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Anime's eager copy klatch
Fansubbers obtain Japanese cartoons on their own and circulate them with English subtitles. Piracy concerns ensue.
By Charles Solomon
Special to The Times

April 20, 2005

When the highly rated anime fantasy-adventure "Fullmetal Alchemist" debuted in the U.S. on Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" last November, many American viewers had already seen all 51 episodes that premiered in Japan in 2003. Some of them owned the entire series before the first DVD appeared in February (the second arrives this month).

The version they're watching is known as a fansub, a subtitled version of the program done by amateur fans. At considerable cost — and some legal risk — fansubbers bring the hottest titles in Japanese animation or anime to eager audiences who can't wait for the American versions of those shows to air here.

Japanese animation or anime has become a big business in America, accounting for $500 million in video sales and about 10 times that in licensing, rights and related merchandise sales annually. Anime enjoys widespread popularity among adolescents, teens and twentysomethings, and fansubbers constitute one of the oddest subgroups within the larger culture.

Fansubbers begin by obtaining a copy of an episode of a Japanese TV show, either by buying it or downloading it. If they don't speak Japanese (and most don't), they have to find someone to prepare a line-by-line English translation. Each line then must be timed and digitally added to the correct scene. Endless technical glitches can occur during the subtitling process, and specialized websites offer step-by-step advice.

Fansubbing began in the 1980s, when few anime titles were available in the U.S. Because it's a legally gray area at best, people involved in fansubs use only their first names. Jeki, a 27-year-old fansubber, recalls, "I grew up watching 'Robotech' and the few other Japanese series that were on. I wanted to see more of that type of cartoon, but all Saturday morning offered was 'The Smurfs' and 'Alvin & the Chipmunks.'

"When I was 12 or 13, I met a couple of people on message boards who shared my interest, and we decided we could make fansubs as a group. We bought Japanese laser discs and copied them; some of us knew Japanese and could do the translations. We really, really liked these shows and were sure other people would too. But they just weren't out there in the marketplace, so how were people going to find them if we didn't sub them?"

Barry, a 34-year-old software engineer and anime fan, began watching fansubs in college. "One of the clubs on campus had a collection of videotapes that you couldn't get in stores, like 'Kimagure Orange Road,' " he says.

Fansubbers initially distributed shows on videocassettes: Someone would send in a blank VHS tape and get the fansub by return mail. But the growth of the Internet and the shift to digital technology has made fansubbing easier and faster. "There are fansubbing groups in Japan that digitally capture a show as it's being broadcast and send it to whomever's doing the translation," Jeki notes. "The fansubbers here have software and technology that makes it possible for them to have a good, translated copy circulating on the Net in two or three days.

"The [anime fan] conventions no longer show fansubs; distributors use them to launch their new domestic releases. Digital fansubbing means you don't have to go to a club to watch new anime."

The Web has become the most popular way to distribute fansubs: People log onto a site and download files of subtitled animation. The individual files are large, so to get new material users have to share the fansub programs they have. This electronic swap-meet mentality dovetails with the attitude of fansubbers, who insist they are neither pirates nor bootleggers.

"From day one to the present, the attitude of fansubbers has been we will not proceed with the subbing or the distribution of a show that has been licensed in English," says Betty, a member of one the nation's largest fansubbing groups. "Fansubbers hate to see people selling their work commercially, whether it's listing copies on EBay or selling them on a website."

"When a title comes out commercially, all the distribution sites I go to say, 'We don't have it anymore,' " agrees Barry. "I toss out any DVDs I've burned and delete the files. I buy the stuff I like. If I didn't like a title, I know not to spend $20 on the DVD. There are sites where people sell things that are licensed or offer free downloads of them, just as you can get movies off the Internet, but I've never looked for them."

Not surprisingly, American distributors take a dim view of fansubbing. Rod Peters, senior marketing manager at Houston-based ADV Films, the largest U.S. anime distributor, says, "Once we announce we've acquired the rights to distribute a program, that program cannot be subbed or distributed by anyone outside ADV. We give anyone who does a cease-and-desist order; if they continue, we turn them over to our antipiracy division for legal action." Chad Kime, corporate planning manager at Geneon Entertainment, the distributor of the hit series "Samurai Champloo," says bluntly, "Fansubs are illegal and a form of piracy. We cannot condone fansubbing."

Fansubbers counter they provide distributors with valuable market research. "Like it or not — and they certainly don't like to admit it too loudly — distributors know fansubs provide gold-plated marketing information," Betty says. "If a series is popular as a fansub, they know it will sell. There have been cases where a company declined to license a title, because it had been fansubbed and 'everyone had seen it' and regretted the decision."

Kime says that might have been true several years ago, but currently, "the bidding on many titles begins before the show even airs. Additionally, more and more 'B' titles are being ignored by the fans; many companies suspect that sales of these titles is impaired by distribution in fansub circles."

In December, four major fansub sites received e-mail from a Tokyo law firm representing the Japanese distributor Media Factory, requesting that they stop uploading their client's series and/or stop inducing visitors to visit websites where those series could be downloaded. Despite these countermeasures, the consensus among otoku (devotees of anime) is that fansubbing, like downloading music, has become too widespread to halt. The debate will undoubtedly continue over the next several years, as fansubbers vie to present the first versions of favorite series, and distributors on both sides of the Pacific mount counteroffensives.

I don't know that much about anime and whatnot, but Cowboy Bepop ROCKS!

(And MY GOD what great music that show has! And it's INDIE music too ...to the best of my knowledge. Try listening to "Call Me, Call Me" and disagree.)

I watch anime - always subbed, never dubbed. A few reasons:

- The voice actors change. The origional producers carefully selected ideal voice actors who captured the personality of each character. Replacements are not good.

- The new actors invariably sound extremally annoying. I dont know why this is, but I have only ever found one exception (Hellsing).

- Some aspects of Japanese are almost untranslateable. Names have suffixes indicating relative social status or occupation. When dubbing, every suffix becomes the prefix Mr or Miss. Same when subbing, but if you watch enough you start to pick up the details.

- The dubs are often cut. Anime can be very violent in places, and some series remove anime conventions which could confuse US or European viewers (eg, characters are often drawn simplified for a few seconds or at about one-quarter size to indicate shock or comic-fear.)

Agreed. Did you watch the movie? GOODNESS that was intense. The music is all original, straight from independent artists from here, Europe, or Japan that you just won't be able to find with the labels.

The full version of the intro is verrrry sweet, though.

And I honestly doubt fansubbing will be stopped. A lot of these people want to watch what's hot now, without waiting for the official dub to appear. A lot of these people also like to watch the unedited shows, without cuts or any censorship done when it lands on the American side.

Then there's also those companies that take very good shows and completely butcher them, dialogue, original score, and all. 4Kids, I'm talking about you. These companies will take an anticipated show, butcher it, make it extremely kid friendly, and plaster it on a now endangered species which is the Saturday Morning cartoon lineup. It's sad, really.

But what was said was right, most of these anime companies are within the culture as well; they do it because they love the shows, and a lot of them go to these websites wondering which ones are extremely popular and which aren't to bring it over here. Thus how we got Inuyasha and Fullmetal Alchemist.

What Goldenpi said. But, you have to give props to the current stuff that's been arriving to Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. It's as uncut as possible and all translated very well, with only the untranslatable stuff toyed with. And the voice acting talent has been getting so much better. Pioneer's doing a remarkable job with Inuyasha, and I think Cowboy Bebop was dead on with the voice acting. FullMetal Alchemist is pretty good, as well.

Here's a visual example on how companies like 4Kids ruins the shows: http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=145

It's all too true.

Jinsoku, I have seen all 29 or so episodes on Adult Swim, but you say there's a MOVIE TOO???

(GOTTA HAVE IT!)

I was wondering when they'd get around to Anime. I know someone with multiple disibilities who loves anime and has quite a collection of tapes from TV and BT files. He is unable to stop since he loves it so much and has a hard time comprehending the issue. If they tried to sue him I'm sure there'd be problems.

Yup. The movie exists. Simply titled Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (US release). VERY well done. The music is there, and holy hell, the art direction and choreography for some of those fight sequences are magnificent.

Dubs suck. End of story.

All music on Cowboy Bebop series and movie is coomposed by Yoko Kanno (No Yoko Ono you n00bs). She did every single scrap of that soundtrack. She is a goddess of music.

Go here to checkout her discography

http://jameswong.com/ykproject/core.html

Amazingly talented woman.

As for fansubs. They can sometimes be sucky. They can sometimes excell. But they always win over DVD's in terms of things like karaoke (The fonts are animated to follow the opening and ending songs!). Overlayed sign translations and subbers notes on cultural idiosyncracies.

If the anime licencees want to sell their DVD's they'd better bloody well get with the times! Crappy yellow subtitle fonts poorly timed to the anime and no extras or creativity in subtitling are NOT going to convince fans to buy when fansubs do it 100% better!!!

Not to mention some shows being censored or not picked up at all.

Oh BTW did I mention dubs suck?

I better repaet it just in case you did not get it.

DUBS SUCK!!!

I need an edit button

Note to Leflaw: Anime is a big audience. Create a discussion website please. I had an intuition to post this topic and sit back & wait for the animated response. Thanks to all for informative dialogue.

Lessig's travels in Tokyo last year convinced him that the comic art imitation signalled a wild freedom of expression in Japan. With a subsequent belief that too many lawyers would (and does) spoil the mix. The arts business leaders should throw the lawyers out.

what an ANIMEted discussion

"fansubbers bring the hottest titles in Japanese animation or anime to eager audiences who can't wait for the American versions of those shows to air here."

The "american versions" are only shown on TV in very crappy dubs.. i'm sorry but dub actors couldn't convince me they were a stone let alone a multistoried character.

BTW.. subbing continues on MFI stuff.. the word around the circles is they got pissed because one of their series was shitty and the fansubbers let em know.

ADV is by far the strictest of the bunch when it comes to american licensers, but even they play the game.

They know fansubbers and their small audiences provide the reiveiws, the hype, the market.

Before fansubbing hit the net the local anime section was 3 feet wide (vhs), now it outnumbers hollywood releases, despite the pridces some $10 above market.

As for sales, everyone i know who collects fansubs and has a stable income buys more dvd's than they do food.

Contrasting to another news feature from the last couple of days, this is basically the same situation as the ClearPlay people, who want to skip past all the sex, violence, and other naughty bits.

The anime people just want to know what the hell the characters are saying.

Both want to modify the content. Both are challenged by the copyright owners.

Congress made ClearPlay legal.

by the way.. the MFI thing is really really ancient..

from what i've observed over the years the game between these guys and fansubbers goes by these rules:

"you stay down there in the shadows, and i stay up here in the public, and if i ever see you rise too far i whack you back down again"

there's a cycle like this about once every 1.5 years or so.. they send a couple goons who threaten about the 6 biggest groups, who promptly abandon popular series which then serve as an impetus for new groups to form.

they know it happens, i know it happens, god knows it happens, and the roaches know it happens, and life goes on as usual... .the balance is maintained and the spice flows for all.

Fansubbers distribute newly released shows from Japan that obviously have not been released or licensed in North America. They put their own effort into making it comprehensible and available to us in the US because the entertainment world is severely lacking behind the times in making new content available to everyone globally.

It can take months or even years before a company licenses an anime and take even LONGER in production to dub it and put the series out on the market. Not the whole series, just the first dvd containing 2-5 episodes, then you wait even longer for the next volume, spend 20-30 bucks on it, wait for the next, get 1 or 2 less episodes for the next volume, still spend 20-30 bucks on it, and repeat. It's ludicrous the way the industry handles it, especially for non-cable TV dubbing or putting long series like Inuyasha on 30 different volumes.

That being said, most fansubbers obey the "unwritten rules" in that when a company licenses a series, they stop subbing and distribution immediately. Until that time, when it's still completely unsure that it will EVER be available through corporate distribution in North America.

Just a little final tidbit that has relevance:
http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=145

Fansubbing is the heart and soul of anime in my opinion. Most series wouldn't be where they are today without fansubbers paving the way and creating a demand for legal copies. Without fansubbers, there wouldn't be, in my opinion, a demand for DVDs of some series. Forget what Cartoon Network does to a series, once you see it in the original language without the stupid editing, you really fall in love with it.

Without fansubbing, fringe shows like "I'll Be an Angel", "Azumanga Daioh", or "DigiCharat" would probably never have been licensed in the US for sale. Oh the horror, where oh were would I get my screwball comedy? ADV can whine all they want, but they know who butters their bread.