Pity the poor anime pundit, busily making predictions about stuff that’s in the distant… I mean near… I mean tomorrow… I mean just happened. Only last month I was merrily giving an interview to Variety magazine, predicting crowd-sourced anime within the next two years. I was inspired by the sight of the Kickstarter funding for the manga of Osamu Tezuka’s Barbara, which swiftly rustled up the required ten grand. You could probably squeeze out a crappy anime video one-shot for $20,000, I mused, so what were the chances that someone decided to hit up forty wealthy fans for $500 each? It’s already what the Japanese charge for some DVD box sets, so why not?
Within a couple of weeks, San Francisco developer Double Fine announced that it had managed to scrape $480,000 to go into production on a new game, a “Double Fine Adventure”. That’s enough to make a 12-episode anime television series! If you really want to make an animated tentacle-invasion version of the Iron Lady, now all you need is to rustle up 10,000 like-minded friends.
Except! You don’t need to be a genius mathematician here to see that some of the Double Fine investors were putting in a lot more than the minimum $15. In fact, if there were 10,000 of them, their average investment was the price of a posh car, each! So this isn’t quite the grass roots investment funded solely by potential end-users that some are pretending it to be. There are still some big investors behind the scenes, but not many! Just think, what if you could write off the cost of a convention weekend and put it towards actually making an anime? And since there are stepped levels of involvement, you’d also be likely to score some exclusive, personalised merchandise, too, and your name on the credits. Beats standing around a car park dressed as an elf!
So, for now, my prediction still stands. I still see a crowd-funded anime production happening within the next two years [Time Travel Footnote: there was a wait of only eight months or so before this happened]. Probably a crowd-funded anime translation substantially sooner than that. But if you had a personal say in which new anime actually got made, which would you choose?
Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO #97, 2012.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 
Double Fine is the name of the developer, not the game. Nearly nothing about the game has been revealed.
Thanks, cuc. Fixed.
Not exactly anime depending on who you ask, but I remember reading somewhere and had always thought that Kihachirō Kawamoto’s The Book of the Dead, which premièred in 2005, was in at least a large part crowd-funded – which would explain the length of its ending credits. Though I can’t find where now: possibly someone able to find it in Japanese sources could confirm, though I don’t think it would have been one in which I read that.
The Midnight Eye review mentions a lot of investors in the credits but that’s nothing unusual in the film world. Haven’t seen it, so I can’t comment as to whether those are corporate investments (which is straightforward capitalism) or private investors, which is a step closer to what we now call “crowd-funding”.
K20: Legend of the Mask had a “production committee” of 47 members…
A kickstarter-style site for anime actually is already in the works: http://www.fandompost.com/oldforums/showthread.php?9570-A-kickstarter-streaming-supporting-website-for-classic-anime
Yes Shaun, but that doesn’t mean that it has “happened” yet…!
Who’s Shaun?
You said “..probably a crowd-funded anime translation substantially sooner than that” and that does indeed look to be coming true.
Sorry, I meant Shiroi, got you mixed up.If it actually happens within the next 24 months (instead of just being talked about), then I am very insightful. And so are you.
It took me so long to reply to this comment because last week the site went down, someone broke into it, and upgraded all my software. Presumably someone at Titan felt like having a tinker with the GUI, or whatever the kids are calling it these days.
And there we are: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2012-10-01/i.g-tatami-galaxy-yuasa-raise-funds-for-kick-heart-anime
And in a similar but more generalised vein, AniPipo (http://en.anipipo.com/).
Also, for translation, Anime Sols as I mentioned elsewhere.