According to an announcement on Crunchyroll’s series page for Persona -trinity soul-, the series has been licensed by Aniplex. No formal announcement had been made, and after much research on my part, I discovered that Aniplex rarely fully handles licensing operations in the U.S. They did manage Fullmetal Alchemist’s English release (with Funimation), as well as ROD the TV and Blood: The Last Vampire, all of which Aniplex themselves produced.
Aniplex did produce Persona as well, which would explain how Aniplex decided to manage its U.S. release, but the question remains: why? Persona hasn’t been around as long as D.Gray-man, another Aniplex-produced show, and you’d think they would make DGM a priority since its animation and overall franchise are quickly getting old. If I were managing the overseas production branch of Aniplex, and I could only pick one new show to license and manage in the U.S., I’d pick DGM. Of course, IMHO, DGM is better (did anyone notice that I temporarily dropped Persona?) so I’m a little biased.
Maybe they’d already shipped around Persona to potential licensees and they all turned it down; while on the other hand, Viz is still considering licensing DGM. That seems like a probably theory to me, but this could also all be another charlie foxtrot by either Crunchyroll (no announcement by Aniplex, heh-lloooo,) Aniplex, or even Viz Media. I say that because of the challenges that the anime industry as a whole is facing, as well as Tokyopop’s mishandling of Kino no Tabi, which made me lose faith in the professionalism in the people running these companies.
Or maybe I’m just a confused, paranoid fangirl. :D I’ll laugh if the licensing was a false alarm, DGM gets licensed with no glitches, and Aniplex stops confusing me, therefore rendering this whole rant pointless.
~CJ
PS – As you can guess, I have now officially dropped Persona. Hope to catch the DVD release in the states.
EDIT: Geneon was responsible for the majority of ROD the TV’s English production, so I guess you could say Aniplex had very little to do with the American licensing. (I think? This licensing crap is confusing.)
EDIT2: Oh lulz, Dragonaut got licensed by GDH, according to its Crunchyroll page. Lulz, lulz, lulz.
You shouldn’t seriously try to determine lincensing status using CR.
That message just means they removed the series, probably because of a complaint. Not really the same thing as licensing per se.
For your information, several other series that are clearly NOT licensed at this time (or at all, considering how old they are or how unlikely a release is) have the same message.
This has led to several LOL moments in certain messageboards, because people automatically assumed those messages were worth something.
Just pointing that out…
@Madonis: Good point. I don’t like crunchyroll’s shady buisness tactics and ego problems, so I probably shouldn’t take everything they say at face value…^_^;
But it seems likely that it’s a real (or semi-serious) license since it’s a relatively new, mainstream series. Ne?