Kickstarter, kickstarter, kickstarter… This service is changing they way the world works – games, movies, tech and now even anime is using Kickstarter to gather funds for creating their projects. This time around we have Studio Trigger who brought us Inferno Cop and Little Witch Academia and coming out with Kill la Kill in Fall has decided to use kickstarter as a platform to aquire funds for creating a sequel to Little Witch Academia.

The original Little Witch Academia (LWA) was creating during the Young Animators Training Project 2013 where basically the japanese governments funds the creation of anime. This new studio has staff from the original Gainax who worked on Gurren Lagann and Panty & Stocking so naturally the whole western community is super hyped.

/a/

Their initial goal was to raise 150,000$ and they gave us 30 days to do this. Well in the first minutes of the kickstarter page going live a thread on both 4chans /a/ and reddits r/anime apeared with a discussion of this event. I backed this project when it had around 30,000$ already, so 1/5 of the way. At that time I already thought that this is going very fast, but what happened in the next 3 hours completely blew my mind. Not only did the project get funded in less then 5 hours after it was put up, but the thread on /a/ reached over 6k posts with the last 1k being somethig along these lines: ” today is the day /a/ saved anime”, “project funded, good job /a/nons”, etc. From the post you could see that some people backed from 50$ to the maximum 10,000$ (which is craaaaazy if you ask me, but I gave my 100 to support based Trigger). Of course the producers were not expecting the project to be funded in 5 hours and now they are thinging of strech goals.

Later on there were even discussions on how Japanese otaku don’t like this system and don’t like how local studios are seeking help from gaijin (foreigners). Also as it seems they didn’t like the anime as much as the western audience did (which is strange as we love this show).

Oh you can also view the episode here on YouTube, but they said they will take it down at some point:

So what do I think about this? 

There are 2 things that can come from this: they succeed and set an example for the industry or they succeed here but fail on everything else. What do I mean by that, well…

– They will succeed with this project no dobt, hell they are already sitting at 300,000$, which is double what they wanted.

– The anime industry in Japan might start to recognise westerners as a potential new audience for their works and they might even change the way they think before releasing a new anime, like actually considering us western otaku. If this happens, it will be a serious game changer, because all non japanese otaku combined I think have more people then just japanese otaku. And if all these people can legitemetely get their hands on the shows they love and if these shows are reasonably priced (in comparison to the countries economy) then the studios could make more money then if they concentrate on Japan alone. What else could happen is that the prices on anime could fall in Japan and increase overseas, potentialy leveling them equal.

– On the other hand though everything could go horibly wrong. What I mean is that japanese otaku tend to bycot shows or even studios if they cater for foreigners, especially koreans. There have been cases like this before. In this case even if LAW2 is a success because of kickstarter and crowdfunding, japanese otaku might just boycot Kill la Kill when it comes out thus making Trigger lose money and potentially disband. (it will be time for /a/ to save anime again).

But right now its just a guessing game as to what happenes next. Lest wait and see. This could eiher be the day/month when gaijins proved that they care about anime and that their voices and opinions should be heard, or the time when japanese otaku destroy a briliant studio because they are racist.