world from an ominous unknown threat." Though I could have told you that they decide to form a jazz band and ride ostriches on the surface of Neptune and you would have had no choice but to believe me after seeing the trailer.
Surprisingly, an announcement trailer for an animated series has NO ANIMATION in it. Instead, all we get is a bunch of boring live action interviews with people working on the show interspersed with a slideshow of concept art. And while it's super cool that you guys are using hand drawn animation in a field dominated by digital animation nowadays and that you have an all-female writing team, I don't think that this is exactly what you should be focusing on when you're trying to pitch the merits of your show. And just telling me that your show is going to be like "nothing I've ever seen before" isn't an effective way to hype me up when you have nothing to show me. It just sounds like you don't have the confidence to let your show speak for itself and are just trying to trick me into liking it.
But a lackluster trailer alone isn't quite a controversy, so what gives? Well, anime fans apparently don't understand the concept of original programming and are absolutely furious at the idea of Crunchyroll airing something besides anime. Naturally, I disagree, otherwise I wouldn't have written such a disgusted sentence just now. Seriously, I don't understand the issue here. If Netflix and Amazon are allowed to create original content in order to buff up their library alongside all the licensed content they already provide, then why can't smaller streaming services like Crunchyroll? And even if High Guardian Spice sucks (which is impossible to determine right now), it doesn't change the fact that you can still watch anime you actually like on Crunchyroll after dropping it. And like I said earlier, this isn't even Crunchyroll's decision (even though Crunchyroll would like you to think differently because they're a recognizable brand). This is Ellation, their parent company, calling the shots. In other words, even if the Crunchyroll higher ups don't think this is a good idea (and obviously, I can't say one way or the other), their hands are tied.
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| I wish I was talking about One Piece instead of having to talk about this. |
Now some people are using this trailer as ammunition for their actually long list of complaints about Crunchyroll as a whole. And, yes, Crunchyroll isn't perfect, but that has nothing to do with Ellation's decision to produce original content and host it on their own platform that they own. And what really irks me is the people implying that Crunchyroll is stealing Japanese animators' work to fund western projects for the sake of profits and aren't supporting the anime industry.
I'm sorry, what?
Of course Crunchyroll supports the anime industry. Maybe not the way you want them to, but there is no denying that they do. First of all, they have to pay licensing fees to the anime studios and production companies for every single anime they add to their library. That's money going into the anime industry. Secondly, the new Ellation Studios has two production facilities, one in Burbank and the other in Tokyo. I'm assuming that an animation studio in Japan is going to be hiring Japanese animators. Thirdly, Crunchyroll (as well as Netflix and Amazon), actually invest in the anime industry by co-producing A LOT of anime, including A Place Further than the Universe, Recovery of an MMO Junkie, and (sigh) Island, thus helping to keep the industry (and everyone hired by them) supported. What more could you people want? Aside from not paying anyone who works on the western side of things (for things like site maintenance and subtitles), it doesn't seem like there are any other options for them.
And to those of you who are complaining about inaccurate subtitles and the continued use of an outdated and dying player like Flash in the middle of all this, calm the hell down. One, there is no point in complaining about such things during this particular discussion, it just muddies the issue and gets people off topic. Time and place, people. Second, Crunchyroll has already been working on switching to HTML5, they just haven't announced it because they rightfully assumed that an announcement that was so boring and technical and had nothing to do with anime would get a lot of attention from the majority of their userbase. But in the response to the crazy amount of backlash from the High Guardian Spice trailer, they announced that a new HTML5 player will be rolled out in September, which is already right around the corner. Third, inaccuracies in the subtitles are inevitable when you have so many different episodes being translated so soon after airing in Japan one after another. And while it would be nice if inaccuracies were corrected in a timely manner, Crunchyroll only has so much time and resources, and I understand why they might decide translating new episodes to be of a higher priority than fixing old episodes. The alternatives are either Crunchyroll taking on fewer properties, thus making their library weaker and strengthening their competitors, or taking longer to actually translate episodes, thus giving up the same day release that makes them such an attractive service in the first place.
In short, people need to abandon their knee-jerk reactions and take the time to do some research before suddenly and loudly concluding that a western-produced cartoon is proof that Crunchyroll is a parasitic blight on the anime service, selfishly profiting off hard working Japanese creators' works without giving anything in return. Because all it took were a few google searches and a little bit of time on Crunchyroll's website and the Anime News Network for me to learn that that was not the case.
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| Oh, yeah, I started watching this recently. It's pretty good, maybe I should talk about it. |
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