Latest segment of Justin Sevakis’ documentary series on entrepreneurs behind the North American anime business sits down with the veteran producer, who spent 12 years at VIZ Media on ‘Ranma ½,’ ‘Maison Ikkoku’ and ‘Inuyasha’ before moving on to Bandai and The Pokémon Company; now on YouTube.
Anime distributor AnimEigo and parent company MediaOCD have released Episode 19 of The Anime Business on YouTube, an interview with prolific producer Toshifumi Yoshida, whose career runs more than 30 years and whose credits include the English-language versions of Ranma ½, Inuyasha, Gurren Lagann and Pokémon.
The Anime Business is a documentary series about entrepreneurs who built the North American anime and manga industries; industry veteran Justin Sevakis, MediaOCD’s founder and AnimEigo’s CEO, produces and hosts.
Yoshida was born in Japan and grew up in the United States, fluent in Japanese and reading the manga and Shonen Jump issues his parents brought back from Japan. After a stint as an editor at anime magazine Animag while finishing college in San Francisco, he met VIZ Media founder Seiji Horibuchi, who hired him as a producer for the company’s newly founded anime division in the 1990s.
He spent 12 years at VIZ producing releases including Ranma ½, Maison Ikkoku, Inuyasha and Pokémon; the podcast episode includes his recollection of a notorious English dub for the Ranma ½ OVA Tendo Family Christmas Scramble. He went on to produce Gurren Lagann and Eureka Seven for Bandai; he now produces English versions of the Pokémon TV series and movies, other-language versions for Europe and Latin America, and new original content as a senior producer at The Pokémon Company International.
Episodes 1-17 and bonus clips also stream on the AnimEigo YouTube channel. All episodes are in English, with Japanese subtitles available through a grant from the Kleckner Foundation. AWN’s most recent look at the series was Episode 12, with translator and historian Jonathan Clements.
Watch The Anime Business Episode 19: Toshifumi Yoshida:
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
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