Thousands of Anime fans filled the Los Angeles Convention center for day 1 of the 24th annual Anime Expo Thursday, July 2nd. The Expo, which ends Sunday, is used by Japanese animation developers and distributors to reach out to their fans and promote new projects. Video game developers use Anime Expo to promote some of their product and over a thousand vendors sell anime related product, as well as video games, books and a variety of other product.
During the first day, Media streaming website Crunchyroll, premiered “Braves of the Six Flowers” exclusively at Anime Expo. Crunchyroll streams over 200 anime and asian drama series to over five million subscribers worldwide for $6.95 a month. “Braves of the Six Flowers” is based on the light novel by Ishio Yamagata and will be broadcast on Crunchyroll starting July 2nd at 12:30pm Pacific Time.
Unified Pictures and Digital Frontier talked about “Vampire Hunter: D Resurrection,” a CGI animation project based on the series of novels written Hideyuki Kikuchi and published by Asahi Shimbun. “The goal is to put together a one hour feature animated series, something that hasn’t been done before,” United Pictures’ Kurt Rauer said. The film released in 1985 and it’s sequel “Vampire Hunter: D Bloodlust” are both cult classics. Both Kikuchi and Bloodlust director Yoshiaki Kawajiri are involved in the project. The novels are available in The United States through Dark Horse comics.
Sentai Filmworks announced its acquisition of the right to distribute “Legend of Galactic Heroes.” The series was a big hit in the 80’s, however it hasn’t been decided whether the series will be dubbed in english. Sentai Filmworks also hosted a live unboxing of a prototype for its boxset of the series “Beyond the Boundary” and gave a sneak peek of the english dubbed version of the series “Black Bullet.”
Aniplex of America hosted a screening of the english dubbed version of “Expelled from Paradise.” It announced it picked up the show “God Eater,” which is the first non Aniplex property it picks up. The series will stream exclusively on Daisuki. It announced the availability of the first ark of Durarara!!X2 on blu-ray, as well as the upcoming second ark. It also announced a new mobile app, which fans can download for free to receive the latest news from Aniplex.