Letters

A light month, mail-wise. I may have to prod you folks into writing more. :-)

I have to agree with you about how stupid some people can be at showings of anime. I'm a member of the Japanese Animation Club of Victoria (that's in British Columbia), and we often have members who continuously talk during meetings, although it has improved in the last few months. The laughing is usually in the correct places, but I've seen people laugh at the most inappropriate moments. However, there was one moment that I actually joined in with the crowd with cheering, and that was when we finished watching The Tale of Genji. It's a literary classic, but it's highly inappropriate to show at a 12 hour marathon. It doesn't appeal to the average anime fan, that's for sure. That's the only time when the disruptions in the audience were more interesting than the anime.

Jay Dee Archer
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http://jupiterknight.dragonfire.net/anime/
jarcher@direct.ca

Here's my 'plea' section... One, I soooo want a 'What Panties Am I Wearing Today' prog like in Blue Seed... not that I have some sort of Momiji panty fetish or anything, but it was quite humorous... Also, could someone tell me what's the deal with Minnie May from Gunsmith Cats? I swear, there's something not kosher with the explanation that she ran into some 'bad drugs' in Chinatown, which is why she's so underdeveloped..

And as a side note, do you hope that Princess Monomoke fails as much as I do? No, I'm not one of these "Anime is for the true Otaku" people. It's just that when I tell people where I work why the heck there's a bunch of people with big eyes on my computer screen all the time, I either get a "Oh, you mean Sailor Moon", or someone thinking that it's something to do with Disney.

I'm sick and tired of the Disneyfication of America, and if Disney starts releasing popular Anime, you might as well consider most other anime companies out of business, because Disney can and will outbid them all. And it will go from Anime, to Disney. It's bad enough that Disney has been using a more and more Anime style but when Joe Public starts thinking that ALL Anime is Disney, the true fan has lost.

Imagine Ranma 1/2 dubbed by Disney? Do we really need to hear Jim Carrey doing the voice of Ranma, and George Wendt as Genma? Some Anime fans will relish in the exposure of Princess Monomoke, but I'm afraid that it may be the beginning of the end of the Anime we've all grown to love...

Erik Rug...
rocketboy@subzero.iceinet.com

Nevertheless, I desperately want Princess Mononoke to make Miramax a fortune. Why? Because Disney's not stupid. They'll look at the film, stunned, and say "Hey! This movie has no singing! No cutesy-poo talking inanimate objects! It has a mature, intelligent plot that appeals to non-children! And it sells!!" Eventually, Disney will take their vast store of resources and animation knowledge and use it to create the type of animated movie we want to see, one that's actually aimed at a post-pubescent audience. Disney won't change anime for the worse. Anime will change Disney for the better.

As for Disney getting into the anime licensing business and competing with ADV, I don't see that happening anytime soon. Sure, they could outbid anyone, but that wouldn't mean they could sell any more copies. If you bid high, it's harder to make a profit, and that's the name of the game. If Disney did get into the anime business, I would expect them to set up a new label to do it. The Disney name means a specific type of animation to the American audience, and you can't turn anime into that kind of animation no matter how much you edit it.

And would I want to see Disney dub Ranma ½? If they could do as good a job as they did for Kiki's Delivery Service, I'd say "go for it". Sure, they get Hollywood talent, but they get Hollywood talent that fits. Considering the low regard in which the average dub actor is held by the fans, would that be a bad thing?

So to sum up, despite everything we dislike about Disney, I really don't see them posing any threat to anime at all.

In reading your Last Exit for September, I noticed your comments regarding webmasters who claim certain images as 'theirs'. As someone who actually does this quite frequently, I'd like to explain our side, if that's alright. ^^;

While the images themselves are most certainly copyrighted to the respective companies, webmasters tend to act protectively towards things they have personally scanned, screencapped, etc. simply because of the insane amount of work involved in getting these images to digital form. I run an image gallery with well over 200 images, and the labor that went into scanning, editing, and cleaning up those images totals well over 48 hours. My scanner is dying a slow, painful death due to my efforts. Labor aside, after spending a couple hundred dollars on artbooks and equipment, it's a little more than irritating to find your entire image gallery, once unique, on someone else's server as a part of someone else's webpage.

So many sites are the exact same junk over and over again, we'd just like to have something that is ours and special. When people go right-click happy and steal entire image galleries, that uniqueness is taken away. That's what we're trying to prevent.

I hope this clears up the issue a little for people who think we're all stingy jerks. ^^;

Thanks for your time. (^-^)

~ryuuen lmaclean@ucsd.edu
http://come.to/battousai/

For more opinions on scan copying read on...

You commented on how images scanned from, e.g, art books, aren't the site owner's property anyway, so why should they say 'please don't steal them!'? I think what they really mean is that it took quite a lot of time, effort, and disk space to get them onto the computer, so please don't take credit for being the one to scan them if you're not?

I do have a website, and I've noticed that in another Yu Yu Hakusho picture gallery they literally took the pictures that were displayed on my page frame for frame. I considered emailing the site owner about this, since I DID say if you were going to use them, please give credit where it's due, but decided that if it didn't bother him in the first place to use them, it probably wouldn't bother him any more if I flamed him about it.

The thing is, my source was common to everyone. I mean, anyone with access to YYH VCDs or tapes could easily take the captures, but the word is COULD. When someone actually takes the time and effort required to scan them (and in my case also convert them from BMPs to JPGs), it's a bit annoying when someone just assumes it doesn't matter because you don't OWN the pictures anyway, and puts them on their own page.

The pictures DO belong to the actual artists, of course, and most people do put in Disclaimers, but without the Internet, I think many fandoms all over the world would not have grown so much. Without the people who scan in the images, many would not discover anime/manga, or without the images wouldn't deem it worthy to spend money on.

I know that if there's only one real original source, you can only get so many different scans of the same thing. For example if I scanned in one of my YYH CD covers, and someone else with exactly the same CD also scanned it and put it on their page, I couldn't fault them, because, well, they scanned it themselves. The problem comes when you can't tell which is the original and which is the simply downloaded copy-pasted sites. That's a question of trust, I suppose, and that's why people start to get paranoid and say, 'Please don't 'steal' my images!' Because everyone wants their site to be in some way different to the other ones, original, but if it's a picture gallery (ESPECIALLY if it's a picture gallery), even though you didn't draw it yourself, you might pride yourself in having the most scans, or the most obscure ones, etc. Usually, if there is a whole group of fans who communicate (e.g. via a ML) they will KNOW which is the original site and which is the copy.

Now you might ask how I know that this aforementioned person 'nicked' my images? Well, if it were 3 or 4 frames, I might say it's a coincidence, but a few dozen? (And I KNOW these frames really well) and a pencilboard that I had never formerly seen floating around on the web before until I scanned it? Now I don't mind people using 'my' images, as long as they give credit that I was the one who originally scanned that particular image, anyway. It encourages visitors to your page, and subsequently increases feedback. Word of mouth is always the best form of advertising, I feel.

Appleby-chan
appleby_chan@hotmail.com
www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Pagoda/5984

And another quick comment on the issue:

Aloha, Ryan!

This "don't steal my 'stuff'" has been going even before web pages. I remember back in old days of BBSes when one SysOp got mad at his users for downloading scans he posted on the BBS and uploaded them to others.
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Wendell @ animatsuri@dm.net
http://limepub.com

I think I see where the site owners are coming from. It's not as much a feeling of ownership as a wish not to be taken for granted. Okay, that makes sense, as long as permission to use the images is normally given when requested. If the images are held back, then I think we get back to the pretension of ownership.