Sentai Reveals New Acquisitions
|Sentai Filmworks has announced its acquisition of the 2011 Mawaru Penguindrum & 2009 Tegami Bachi television series and the 1993 Jubei Ninpucho motion picture. Creator/director Kunihiko Ikuhara’s dense, complex, and confusing 24-episode drama Mawaru Penguindrum will be released on domestic DVD & BD this December. Sentai’s initial acquisition of Tegami Bachi ~ Letter Bee includes only the 25-episode first TV series. Crunchyroll simulcast the series. The show will be released on domestic DVD this December. Manga Entertainment previously distributed the Jubei Ninpucho movie under the title “Ninja Scroll.” Sentai will re-release the film on DVD & BD this December.
Quite happy to see a domestic distributor willing to take a big risk on such a polarizing show as Penguindrum. It’s quite a brilliant show, but it’s too convoluted for most viewers to enjoy.
Source: Anime News Network
Add a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
I had a feeling Penguindrum would get a license simply for the “From the director of Utena and Sailor Moon” sticker they’ll no doubt put on it, but I won’t deny that even though I loved it I didn’t recommend it to a number of friends. The storytelling gets really out there and it seems like a hard thing to pitch more than one or two volumes of. Hopefully I’ll get straight to box release and it’ll be hard to string someone along only part of the way. Buying a disc that gives no answers is not a great feeling.
I don’t think the Utena and Sailor Moon connection guarantees it being a successful, or The World Exists for Me would’ve been a hit. My guess it underperformed in Japan, and Sentai got a good deal out of it, because the U.S. edition will be following the R2 home video release very closely, and that rarely happens.