Manga Entertainment

~ the goodbye ~

For about ten years in Britain the word manga meant a videotape with an 18 certificate on the sleeve. That is not what the word means in Japanese and it is not what it means now, and the detour has a company behind it.

Island World Communications, part of Chris Blackwell's Island group, started the Manga Video imprint in London in 1991 and opened with Akira. Katsuhiro Otomo's film had been in Japanese cinemas since 1988 and had run in a few British screenings, but the tape is what did the work. It sold to people who had never sat through a subtitled anything, on the strength of a cover that looked like a record sleeve.

The label knew exactly what it had. Its dubs were written to earn a 15 or an 18 rather than to match the original script, which in practice meant a quantity of swearing that was not in the Japanese. Video shops filed the tapes near the horror shelf. A generation of British teenagers came away certain that Japanese animation was violent and adult, which was commercially correct and a distortion of an entire national industry.

It got large enough to fund things. Manga Entertainment was one of the three companies behind Ghost in the Shell in 1995, alongside Kodansha and Bandai Visual, on a budget of 330 million yen. A British video distributor's money is in the credits of the film that decided what animation was allowed to look like for the next twenty years.

The end took a long time and no drama. It bought L.A. Hero in 1993 to make an American arm, which passed through IDT Entertainment in 2004 and Starz Media after that. New American licenses stopped in 2011. The British company was sold to Colin Lomax in February 2015 and then to Funimation, which is Sony, on 29 May 2019. On 19 April 2021 the name came off the building and it became Funimation UK and Ireland, which became Crunchyroll UK and Ireland the year after.

None of this happened in Turkish. The word arrived here later and over a wire, already attached to the printed page it actually means, so the decade of confusion Britain went through never took place. I met the same films with no label attached to them at all, years afterward and as files. Nobody in this country learned the word manga from a company, which turns out to be the difference between having a scene and having a distributor.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the dubs ~

The house style is the thing people still argue about. Manga's English tracks put obscenity into scripts that did not have it, partly for the certificate and partly because the certificate was the marketing. An 18 rating told a video shop where to put the tape and told a seventeen year old what to want.

It worked well enough to be self-defeating. The label built an audience that thought the medium was one genre, so anything gentler had nowhere to go in Britain for years. When the rest of Japanese animation finally arrived it had to be introduced as though it were new, to people who believed they already knew what it was.

~ what it paid for ~

Ghost in the Shell is the one that justifies the whole enterprise. Production I.G animated it, Mamoru Oshii directed it, and the financing came out of two Japanese companies plus a video label in London that had been in business for four years. It opened in Japan in November 1995 and did better in the English-speaking world than at home.

That is the part of the story worth keeping. For a short window a distributor could put its own money into the thing it distributed, because the margins on a VHS tape were wide enough to leave something over. Nothing in the current arrangement works that way. The catalog moved to a streaming service and the streaming service is owned by the same company that owns the studio.

~ the postmortem ~

The American half went quietly. Once the label stopped acquiring after 2011 it was a catalog inside somebody's home entertainment division, and it moved with the paperwork when Lionsgate bought Starz in December 2016. Lionsgate still licenses the Manga name for reissues, so American shelves carry a brand whose company has not existed for years.

The British half died on a date. Sony had bought Funimation, Funimation bought Manga in 2019, and on 19 April 2021 the last distributor with a genuinely local identity in the UK anime market was renamed after its parent. A year later it was renamed again. There is no version of that sequence in which the thing that started in 1991 still exists.

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