We’re lucky here in the UK that there are companies determined to import the very best anime. All the Anime, based down the road in Glasgow, is one such. At last year’s Scotland Loves Anime festival I watched Patema Inverted and enjoyed it – despite it messing, at level 10, with my vertigo. Now All the Anime is offering the Ultimate Edition.
The Kickstarter launched on the 2nd of May and will close on the 1st of June. It’s asking for £16,000 and has already made that. Anime fans in the UK, over 500 of them, have already taken the total to above £20,000.
A pledge of £1 (aka “Warm Fuzzies”) unlocks art and £22 opens up the collectors edition. It’s amazingly good value. The “Ultimate Edition” unlocks at £40.
There are some questions around why All the Anime needs to Kickstart this and what happens to the money. 50% of all the cash goes to production costs – that’s authoring, translation, material access, replication, packaging, shipping and fulfilment. There’s a flat fee of £2,500 just to start that process up. 40% of the Kickstarter budget goes on the Kickstarter extras. That leaves 10% (plus 20p per backer) that goes to Kickstarter. Importantly, none of the money from Kickstarter goes to acquring the rights to any of the material.
Stretch goals are interesting and All the Anime are following their usual pattern. This is what they say;
We Kickstart projects a lot (check our profile if you’re curious or follow us to see what we end up supporting usually). And to be honest, we’re pretty sick of stretch goals dictated by the companies in question. We prefer to get the input of backers and cater to their preferences – within reason of course – sadly, no unicorns as stretch goals.
Does this turn the anime market upside down? It certainly would if Kickstarter was a route to buy rights. Even without this what Kickstarter allows is for anime fans around the country to pool resources. There may not be enough of us to support stores in every city but there are plenty of us across the country. It feels like a very similar situation to roleplayers; we’ll open our wallets when we see a good, quality deal, and when we do there’s enough of us to fund even big projects.
