ANN 1998 Retrospective
by Justin Sevakis,Since last summer, ANN has worked hard to provide you with the most up-to-date, complete, unbiased news coverage in the anime industry. Now, with the start of the new year, it's as good a time as any to take a look at what happened in the past few months...
The Big Stories
ittedly, the two biggest stories of the year happened at a time when ANN, frankly, didn't have it together quite yet. Those stories were the release of Kiki's Delivery Service and Pok»mon, both to a potentially mainstream market.We were all quite surprised two years ago, when I Can Hear the Sea) and distribute them worldwide.
Kiki's Delivery Service was the first fruit born of the deal, and although it didn't sell nearly as many as their other direct-to-video release, "The Lion King II: Simba's Pride," the release was a modest success, selling nearly one million copies and got the attention of most of the critics out there. Entertainment Weekly went so far as to call it the best video release of 1998.
But most surprising was their release of a subtitled version. While the translation left a lot to be desired (like accuracy, for example), the fact that they even released one at all shows that they were paying attention to the otaku purist as a possible customer.
Pok»mon turned out to be less of a story, as it eventually revealed itself to be just another little kid anime-turned badly hacked American kids' TV show. We've seen this so many times before that it's not even that big a deal anymore. Just the same, releasing the manga, which was so successful that it even had a second printing.
The Local Distributors
1998 saw the opening of Bandai's new AnimeVillage branch, which started off distributing titles from Sunrise providing its tapes to other retail businesses.appropriated the rights to Magic Knights Rayearth, the incredibly popular TV series, which had previously been made available only through fansubs.
Pioneer surprised many people with its licensing of Revolutionary Girl Utena, and have already licensed the new Loduss War TV series.
MGM after they bought the property owned by Orion after it went belly-up.
Ninja Scroll), is expected to hit theaters this year, and UV has put up RealVideo samples on their web site.
Finally, The Cool Devices! Now there's a nice mix!
Problems Abroad
In the "what were they thinking?!" department, this fall Urusei Yatsura manga page and added a 3-D Lum and expected flocks of people to come running to play zap-the-manga-.Also making news wasGainax projects or the company as a whole is still not known.
Fans of legendary director his ing this fall. Maker of such well-known films as "Ran" and one of the only Japanese talents to have won an Academy Award was 88 years old and died of natural causes.
There was SOME good news. In a collaboration with American and Japanese animators, the Sony in the United States before its Japanese run. The movie will have nothing to do with any Final Fantasy game.
Fan Chaos
Just as ANN was opening we received word of somebrutal attack of Nausicaa.net by Russian hackers. The hackers hit the entire server, deleting... well... everything. While the cleanup continues even now, the site is ALMOST back to normal.The Mixx Story
...But the story that really put us on the map was the one covering the issues with taking it down altogether.A week later, responded to criticism with some of his own.
As little as a month ago, we still saw some of their problems when we learned of allegations of Mixx inflating their subscription numbers.
...And here's 1999!
Now that 1999 is here, fans have plenty to hope for and experience, and through it all ANN will be here to cover it. Thanks for a great 1998!