A weekly look into American otaku culture

In what has surprisingly been the best piece of anime news to have come out the in past couple of months, FUNimation has announced that they have the rights to the Negima anime.

This came as a big surprise to me. We all knew that FUNimation was interested in the series last March when they had registered the Negima.tv domain name. After all, it seemed like a good investment at the time. “Love Hina” was a huge success for Bandai and Tokyopop with anime and manga sales respectively, and it is in my own personal opinion that it helped sparked the last boom in anime interest. Also, at the time the Negima manga was dominating the US sales charts and making a name for the new coming company Del Rey. So I think we could understand why FUNimation wanted dibs on this series even when it wasn’t even close to being finished in Japan.

But when the anime finally came out, the majority of fans all agreed that it sucked. Sure, the “Love Hina” anime just isn’t as good as the manga was because they had to take out all the raunchy material, but I felt that is could still stand well on it’s own. Negima, on the other hand, had a lazy animation and weak storyline, which pretty much left the fans nothing to look forward to with this adaptation. Sadly, it wasn’t until the last three episodes that this series really started to shine. It’s a tantalizing look and the potential that the show could have been.

So I really thought that FUNimation had backed out of the deal once the final product came out in Japan. FUNimation’s philosophy is that they want shows that have a good storyline, not ones that will make a quick buck for them. For the most part, I respect their logic. Sure, it does produce a large number of flops (like Kiddy Grade, Spiral, and even Kodocha), but man, they’re some of the best flops around, making them kinda cult classics among the anime community. But Negima wasn’t good, so why would they continue to invest in it?

But I’m still really glad that they are. There are still a large number of Akamatsu fans out there like myself who are going to support this series no matter what. A bad Akamatsu show is still better then most of the stuff on the market right now. So, yeah, I guess there’s still a lot of potential to make some money by giving the fans what they want.

Now I’m just waiting for FUNimation to finally announce that they have BECK, then I’ll be one very happy fanboy.

(PS, Inspired by Studio GAINAX, I’m going to now end all of my posts reporting how many DVDs and tankoubon are left on my “to watch / read” pile)