Ask John: Will the Beck Anime be Released in North America?

Question:
What are the chances of BECK being licensed for North American release? Having seen the entire series except the last episode I have to say BECK is probably one of my favorite anime of this season. I’d really like to get my hands on the DVDs for this series, but I’m not sure of the likelihood of the series being picked up. For one, it relies heavily on Japanese culture, and while there is a niche crowd for this type of thing, it isn’t very big. And two, the parts where the characters talk in both Japanese and English (albeit pretty poorly) can be incredibly hard to translate and dub and still make sense in the original context. I don’t know if anything like this has been brought over successfully before, but I’d really like to see it done.

Answer:
Unfortunately, my gut feeling is that the odds of the Beck TV series being officially licensed for American release are relatively slim. (However, I may be wrong.) It’s true that the Beck manga has been licensed for American release, but manga requires significantly less investment to license and localize than anime does. The Beck anime series is a slightly off-kilter slice of life drama that seems to be targeted mainly at young male viewers. Thus, to be expected, the English speaking audience for the show seems to consist of a small circle of very devoted fans. Especially considering the common tastes of American and European anime fans, the relatively mundane Beck anime isn’t sensationalistic or sexy enough to appeal to typical American and European anime fans. But the fans that do like it are very fascinated with it precisely because it’s such an atypical show.

Unfortunately, the fact that Beck is different in style, theme and execution from most anime is exactly what will likely prevent it from being officially released in America, at least in the foreseeable future. Numerous representatives of the American anime industry have all confirmed the same fact recently: because of the saturation of the American anime market created by the abundance of anime released in America coupled with inadequate support from the American consumer market, domestic licensors will be forced to be more selective in their future acquisitions. That means that shows like Beck, which may be very good but which don’t fall into profitable, popular genres, are less likely to be licensed for domestic release. If an American licensor can only afford to license a given number of titles, it makes good financial sense to skip shows like Beck that have a small audience, and instead license anime that’s more likely to sell to a wider audience.

Consider that Pioneer released the Kacho Ohji anime TV series in America (under the name “Legend of Black Heaven). Although Kacho Ohji skews toward an older audience than Beck’s apparently teenage target viewers, the two shows are similar in theme and style. Both are relatively realistic contemporary dramas about musicians with high hopes and very grounded realities. Kacho Ohji has never been a strong seller in America. In fact, I’ll bet that many American anime fans have never even heard of “Legend of Black Heaven,” even though it’s been available on domestic DVD for years, from one of America’s biggest anime distributors. I think that Kacho Ohji’s poor American sales may be taken as a predictor of the likely American reception to the Beck anime.

In 2003 or 2004, when the American anime industry was expanding explosively and many domestic licensors seemed to be making intentional strides toward broadening their catalogs and diversifying the American anime market, I would definitely have expected Beck to receive an American DVD release. But in 2005, with the American anime industry reducing its output and focusing its attention on licensing certain hits, the Beck anime just doesn’t seem like a title that has a lot of potential to be a sales success in America.

On a tangential note, based on the first handful of episodes that I’ve watched, I wouldn’t say that the Beck anime is more heavily imbued with Japanese culture than any other anime series set in contemporary Tokyo. But the use of language in the series is one of the best illustrations I’ve ever encountered to support the theory that anime is meant to be watched in its original language. Two of the show’s Japanese characters were raised in America, so their dialogue is a mix of English and Japanese. The fact that they speak primarily Japanese, peppered with English, in their daily Japanese life makes absolute sense. But there’s no way to effective dub these character’s dialogue. It makes no sense for them to speak in English and “broken English” when they live in Japan. Reversing their dialogue style to primarily English with occasional Japanese makes no sense either considering that their primary language in Japan would naturally be Japanese. I cannot envision any possible way that the Beck anime can be dubbed into English and still retain one of its most unique characteristics, which may be yet another reason why the show might be an unlikely candidate for official American DVD release.