When Funimation acquired Crunchyroll back in 2021 for the eye-watering sum of US$1.175 billion (with a ‘B’), I was cautiously hopeful that it represented a shift for the better in the world of anime availability. Certainly in Australia, where—much like the vast majority of the Asia-Pacific region that isn’t Japan—anime is frustratingly difficult to access, I had hoped that the self-congratulatory back-slapping and champagne-drinking from shifting nine zeros from one bank account to another would manifest in more anime on my screen.
Some things really are too good to be true, aren’t they?
You see, I didn’t want to be writing this article at 8:00 pm on a Wednesday night. No, what I wanted to do was start a rewatch of Puella Magi Madoka Magica—but I can’t, since that’s not available anywhere in Australia, and certainly not on Crunchyroll, home to “1000+ series.” Of those ‘thousands’ of series, do you know what’s also not available? The first season of Blue Exorcist, the show that’s already struggled with counting up to three; and while I’d love to see what the fuss is about Overlord, Crunchyroll only has the rather baffling selection of Seasons 2-4. I was hoping, at the very least, I could comfort-watch One Punch Man ahead of Season 3 but nope that’s not available either.
I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this by now.
Australia has had a pretty checkered past with getting access to anime, and to understand just why this situation is even more awful than you might expect, we need to look at the shaky road Aussie otakus have walked for the past thirty years.
Our story begins in East Melbourne, 1996. A well-known Australian brand, Madman Entertainment, would be founded to import anime titles into the country, starting with VHS imports and eventually making their own DVDs in house. Madman soon became instrumental in getting proper anime to screen (as opposed to the butchered 4Kids ‘morning cartoons,’ as anime was often called in the ’90s). Two years after their inception, Madman started airing Neon Genesis Evangelion on Australia’s multicultural public TV channel, SBS.
While the Madman logo would become synonymous with DVD anime, the American-owned Cartoon Network muscled onto our television sets with Toonami, a pay TV network block that ran from 2001 to 2006, with titles such as Dragon Ball Z and Cardcaptor Sakura. Toonami would itself meet an inglorious end, quietly given the axe by its overlord in favor of Adult Swim, a free-to-air programming block that previously had broadcast adult cartoons such as Robot Chicken and Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. Adult Swim stumbled and struggled along for several years, occupying an awkward 11:30 pm time slot to ensure those pesky children had gone to sleep, so they didn’t see all the blood and gore in Bleach and Inuyasha. Yes, truly shocking content.
Adult Swim (at least, the Australian variant) would live out the remainder of its sad existence on 9Go!, a “youth” channel operated by the Nine Network (itself owned by somewhat infamous businessman Kerry Packer) until it was put out to pasture in 2016.
In the meantime, Madman Entertainment (now owned by Funtastic Limited, a brand whose lingering mark on Australian culture is the slow, sad decline of Toys ‘R’ Us), had been tinkering away on a ‘skunkworks’ project. With a beta release in 2014, AnimeLab became one of Australia’s first dedicated anime video-on-demand platforms, delivering hundreds of shows from Madman and Adult Swim’s catalogs.
This seemed like the golden age of anime for Australian fans, or at least, as close as we’d get to it. For a reasonable AU$6.95 monthly subscription (almost half of what Crunchyroll charges in 2024) we had access to anime across iOS, Android, and console applications; AnimeLab even nabbed the simulcast rights for Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works. At Madman Anime Festival in 2018, AnimeLab announced they’d reached 1 million users in just four years—an impressive number when you consider Australia’s population was just 24 million in 2018. That works out to 4% of the population having AnimeLab.
When Madman Entertainment was sold off to Aniplex in 2019, it became part of the Funimation banner (and Sony Group under that, if you’re keeping track), fuelling AnimeLab’s growth. Things were going so well that, in February 2020, Funimation shut down its rival service in Australia, FunimationNow, and merged all the content onto the AnimeLab platform.
For just a brief moment in time, things weren’t looking so bad.
That, dear audience, is called foreshadowing.
Can’t You See, It Isn’t Fair?
If there’s one thing Aussies pride ourselves on, it’s our nature as honest men and women. We love honesty and giving people a “fair go”—it’s even enshrined as an “Australian Value” by our Department of Home Affairs. That’s right—if you want to become a citizen of this great nation and partake in Coles Thin Beef Sausages on Wonder White bread while flipping a $2 coin to determine whether you vote red or blue, you’ll need to agree to being an honest bloke with a good sense of integrity.
I guess Crunchyroll’s getting deported, then.
When Funimation announced its full merger with Crunchyroll, the rumblings of discontent quickly stirred online. Crunchyroll moved to assuage concerns, promising in early 2022 that “tons of shows and movies from Funimation […] will begin arriving on Crunchyroll” and that viewers would have “all your anime, all on one platform.” But by December of 2022, that promise was almost entirely broken, with many viewers noticing that content which had been available on AnimeLab or Funimation had vanished into the void. It would take until July of 2023 for the One Piece dub to arrive on Crunchyroll properly—arguably one of the biggest and most important anime for any platform to have, regardless of your audio preference.
Meanwhile, Australia had been—and still is—grappling with content deprivation driving consumers in the nation to raise the black flag. With the release of the 2022 Consumer Survey on Online Copyright Infringement, the data revealed a stark 39% piracy rate—up from 30% in 2021, and higher even than the peak of 34% lockdown-induced piracy in 2020.
While cost-of-living is certainly biting into the bottom line of most households, it’s hard to argue that price is entirely the problem at hand. Gabe Newell, president and co-founder of the games distribution platform Steam, said in 2011 that “Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.” Over a decade—and an increasingly emptier library of content—later, it’s difficult to disagree with him.
Of course, I’m not condoning piracy, or suggesting it’s the solution to my midweek urge to binge magical girl shows. But Crunchyroll and Sony Corporation have questions to answer. Why, three years after their colossal merger of Funimation and Crunchyroll, do customers have access to even less content than before? In Australia, I’ve seen Toonami, Adult Swim, AnimeLab, and FunimationNow all get launched, acquired, merged, and eventually buried. Having the latest anime each season means shockingly little when your debut expo in Australia is executed so poorly that it ends up on national news.
Maybe there will be a new hero to lift the shadows from these darkened times and usher in a glorious age of anime again. Until then, anime watchers are left in a frustrating position—trapped by corporate rightsholders and region-locked red tape, forced to choose between dubious VPN circumvention, unethical torrenting, or doing what Crunchyroll would deem the legal option: watching the precious little content they allow to trickle onto our screens. That, it seems, is what a billion dollars is worth.
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