1 Not available domestically, unfortunately.  It's one I'll keep an eye out for.

2 "We're not in Kansas anymore"
Sounds like it could that have been deliberate, the way the Kansas portions of The Wizard of Oz are in black and white.
(I tried to italicize the movie title, but this text box apparently still doesn't work quite right in Chrome--it italicized the whole comment.)

3 That was just me saying that. The movie makes no reference to Kansas, and there isn't any obvious reference to the Wizard of Oz, either.

4 Steven, I was floating the idea that in both movies, filming the real-world portions of the movie in a different style than the magical-place portions as a stylistic differentiator.

5 I am curious about these anime series that you are watching. Somewhat new to anime. How do you find these?

Amazon.com often has no idea what I'm talking about. The major sites I am aware of, Crunchyroll and Funimation, often don't have these either.

6

These days most of the stuff I watch is pirated, coming off of bit torrents.

The two best trackers I've found are Nyaatorrents and BakaBT. TokyoToshokan isn't a tracker, but it's an aggregator where people announce torrents.

The torrent program I use is uTorrent. I'm currently using version 2.2.1. I have a computer dedicated solely to doing torrents, and it runs 24/7, mostly hosting BakaBT torrents, which is why my exchange ratio there is 10.3:1

7

 

I held out and was virtuous for a very long time. Up until about two years ago, I only wrote about legal DVDs I had purchased. But it finally got to be too much for me, especially after the North American market collapsed.

Even disregarding the price, the sad fact is that the product delivered by the fansub groups via torrents is better than what we can buy. It's more timely, and the quality is higher, and the resolution is better, and it's more comprehensive.

I wish it weren't so. I would rather buy than steal. But two years ago it reached the point where it didn't feel like virtue to be honest. It felt like being a sucker.

Even as big as the anime market was in North America three years ago before everything fell apart, we were still being treated as second class citizens. Usually there was a delay of between 1 and 3 years before titles got released here, if they were. And what we got was 480p, which these days looks like a postage stamp to me. (Especially on my 1920*1080 computer display.)

Well, it is a tenet of capitalist theory that a market will respond to a vacuum, and this one did. Fansubbing started really small, maybe 20 years ago. But these things build momentum. Users beget fansub circles, and increases in numbers of titles bring in more viewers. It builds. Now it's huge.

There are at least 20 significant fansub groups (and probably more like 50 minor ones), and it's a rare title which doesn't get subbed by at least two groups. They're providing a good quality product, and they aren't charging for it. Against that, companies like Funimation and ADV were offering a worse product, later, that cost a lot. It's little wonder that ADV died.

8 I said many times that the solution was to co-opt, not to punish the fansubbers.  Crunchyroll proved that it can work, but even there, there's issues with quality and timeliness.  And as Avatar will tell you, they pay crap to translators.

9

CrunchyRoll is the only company here who are making a serious attempt to compete with fansubs on close to equal terms.

Their problem is that the Japanese production companies are terrified of the possibility that Japanese fans will start coming to North America for product, instead of buying the domestic product. The prices are lower here because American customers won't let themselves be reamed the way Japanese fans have always been.

So CrunchyRoll cannot offer Download-To-Own because then the Japanese would buy from CR instead.

10 Thanks for mentioning this movie; I was curious about it back when it was announced and it sounds like the type of story that would be right up my alley. I'm admittedly not as interested in full CG animated productions - I always feel like something is missing, that special human touch that makes hand-drawn (or I suppose now it's digitally-drawn-but-still-2D) animation enjoyable to watch. You can't really point out who animated individual scenes when it's all modeled and animated within the standardized CG environment of the production, obviously. Sometimes, though, the "human touch" comes more from the expression of the story than the graphics, and it sounds like that's the case here.
Thanks for reminding me to go check it out!

11 Me too, thanks for the recommendation.  I was a little concerned because the human characters looked a little plastic-y, but the expressions on all the characters were done very well and the actors were excellent.  The island was wonderfully imaginative, colorful, and the action scenes were well planned and engaging.
I'm putting this in my folder for my nieces and nephews to watch when they can read subtitles quickly enough.

12

I think it might be a little bit too intense for pre-readers, even disregarding the problem of reading subtitles. For a 9 year old, it should be fine, though.

It's a kid's movie, but not little kids.

13 I think that's perfect.  My nieces are 6 and my nephews are 4.  And their parents are twins.   Symmetry can be stupid.  But one of the sets of nieces and nephews can probably handle this earlier than the other, by at least two years.  I'm thinking my sister's set can handle this by the time that my niece is seven or eight, and my brother's set, well, I have no idea.  My brother's kids are scared of Pixar stuff, so I think it'll be a while.  My sister's kids may be able to handle it, but I always run it through the parents first.

14 This is a bit of a necro-post, but Funi just announced they have the license for Oblivion Island.  No word on a release date.