Funimation

» see funimation.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

funimation was a us licensing brand that turkey did not have. anime in 2000s turkey came mostly through trt's dub schedule and fansubs traded on irc and torrent sites. funimation's name appeared in english fansub release notes as the licensor whose dub a fansub group was correcting against. that was the limit of my exposure to the brand in the years it actually mattered.

gen fukunaga and his wife cindy founded funimation productions on may 9 1994 in decatur texas with seed money from gen's uncle in tokyo. the founding deal was the english-language license to the original dragon ball series, dragon ball z followed shortly after. by the late '90s the dragon ball z dub had become a saturday morning toonami fixture on cartoon network, which gave funimation a primary distribution channel and a steady revenue base.

i was not paying close attention by then, but anyway, by the 2000s funimation had grown into one of the two largest north american anime licensors alongside viz media. dub catalog through the 2000s and 2010s included one piece, with attack on titan and my hero academia joining in the streaming era. the company launched its streaming service funimationnow in 2016 as a paid subscription with dubbed simulcasts as the main differentiator from crunchyroll's sub-first model.

this part you had to be in the english anime-fan orbit for, and i was outside that orbit. sony bought 95 percent of funimation for $143 million in a deal that closed on october 27 2017. sony picked up the remaining anime piece of the puzzle by buying crunchyroll from at&t for $1.175 billion in august 2021, which closed the consolidation of the two largest english-language anime services under one roof.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

funimation's role in the english anime ecosystem was the dub. crunchyroll had built the sub-first streaming model in the 2010s on community-translated subtitles and later licensed simulcasts. funimation was the company that paid english voice actors and ran a recording stage in plano texas. the dub was the differentiator for the casual anime audience and for parents whose kids watched on tv rather than on a computer. funimation's catalog and crunchyroll's catalog overlapped less than people assumed for most of the 2010s.

this part you had to be in the us cable lineup for, and i was not. the toonami era on cartoon network from '97 onward was where funimation's dragon ball z dub crossed into mainstream american tv. for a stretch in the early 2000s dragon ball z was the highest-rated cartoon network program in the kids demo. that one license deal carried funimation through the dvd era of the early 2000s and into the streaming era of the 2010s.

~ the day it died ~

sony announced the consolidation timeline on march 1 2022 with the funimation global group rebranded as crunchyroll llc that same month. for two years funimation kept running as a separate streaming service with its own dub catalog while crunchyroll absorbed the licensing pipeline in the background. the formal shutdown was announced on february 7 2024 and executed on april 2 2024. existing funimation subscribers had the migration tool to move their accounts and digital copies to crunchyroll until shutdown day.

on shutdown day funimation.com began redirecting to crunchyroll.com and the funimationnow apps stopped streaming new content. the dub library itself moved to crunchyroll. some titles remained licensed to crunchyroll, others reverted to their original japanese rights holders and quietly disappeared from any english streaming service. fan documentation of which titles survived and which did not is still patchy on reddit.

~ the next chapter ~

the funimation brand ended on april 2 2024 but the operational dna stayed inside crunchyroll. the plano dub stage continued operating with the same staff under a new badge. the toonami dragon ball z dub remained the canonical english version used in current crunchyroll streams. the back catalog of funimation-licensed titles became the foundation of the merged crunchyroll service. sony now owns roughly the entire english-language anime distribution stack outside of the netflix originals catalog.

funimation's death was the end of a brand rather than the end of a business. unlike crunchyroll's earlier indie competitors that had simply disappeared, funimation got the soft landing that sony's ownership made possible, with the catalog kept alive under a different name and the staff retained where the work was unique. for the english anime fan who had grown up on toonami dragon ball z, the funimation logo at the start of an episode was a thirty year fixture that quietly stopped appearing in spring '24.

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