'Riding Bean' is a hugely influential anime and the basis for the later 'Gunsmith Cats'.
Back in February, it was announced that AnimEigo would be bought by MediaOCD, run by Justin Sevakis. Nearly a year later, I caught up with him to see how he’s been doing.
AnimEigo is a very special part of anime history outside of Japan. Being one of the first official distributors, it laid much of the infrastructural groundwork that we all take for granted today.
So, taking over a company like AnimEigo is by no means trivial, and I was curious to ask Justin how the whole deal happened.
“I was working on a documentary project about how the anime industry in the English speaking world came to be, and arranged to do an interview with Robert Woodhead in D.C. at Otakon. We wrapped the interview and he told me that he was getting ready to retire, and wanted to know if I’d be interested in taking over the company. I was completely honored. Along with Natsumi, who ran a lot of the day-to-day business of AnimEigo, we hashed out what that would look like, and about 7 months later we signed the agreement.
“Honestly, it’s taken over a lot of my day-to-day. There’s a staggering amount to be done. Luckily I have an incredible staff who have been able to take up the slack, but we were already working very hard before all of this, so it’s been an adjustment. We don’t want to cut any corners.
“We also still do a lot for Discotek, so there’s going to be a lot of overlap, but every boutique publisher is going to be, to some extent, a reflection of the owners’ tastes. Since we also do all production in-house, we’re in a position to take slightly bigger risks on titles that Discotek might not. We’re also going to be concentrating a lot more on the marketing of individual titles, partially because the big “household name” level anime is largely already taken and out of our price range for now, but also because finding buried treasure is part of our DNA. We’ll also be using our resources to try and produce more bonus material, when possible.”
The 'Megazone 23' series is now finally being appreciated by modern anime audiences.
Justin is also keen on building up AnimEigo. As he explains, he has plans for the next few years already laid out.
“It’s a long history, but ever since the DVD crash in 2007 or so, AnimEigo has been mostly one-off projects funded via Kickstarter every year or two. With that level of output, it simply wasn’t a sustainable business on its own. I’ve spent most of 2024 trying to get us up to one release a month, getting us back on people’s radars, rebranding, and modernizing. For 2025 we’ll see if all of that work pays off, we’ll start doing more titles that have never been released before, doing more on social media, and seeing if we can get fans excited about great anime that maybe they’ve never heard of before.
“Looking back, it’s such a different world from 1988 I’m not sure how you even compare them. When AnimEigo started, there were no uncut, subtitled, or even faithfully dubbed anime available, period. Even VHS fansubs weren’t really a thing yet. This kept the fan community very small, and it was very hard to get Americans to take Japanese popular artistic styles seriously. Japanese video games would have different artwork for American release because people were scared we wouldn’t like the art style. Now you can find anime related stuff at half of the stores in the mall. It feels like I’ve entered Bizarro World sometimes.”
That Bizarro World also feeds into the current challenges facing the anime industry outside of Japan, and Justin had some very valid points on some of the bland Western IP adaptations we’ve been subjected to.
“The biggest problem is that, for new stuff, there’s just too much. There are 60+ shows released every season, most of them don’t find an audience, and the vast majority are forgotten a few months after they finish airing. It’s a huge waste of effort and just not sustainable. Individual titles can’t be marketed, and it’s very hard to create new “classics.” Then you have the issue where most of the business is run by Crunchyroll/Sony Pictures, which don’t get me wrong, they do a great job at what they do, but often times they’re spread too thin, and many great shows sort of slip through the cracks.
“On the flipside, outside funding for anime has been a real double edged sword. Sometimes it’s given birth to some great stuff, but mostly we've gotten a lot of half-hearted adaptations of Western IP that nobody really wants. I think there’s a level of respect that Western film studios and streamers have given to anime studios to let the creatives do what they do, but I’m just as concerned about the green-lighting process, and how they decide what new shows to invest in. Those decisions lead to a lot of “safe” titles being made that end up being pretty bland. Even the decisions of what manga and light novels to adapt, what new ideas to try, and who to hire, those decisions can be creative too, and I think a lot of the delight and surprise of any foreign country’s creative output is down to those decisions of what stories get told. I’m happy for the recognition of anime by the broader entertainment industry, but I’m always concerned that trying to chase a broader audience leads to lowest-common-denominator storytelling. That’s certainly been what happened to the American movie business, and a lot of people feel that anime has taken a similar path the last 5 years or so.
'Otaku no Video' is a fan favorite and is a fun chronicle of the formation of GAINAX.
“When anime was made strictly for the domestic market, there was a sense that nobody else was looking at what they were doing. Many creators found that frustrating, but in retrospect I think it may have been creatively liberating. TV series were always about selling sponsor product, especially toys, but stuff made for the direct-to-video market could break even on a production just from selling a few thousand copies to rental shops around Japan. For a few years there, you got some genuinely crazy stuff being made, and a lot of that was what broke through to the American and UK markets in the 90s.
“Nowadays you see a lot of Western fans trying to dig into the past, and falling in love with the rougher, hand-drawn feel of the pre-digital era. So shows like Bubblegum Crisis and Vampire Princess Miyu are finding a new life with fans that weren’t even alive when they came out. But there are great and interesting works from all over anime history that need preserving and being made available again, and that’s what we’re about.”
“My personal favorites tend to be ethereal, introspective works. Films like Isao Takahata’s Only Yesterday, Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor 2: The Movie, and more obscure stuff like GoShogun: The Time Étranger. But I love anything that conjures strong emotion, that can be anything from sports anime to magical girl shows. I did notice that a lot of those shows happen to be about kids having a really rough time of things.”
Finishing up, I wanted to find out what Justin thought was the draw for classic anime and why younger viewers are very eager to devour so much of it.
“Broadly, there’s a nostalgia across generations for a pre-smartphone, pre-internet age. We know the livestyle we’ve made around these things has been terrible for our mental health, and that nothing seems all that special or foreign anymore. Japan of the past was a bit more mysterious to Westerners, it was just culturally further away from us, and I think people are also nostalgic for that sense of mystery about something so special. Anime, specifically, has always been about escapism, and to combine anime with a pre-smartphone past just feels like a warm nostalgia bath. Besides that, there’s just so much to explore, thousands and thousands of titles from 40 years of anime production, that it’s almost impossible to not find something that speaks to you in all of that.
“As for what that means for the future, I really couldn’t say. But I do find it very heartening that younger generations have no qualms about enjoying media from their parents’ generation. I certainly didn’t feel that was true when I grew up.”
If you’re curious about AnimEigo’s recent output, then feel free to check out my Blu-ray reviews for Riding Bean, Otaku no Video and Megazone 23.
Follow me on X, Facebook and YouTube. I also manage Mecha Damashii and am currently featured in the Giant Robots exhibition currently touring Japan.
