Tags: bandai, bandai-visual, bandai-visual-usa, broccoli-books, kadokawa-shoten, Sola
Blah blah blah, Bandai Visual USA + sola, $49.99/disc, three episodes per disc, June 10th, no dubs, etc.
Does anyone else think BVU is really moving to the (relative) mainstream of anime? I mean, look at their past titles: Patlabor, Gunbuster, Demon Prince Enma, Wings of Rean, Super Robot Wars, MS Gundam IGLOO, SOS! Tokyo Metro Explorers, Galaxy Angel– all space, mech, sci-fi, adventury, kinda “big” series.
And now look at their most recent license: Harukanaru Toki no Naka de, Shigofumi, True Tears, sola. The first two have some adventure and stuff, but none of these are “big” titles (yes, I know sola was voted top anime of ‘07 on Yahoo! Japan, but I just can’t take that very seriously), and True Tears in particular is an absolute slice-of-life romancey thing. I guess what I’m trying to say is, all of these recent licenses are of moe shows, which is so different from what BVU has done in the past.
Now, True Tears and Shigofumi were both produced by Bandai Visual Japan. But sola is not– which may make it the FIRST title ever to be released by BVU that is not related to Bandai Japan in some way. The closest would be HaruToki, which was only distributed by Bandai Japan. But everything else Bandai Visual USA has was either produced by Bandai Visual or by one of its subsidiaries like Freedom was done by Sunrise and Super Robot Wars is based on games made by Banpresto.
This is assuming all of my research is correct anyway, but sola was created by MediaWorks, which is part of Kadokawa Shoten. Then again, Broccoli Books scored the English manga license, and Broccoli USA and BVU have long been buddy-buddies.
Well, we’ll see if this means anything. Just thought I’d point it out for you industry-watchers. :)
After I got a comment from DiGiKerot, I went and poked around some more sites– specifically the Japanese wikpedia entry for sola –and they list Bandai Visual (Japan) as one of the production companies. The English sites just haven’t caught up to it yet (and it’s not mentioned on the official Japanese site either). So, so much for that! Sorry for the red herring. ;)