Studio angels

As comfortable as I am living and working in a bubble, I know that I don't exist in a vacuum. I say this because I see that a lot of what people wring their hands over, i.e. intellectual property, is not the sole domain of anime and manga. Perhaps it's its proximity that has a blinding effect, but it seems that we tend to wave our hands (like I'm doing now) and draw from experience in a narrow subset of all that's going on

Basically, I think that we have mined our sandbox for all its worth in this regard, and there is a dearth of really interesting, or inflammatory, ideas. Anyone who wants to take up this discussion should really look outside of the community, outside of even the industry. But where?

There's always the debate over who is right, but I've been meaning to plug 1000 True Fans since its publication in March, so I'll focus on that instead. It might not say anything about who is right, but it has an idea on how do all right.

If you were to skim one of his books, or just the sound bites, you'd find that a) the book got quite a few things right, 10 years later, and b) there is a strong emphasis on engagement that can also be found in 1000 True Fans. This is like a return to patronage, only with more patrons, each of them generally less well off than their eighteenth-century counterparts.

Could this scale up to, say, an animation studio? Probably not. As it stands, it's very hard to be a True Fan of a studio. Given that a studio produces series across a wide spread of interests, who would buy all of them? And we haven't even begun to consider the effects of changes in staff.

What could be done, though, is support on a per-series basis. Series are already organized into production committees, so how far of a stretch is it to call them startups? How cool would it be if Studio Rikka got another ONA off the ground using a fundable-like system, maybe with funds matching from a big distributor? Put out a pilot or premiere episode, and then raise money for each subsequent installment along the way.

It's like angel investing, although the return on investment is only the animated realization of someone else's idea. Still, seeing as how the original angel investors funded theatre, investing in the arts is not without precedent.

Well, one can dream.