The Canadian Anime Retrospective

Canada and Japan have a long checkered history. Some good, and some not so good. At I Miss Bionix I always strive to post news and information that I’d think the average anime fan in Canada would like to read about. But as an average reader can probably tell by looking at recent blog postings, updates are far and few between. That’s partially because I’m lazy, but largely because there hasn’t been a tonne of news to cover (and when there is, sometimes I just forget to cover it… sorry Pokemon fans!). So I’m proposing a spotlight, or rather a retrospective on some Canada – Japan history that hasn’t ever really been highlighted as far as I know. It’s the art of co-productions.

According to Wikipedia a co-production is “a production where two or more different production companies are working together, for example in a film production. In the case of an international co-production, production companies from different countries (typically two to three) are working together.” So in our situation we’d have Canadian, and Japanese companies working together on a single animated show from a very early stage of production. So we’ll rule out things like dubs produced in Canada, as well as outsourced animation as the former is just an adaptation, and the Canadian input wasn’t felt during the actual production, and the latter is in the same boat with no real collaboration going on.

Each series in the retrospective will get a dedicated blog post highlighting those involved from production all the way to broadcast, plot summaries, release history (in North America). Each post would conclude with a mini-review with a general comment on the quality and popularity of the production.

The list so far (alphabetical order applied):
Bakugan Battle Brawlers (+ sequels)
Beyblade Metal Fusion (+ sequels)
Cybersix
Pandalian
Pecola
Spider Riders

As you can see that list is quite small. Do you know of a series I’ve missed? Drop a comment below, or leave me a message on Twitter or Facebook. Remember, we aren’t including dubs in this retrospective, so the likes of Medabots, InuYasha, Gundam and more won’t be included.