Japanese anime studio Production Reed opens Blu-ray doors

Thanks to prohibitive licensing fees and all sorts of other ridiculous hurdles, the amount of anime studios making the leap to Blu remains incredibly small. Thankfully, Japanese studio Production Reed has ponied up the cash and courage to take the dive, officially opening up a Blu-ray website and announcing a few forthcoming titles for the format. The firm's first two offerings on BD will be Magical Princess Minky Momo and Dancougar: Super Beast Machine God box sets, with the first landing on January 23, 2009 and the latter arriving December 19, 2008. As much as we'd love to see this mark the beginning of a trend, we still have our doubts -- but then again, if BD adoption keeps heading up in Japan, we suppose anything could happen.

[Via ActiveAnime]

[(Unverified) Posted Nov 14th 2008 10:14PM]

Heh, this was announced back in July and it's for Japan only with no English dub or subtitles to speak of on it. So why is it even news here? There's lots of anime coming out on BD in Japan. It's the US that needs the BD anime love. Funi has a bit and now Bandai is releasing Ghost in the Shell 2 Innocence coming up in January. But not much else is happening.

http://www.mania.com/aodvb/showthread.php?t=84276&highlight=dancougar

[(Unverified) Posted Nov 14th 2008 11:31PM]

You guys also got the studio information wrong.

Production Reed is an old studio which was folded into Sunrise back in the 70's, and since Sunrise is a wholly owned subsidiary of Bandai Visual Japan, the above titles are being reissued on Blu-Ray for the enthusiast collector, which explains the high price for the first boxsets.

Blu-Ray adoption in Japan is also grater by a factor of four compared to the US since the major anime production houses get a break on fees for Blu-Ray production in order to spur sales to collectors.

[(Unverified) Posted Nov 15th 2008 11:48PM]

Just get Shinichiro Watanabe's stuff on Blu-ray and I'll be more interested.

Also Ghost in the Shell.