Why Funimation is the Worst Anime Distributor in the West

Over the years, anime has evolved from a small niche community to becoming the fastest-growing medium in the west. The niche community that it used to be is completely gone.

In the early days, fansubbing was the main way to watch anime, however, they have become obsolete due to big corporations such as Funimation, Crunchyroll, Netflix, and several other streaming platforms. These both legally attained the anime and subtitle it much faster.

As an avid consumer of the medium, large streaming services have worsened over the years.

While many, including me, would like to obtain anime legally to support the industry, large corporations, especially Funimation, offer worse services than piracy sites such as animedao.to and 9anime.to.

I, among many, believe that Funimation is the worst corporation to legally stream anime on. From a company built upon a strong foundation, it has fallen from grace. Funimation is generally regarded as corporate, tone-deaf, and shady.

Richie, a tenth grader who also watches anime, agrees and said,  “Funimation has been a large part of the community for a long time, but it possesses the worst website optimization and business practices out of all of its competition.”

While Funimation began as a small company by Gen Fukunaga in 1994, its popularity grew as it was among the first companies to bring anime to the US. With its licensing rights to the extremely popular franchise, Dragon Ball, Funimation was able to dub it and have it run successfully on Cartoon Network’s Toonami.

Funimation later was regarded as the “go-to” dubbing company due to its competitor, 4Kids Entertainment, localizing and censoring the source material of Anime to appeal to younger audiences. Its success eventually led to being bought by Sony Pictures Television.

Although all seems well for Funimation, it has no short of controversies over the years that have gradually lowered the Anime community’s perception of the platform. The largest and most prevalent controversy being its censorship. It is ironic that Funimation was built upon having “uncensored” and “original” dubbing.

While Funimation usually retains consistently good uncensored dubs and subs, it has no short of terrible changes in dialogue.  Prison School is one such example of unneeded drastic changes to the sub. The original dialogue line in episode 7 of the show was, “You keep talking to me like we’re on equal terms, but I’m a 2nd year. You have to address a superior more politely.” However, it was changed to include slang and foul language.

The relevance, tone, and meaning of the entire scene were entirely shifted to become a pointless “joke” and not even a funny one at that. Anime fans generally want their anime as close to the source material as possible because of how different anime is from western cartoons. The culture is entirely different and so are the numerous types of shows broadcasted.

Funimation has even addressed these changes by saying the rewritten lines were “Funnier.” This is entirely untrue to most people including Clarisse P., a tenth grader in AISG who also enjoys anime said, “This is obviously a way for Funimation to make anime appear more ‘woke’ and politically correct than it really is, which is not what the community desires.”

Image Provided By: Reddit User u/twinfyre

Funimation has not only applied major changes toward its dubbing, but even its subtitles were also affected. Subtitles are meant to be the closest translation of the source material. However, Funimation has recently also begun to change the context in certain scenes of shows to also be “funnier” and “relatable.” One extremely well-known example is the Kaguya-Sama social distancing scene which had two entirely different contexts and jokes.

The original dialogue was,” “Why are you staying away from me?” and “Of course! I will forbid being within less than 50 cm each other.”

While the English sub said, “What’s the deal with the social distancing?” and “Of course not! The social distance will be set at no less than 50 centimeters!”

This obvious change removes the authenticity of subtitling as the most accurate translation and left a joke in the subbing which would end up aging poorly after the pandemic.

Funimation also purchased the rights to Ishuzoku Reviewers, an anime about a group of friends reviewing brothels, and stopped subtitling it mid-release because they did not like how it reflected upon their company.

However, after Funimation stopped subtitling Ishuzoku Reviewers, they had continued to possess the distributor rights for it. This essentially made the English sub impossible to legally finish and only gave way to an increased amount of piracy and fansubbing.

However, Funimation is no stranger to piracy and its controversy. In 2011 Funimation had filed a lawsuit against 1337 individuals who had allegedly illegally downloaded One Piece on BitTorrent. While cracking down on piracy is not a huge problem, trying to sue the viewers rather than distributors is going to an extreme.

Furthermore, it is understandable to punish people, who publish their own work for free, but it is generally regarded as an unethical business practice to sue people who just want to watch anime without paying for an obscenely high price. Not only did Funimation try to sue fans for illegally downloading anime, but also fansubbers in 2005. During this time, fansubs were still one of the main ways to obtain most anime.

Fansubbing is what started the anime community in the western world because it was the only way to watch anime without understanding Japanese. As the name implies, fansubbing is where the fans subtitled the anime for others who could not understand Japanese. This was mostly done out of goodwill and love for the medium, but Funimation had decided to send cease and desist letters to several fansubbing groups due to not having the licensing rights for Dragon Ball.

This action shows how Funimation is a company that would rather sue or buy out its competition rather than outdoing them. Even though Funimation is the biggest anime streaming platform, it also became one of the worst anime streaming platforms. Its competitors also have no shortage of controversy, they still pale in comparison to Funimation and its numerous attempts to localize anime when they should not.