Mar 02 2009
The Problem with Anime DVDs
I’ve watched a lot of poor-quality DVDs, but the one genre I’ve had the most problems with on DVD has been Anime (or Japanese animation). I’ve seen Anime DVDs where the company distributing them screwed up with the video, the audio and even going so far as to writing the wrong features to their discs. Now I could go through each distributor and tell you what they did wrong, but there is one company in particular that has had more problems encoding DVDs than any other.
Manga Entertainment is the worst Anime DVD distributor I’ve ever seen. They’ve gotten a lot better since their early years of DVD, but during those early years, they were the worst. And by worst, I don’t mean that they had zero special features or that the packaging was lously. No, that’s not even the surface of how bad they were. Let me run down a list of what made their DVDs the crapiest of the crap.
- Letterbox Format: This is a rarity for DVD transfers. Usually the DVDs comes in either anamorphic widescreen or simple full-screen. But Manga Entertainment put most of their early Anime widescreen movies on DVD in the ‘letterbox’ format. What this means is that it is a non-anamorphic widescreen. So when you want one of their early DVDs on an HDTV, the picture is going to look real small and box-like.
- VHS Transfers: This would explain the letterbox format, but doesn’t excuse them. The majority of Manga’s DVDs were transferred from a VHS copy and a pretty poor one at that. On the Royal Space Force DVD, you can actually hear the scratchy audio you’d get sometimes on VHS. Yeesh!
- Poor Video and Sound Encoding: Most likely a result of the VHS transferring. The video looks grainy and the sound is really off-putting on most of their DVDs.
- Writing Problems: You’d think when Manga Entertainment teamed up with Bandai Entertainment to release Ghost in the Shell TV on DVD, they wouldn’t screw up the DVD. Wrong! Here was the problem. The series was released in single disc versions that had 5.1 audio and double-disc versions that had DTS audio. Well, with the second volume, the discs got switched in a writing mix-up. So if you didn’t have a DTS system, you got no audio.
- Shamless Promotional Special Features: One thing you could always count on being on all their DVDs was Manga’s Video Catalog. This ‘catalog’ is basically a slideshow of all of Manga Entertainment’s video releases. It was fun to see on VHS, but it just looks tacky on DVD. Oh, and you could always count on seeing their commercials and weblinks on every DVD if nothing else.
Since Manga has teamed up with Bandain Entertainment back in 2004, things have gotten much better for the company. Their website looks a million times better than it did five years ago, they’re DVD releases have look much better, and they air most of their Anime TV series Monday nights on the Sci-Fi Channel. But judging by the fact that they still keep most of their older titles on their online catalog, they’ll have to with their mistakes until they let go of the rights to their early Anime (which they’ve done for most of them). Most of their older titles have gone on to much better DVD releases with the Honneamise distributor and that’s okay. Manga Entertainment can keep doing their thing and other companies can give their lesser titles a just DVD release.
