Manga Entertainment: Taking Anime To The Next Stage
Can Manga Entertainment translate anime from a domestic Japanese success story into a worldwide phenomenon?
Manga Entertainment, now the largest distributor of anime in the world
outside of Japan, started small. It grew out of the educational video department
of Chris Blackwell's UK-based music company, Island Records. Mike Preece,
now managing director of Manga, was first hired in the late 80s to launch
Island Visual Arts. Typical releases: a life of Walt Whitman, animated tales
from Shakespeare, the Rabbit Ears stories for small children. How could
he have guessed that less than 10 years later he'd be sending out press
kits announcing "bizarre, violent, twisted and uniquely imaginative"
offerings which "smash the boundaries of Western animation"? What
twist of fate turned this mild-mannered purveyor of kidvid and classics
into a specialist in cyborgs and samurai?
It all started in 1991 when Island Visual's Laurence Guiness caught the
theatrical premiere of Akira at London's prestigious Institute of
Contemporary Arts. Katsuhiro Otomo's tale of street gangs, psychics, and
sinister government projects was being billed as an art film, but Guinness
immediately sensed a wider appeal. He exhorted his colleagues to buy the
film for immediate video release, which they did. The cyberpunk epic's runaway
British success took Island by surprise and prompted them to look into the
genre more carefully. "We found a whole underground of interested British
kids, a cult thing that none of us really knew much about," says Preece.
Out of the Kiddie Film Ghetto
Right: Mike Preece, Managing Director, Manga Entertainment, Ltd. (UK) /Left: Marvin Gleicher, CEO, Manga Entertainment, Inc. (Worldwide)
Thanks to Guiness' proselytizing, a trip to Japan was organized for Island staffers. What they found amazed them: a country which produced 350 to 400 hours of animation a year, and where feature animation had long since broken out of the kiddie film ghetto. Anime dominated Japanese film and television; in popularity and range of subject matter, it was the Japanese equivalent of Hollywood.
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