Geek vs Life

You know how horrible it is, to get really excited for something, and then have your hopes and expectations dashed? Well, for GvL’s resident otaku, that was last Thursday.

Don’t get me wrong, Fullmetal Alchemist: The Conquerer of Shambala was a great movie, and it was awesome to see it on the big screen. And since I didn’t pay for the tickets, I can’t say it was a waste of my money, since I have the movie to watch at home. But that’s not what this article is about.

Let me give you some background, first. At least for the past few years, with so many anime movies being licensed and released in the US, I and my fellow anime fans have been clamoring for theatrical releases of anime movies. And we haven’t gotten much. Sure, there’s been the Pokémon movies, so badly butchered by 4crap that you don’t know what was really going on, and the Digimon movie, which was actually 3 completely separate movies they merged into one (Saban must’ve looked at Harmony Gold for reference on that). And that Yu-Gi-Oh! movie that, from what I understand, was US produced anyway. Sure, we get Studio Ghibli movies, but that’s because they’re put out by Disney, a company with well over half a century of experience at marketing animated movies.

Then you get the actual anime companies (for clarification, I do not consider 4crap an actual anime company, Saban only had Digimon, Samurai Pizza Cats, and Power Rangers, and Disney is Disney). There have been limited screenings of anime movies, and they’ve done well. Take the Naruto movie, which was screened back in June, and even at the same theater that I saw FMA. I didn’t attend myself, but from the discussion on the Sakura-Con Message Board, the house was packed, and if it wasn’t sold out, it was nearly so (I’m too lazy to go look up the discussion thread to see if it was or not). Viz promoted Naruto over their own mailing list, did special “get merchandise plus your ticket” packages you could order, sent press releases to the anime news sites, etc. And the movie did really well. Things like this look good to the anime companies, and they get more willing to do theatrical screenings.

What did FUNimation do for Fullmetal Alchemist? Well, as far as I can tell, next to diddly squat. For the anime club I run, I’m on FUNimation’s “Operation Anime” mailing list (OA is a program for anime clubs, to get DVDs for their clubs to screen). And they sent a nice little e-mail telling me about the “Anime Bento Film Festival,” where they’d be doing special one-night screenings of 4 movies (Robotech, Fullmetal Alchemist, Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, and Karas - The Prophecy). Yet, I’m also on FUNimation’s general mailing list. And I heard nothing. And I check the anime news sites Anime Nation and Anime News Network. Neither had anything about this. Sakura-Con’s Director of Publicity, who would’ve loved to do a cross-promotion with this event, heard nothing about this, until I personally told her last Sunday.

And herein lies the problem. Sure, they have a press release on their website about it, but how many people go directly to the company websites, when there are impartial news sites that post all news and press releases that they receive? From what I understand off of the Anime Convention Mailing List that I’m also on (first time I hear about the Bento festival is AFTER the FMA movie anyway, and it’s someone who thinks it’s a local event, this is nation-wide), the only advertising FUNi actually did was to put trailers up in the participating theaters. Which was also a bit of false advertisement, because at least one person was under the impression that the FMA movie would be in HD, and it definitely wasn’t.

And this brings me to my second major disappointment: presentation of the film. First off, if FUNimation had the ability to play the FMA movie in HD, why didn’t they? I’m not the greatest when it comes to technology, but I’m fairly certain that had it been in HD, there wouldn’t've been a slightly off-set double image distracting me for most of the film. Secondly, I’ve heard 2 different theories on the method of how the movie may have been projected. The first is them just playing a DVD, in which I want to know why the burn wasn’t quality checked, it started freezing and skipping near the end of the movie, to the annoyance and anger of most of the audience (the all-of 15-20 or so of us who were there). If it was a streaming satellite, then FUNi should’ve made sure that there wouldn’t be any interruptions (which is more difficult, I do acknowledge).

So far, everything’s been FUNimation’s fault. Here’s where I get to Pacific Place’s mistakes. First off… the lights in the theater were not dimmed until about 3 minutes into the movie. When they were dimmed, I was actually in the process of leaving my seat to go complain. Granted, there was only a short commercial at the start of the film, and no trailers (although most theaters I’m in dim the lights for the trailers as well), but if they couldn’t pre-screen the movie (if they had the DVD to play it from), why didn’t they have someone monitoring the theater, so that as SOON as the movie started, the lights would be dimmed? Secondly, the sound. Because the theater was not properly set up for digital sound, it took them about 5 minutes into the movie to figure out the proper channels for the sound to go through, so that we got more than the two speakers in front. So yes, for the first 3 minutes of the movie, I watched it with the lights on, and with crappy sound. The theater should have confirmed the requirements of the movie BEFORE the movie started, not fix it after it was already going. Which brings me to point number 3, which is a MAJOR pet-peeve of mine. Anime movies are not always widescreen. Yet, instead of adjusting the projection to be slightly smaller, I got to spend almost 2 hours watching video below the screen that I couldn’t figure out. For the Pokémon shorts, I didn’t mind, but for a theatrical movie, they should be able to fix it.

*steps down from soapbox*

Alright, I’m done ranting, I’m going to go back  into the otaku den and watch the last episode of Mai-Otome Zwei.