Anime in New Zealand and Australia [when you could visit both]
Anime's evolution in lands down under
The Japan Times
For the past quarter century, fans of Japanese pop culture in Australia and New Zealand have been served almost exclusively by a single distributor. Based in Melbourne, Australia, Madman Entertainment boasts over 90 percent of the region’s market share in anime home entertainment, and an even greater share of its anime theatrical business.
Not surprisingly, those statistics drew the attention of the Sony Corporation, whose Aniplex Inc. subsidiary invested in Madman two years ago and bought its anime division outright last year. Sony Pictures Television and Aniplex have now consolidated Madman Anime Group into their other recent anime distribution acquisitions: Funimation in the United States, Wakanim in France, and Manga Entertainment in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
On March 7 and 8, Madman hosted 12,000-plus fans at its second Madman Anime Festival in Sydney, Australia’s largest city, after presenting similar events over the past four years in Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. Each festival reports 10 to 20 percent annual audience growth. In a country whose entire population, 25 million, is smaller than that of the Tokyo metropolitan area, the success of such gatherings across a landmass approximately 20 times the size of Japan suggests that Sony made a good bet.
Madman Anime Festival
I first became aware of Madman 10 years ago when I met Dean Prenc, now the company’s general manager of pop culture, during one of my book tour stops in Melbourne. Prenc has been with Madman for 18 years. During my visit to New Zealand last month, he introduced me to marketing and sales executive Andrew Cozens, who gave me a tour of Madman’s Auckland offices, and Melbourne-based co-founder and managing director Tim Anderson.
Anderson recalls his company’s humble beginnings in the early 1990s as a VHS mail-order operation conducted out of his bedroom in a share house. A self-confessed lousy student, he became a fan of classic ’80s imports like “Robotech” and “Battle of the Planets,” though at the time he kept his budding otaku passions to himself. A trip to Japan at age 21 taught Anderson more about the cultural provenance of anime aesthetics, but as an entrepreneur, he focused on other overseas markets like the U.S. and U.K., where anime distributors Central Park Media and Manga Entertainment were hitting their stride.
“I kept an eye on those markets and decided there was an opportunity for official distribution here,” he says. “I was able to get licenses fairy easily because we were such a small market in the early ’90s, when anime was still an undiscovered niche.”
Tim Anderson
Anderson had a part-time job at a village movie theater when he co-founded Madman in 1996 with his friend Paul Wiegard, who now oversees Madman’s live-action TV and film division — which currently handles the Australian and New Zealand distribution rights for Bong Joon Ho’s Oscar-winning “Parasite,” among other A-list titles.
Madman Anime Group’s first big regional hit was Hideaki Anno’s apocalyptic epic, “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” licensed via Houston-based U.S. distributor A.D. Vision Films (now incorporated into Sentai Filmworks) and currently streaming on Netflix. “Evangelion” remains a favorite of Anderson’s (“I still think it’s fantastic”), who says his personal taste leans toward titles that have crossover appeal, like Makoto Shinkai’s “Your Name.” and the TV series “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba,” which debuted in 2019.
Earlier this year, Madman Anime Group’s nurturing of Australia’s anime community extended into real-world urgency. The widespread bushfires that ravaged swathes of the country prompted Anderson and his colleagues at AnimeLab, Madman Anime Group’s streaming platform, to launch “Anime Heroes for Aussie Wildlife: Bushfire Appeal” a worldwide dollar-for-dollar fundraising campaign, supported by parent company Funimation, to aid Wildlife Victoria, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping the region’s catastrophically decimated species. (Up to one billion animals are estimated to have perished in the fires.)
The campaign’s mascot, a firefighting koala hefting a water-blasting hose, was created by Shingo Adachi, character designer for the hit anime series “Sword Art Online” and has raised over $190,000 to date.
Shingo Adachi
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