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Archiving is exceptionally important, particularly for anime. In an increasingly streaming-dominated world, where major corporations are removing things from their services left and right for tax write-offs or to punish workers for striking, archival has sprung up as a topic of conversation among fans attempting to make sure that programs like Infinity Train don't just disappear into the ether.
Archival can be something like emulation for video games that are out of print, keeping physical copies of books, or DVD collector sets of anime and cartoons. There is plenty to say on the subject, and it is very timely given that more and more media continues to be erased to not pay residuals. Anime is no stranger to this, as this article will show how anime archives will make every fan's life much easier.
Disclaimer: This subject will cover recent media news as well as several controversies regarding anime selling, pricing, creator deaths, and other subjects. Any opinions presented are only the author's.
Why archiving anime is extremely important
Part 1: The Impermanency of Digital and Streaming Content
The bottom line of streaming and digital content is that it's proprietary. With some streaming services, barring exceptions like Crunchyroll and now Netflix, there's password sharing, multiple accounts, offline downloads, and other ways to share it with other people. Unfortunately, both digital and streaming have an impermanency problem.
In essence, a show, movie, book, video game, or anime purchased digitally is the sole property of one person. Even then, they can get rescinded by the owner of the server where the media is held via license lapses, like how various video games got removed from consoles like P.T. Silent Hills. Likewise, streaming services and content can be shut down at any time without any warning or very little warning.
What does this mean for anime? Consider that there's no one streaming service where one can reasonably view the entire Mobile Suit Gundam mecha franchise, or at least the Universal Century era, OVAs included. If one wanted to watch the War in the Pocket OVA or Stardust Memory, they'd have to get them off Amazon.
Some originals take a while to get Blu-Rays or physical releases from streaming services, and only if they're popular enough. For example, if a Sailor Moon fan wanted to revisit the DiC dub and not the Viz dub, they'd have to torrent it. There are plenty of anime that are considered lost or ludicrously expensive if they can be found, from Doraemon movies to the first anime ever made.
Part 2: It would decrease corporate control
If last year's removal of tons of shows off of Warner Brothers'/Discovery's HBO MAX streaming service, including some that had no hope of survival without box sets or piracy like Infinity Train, and the current removal of Disney+ and Hulu content like Willow is teaching customers anything, it's that companies will sacrifice anything if it means either a tax write-off or punishing people for striking.
This brings up an idea that's been bounced around since streaming services started: the idea of corporations pushing customers into a "rent economy," where nobody truly owns anything and everything they have is on loan. Streaming services are the epitome of this, where the customer has no control over the media they like.
VRV and Funimation are two good examples. On May 8, 2023, VRV was completely absorbed into Crunchyroll. When VRV premiered circa 2016, it hosted a variety of content that has since been diverted to other platforms, with some shows still lacking a permanent home.
Funimation still exists but is slowly being absorbed into Crunchyroll. Other streaming services like Anime Strike were absorbed into Amazon Prime; Viewster was absorbed into ConTV by Cinedigm; and all of it seems to be pointing to an increasing move to having everything owned by one company that decides everything, like Sony.
Part 3: It would prevent anime and other media from being erased
Archiving is the practice of gathering material to be stored away for future use in whatever format is available that can hold that material. One of the key reasons why it's important in anime's case, aside from everything mentioned above, is to prevent the erasure of art.
The Nintendo 3DS and Wii-U virtual shops closed recently, closing off access to hundreds of exclusive games aside from emulation and basically hacking a console. That's hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars worth of video games completely doomed to the ether, and customers have no legal recourse to experience these games.
Think of it this way: access to streaming services crosses into the digital/physical issue mentioned with the impermanency issue. Basically, a physical copy of something like the Kill la Kill Blu-Ray DVD can be given to a friend, resold, or traded. Physical editions, especially box sets, usually also contain extra features like Kill la Kill's 25th episode, which serves as the official epilogue to that series.
This isn't to negatively judge fans that may trade having to pour hundreds or, in some extreme cases, thousands of dollars for physical copies when a Crunchyroll subscription will do. The problem is that as expansive as Crunchyroll's library may be, it doesn't have everything one may be looking for and isn't quite the solution to the existing problem.
Part 4: Preserving art through various methods
Archiving websites like Archive.org, aka the Wayback Machine, already help preserve older episodes from older websites. The Association of Japanese Animations' Anime Taizen project archives roughly 180,000 episodes from 15,000 titles since 1917 and was opened in 2022. On an individual level, there's DVD burning, getting external hard drives with 1TB to save as a backup, and purchasing the official media of their favorite show.
There are museums dedicated to this effort in Japan, with several highlights including the Kyoto International Manga Museum, which hosts over 300,000 manga in preservation; the Kitakyushu Manga Museum, which profiles the history of manga like Harlock; the Ghibli Museum, which celebrates Studio Ghibli and their many anime; and the Tezuka Osamu Manga Museum, which archives and celebrates Osamu's life and work, including Astro Boy.
The trouble today is an increasingly streaming-dominated and corporate-run world that would gladly see nothing be truly owned, at least not without being ludicrously expensive, but troubles like that are recent. Before the advent of the internet and streaming, lost media were usually lost to natural disasters like the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923.
Likewise, the grueling work culture that goes into production has led to a number of notable deaths, like Berserk's creator, led people to quit the industry due to rampant health issues, like Hideaki Anno's anxiety and depression struggles when creating Evangelion, or put many mangas and therefore anime on hiatus, like My Hero Academia.
This article isn't a prophecy of doom; it's more of a call to action to recognize and support preservation efforts for anime. In other words, the anime industry as a whole needs to be able to protect their originals as well as the remakes and reboots from erasure, support artist and creator health alongside their economic needs via a change in work culture, and ensure proper preservation efforts.
Customers can do this via some of the methods mentioned in part 4: downloading episodes that cannot be found physically, burning DVDs, and supporting the official releases by purchasing official DVDs and other physical media and merchandise, as well as donating to efforts to preserve art. If there are any preservation points or efforts that haven't been mentioned, please don't hesitate to mention them in the comments.
