Not quite a rant

A comment on an earlier post:

There appear to be two underlying assumptions in your post.

1. Everyone or at least the majority of anime fans share your taste and thus would agree that everything in the first list are all very good to excellent while those in the second list range from mediocre to vile.

2. That if you believe that something is very good to excellent for you then you are entitled to it and if you can’t get it legally it is necessary for you to acquire it illegally.

1. No. The items on the first list are good, period. I don’t care what anime fans think. In anime, as in all other popular arts, there is at best a weak correlation between quality and popularity. I do not give a damn about bestseller lists, Nielsen ratings, ((I got a phone call from a Nielsen representative a few months ago. He was audibly startled when I told him that I don’t have a teevee.)) the top forty, box office rankings, Academy Awards, Emmys or the Nobel Peace Prize. They’re all meaningless. And I really don’t care how a show fares in the ANN ratings.

2. No. It would be good if the people and corporations that hold the rights to excellent anime were to make it freely available to all interested for a reasonable price. However, they can do any damned thing they want with it, including burying it forever, and I can claim no legal right to see it. There are also plenty of problems with licensing anime for sale outside Japan, some insoluble. The firms that do license anime choose what they think the typical anime fan will pay for. Disappointingly but understandably, they usually shy away from the eccentric and unclassifiable, preferring conventional series and fanservice. ((Fortunately, there are exceptions, e.g., Oh! Edo Rocket.)) I can only hope and wait, and wait.

But.

Back in ancient times, I read about a band called Gryphon. They were a progressive rock band influenced by Renaissance music, and they played recorders, krummhorns and bassoon as well as guitar, keyboards and drums. The description was interesting, and I wanted to hear them. ((They opened for Yes on an American tour. According to legend, at some concerts the audience booed when Yes took the stage because they wanted to hear more of Gryphon.)) Frustratingly, no record shop in town had any of their recordings, and of course no radio station played them. A few years later I found one album in a used record shop. Their other four records were not released in the USA. However, I could find plenty of records by such incomparable performers as The Rolling Stones, Diana Ross and the Supremes, and The Osmonds. ((Younger readers might not realize how difficult it was to find particular books and records in the dark ages before the internet. I made trips to every used book store and record shop within bicycle distance at least once a month, hoping to find the out-of-print books I wanted to read and the interesting music that radio stations couldn’t be bothered to play. It was possible to special-order some books and records through shops, but it often took months for your order to arrive, and the recording of “The Magic Flute” you requested was apt to mutate into a Mahler symphony by the time it finally arrived.))

There’s a happy ending to the story. Many years later, I got a 14,400 baud modem for my work computer. I found a dealer online specializing in old prog rock, and he had the CD reissues of four Gryphon albums. I found the fifth at Amazon.com. So, just a quarter-century after first learning about them — a mere instant in geological time — I finally had a complete set of Gryphon’s original recordings.

There might eventually be a happy ending to the anime story. Perhaps, like Gryphon, Dennou Coil will be available in North America after twenty-five years. Or it might take half a century, as did Tezuka’s Tales of a Streetcorner. I’ll be dead by then. And I have little hope that the animation of Masaaki Yuasa and Kenji Nakamura will ever be available in North America. ((It will be interesting to see if The Tatami Galaxy, currently being streamed by Funimation, will be licensed soon for download-to-own or disc in North America. I doubt that it will be, despite its excellences.)) I want to play by the rules, but I am tired of waiting.