Crowd-Funded Anime 'Under the Dog' to Change Producer

by tsubasalover
Jan 22, 2015 6:40 AM | 32 Comments

After four months without news, the Kickstarter project page for Under the Dog (UTD) announced the sci-fi anime will be changing producers. Hiroaki Yusa, along with his company Creative Intelligence Arts (CIA), have departed the project; production will now be managed by the animation studio, Kinema Citrus, and headed by Kouji Morimoto.

While no specifics have been given on why CIA has left, Hiroaki Yusa said the change was made "in order to comply with certain requests from members of the UTD creative team, and to deliver an unhindered product to our backers." He further said, "We leave UTD in Jiro Ishii (original author), Muneki Ogasawara (CEO of Kinema Citrus) and Kouji Morimoto (replacement producer)'s capable hands and trust that they will carry on where we left off with such an excellent pedigree of artists to back them up every step of the way." The full press release can be found on the anime's Kickstarter page.

In an interview with Crunchyroll in September, Hiroaki Yusa stated he and CIA had spearheaded the Kickstarter funding to avoid politics and allow for creative independence from production committees whom are often averse to risk. It was further written on UTD's Kickstarter page that they hoped the crowd-funded anime would be "a wake-up call to investors and production committees." Prior to UTD, CIA successfully crowd-funded a Japanese RPG titled Project Phoenix in September 2013; the game is set to release in June of this year.

Source: Kickstarter

Previous related topic: Kickstarter for Sci-Fi Anime 'Under the Dog' Launched

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20 of 32 Comments Recent Comments

Still gonna watch~

Jan 26, 2015 5:16 AM by Tengai

Too much for the CIA to handle

Get the FBI

Jan 23, 2015 6:28 AM by zetsu_shoren

I'm beginning to think that what could i possibly buy with that money which i invested.

Well at the very least i learnt to not get greedy again.

Jan 22, 2015 8:59 PM by Soshy

Wonder if that means they are going to change how they end up implementing the project.

Originally the kickstarter said it was originally going to be a 24 minute OVA of sorts, with the possibility of making it 2-3 OVAs in total or perhaps a movie trilogy.

Perhaps they might decide to go straight to the hour long+ movie or to a TV series now.

I wonder if all the backers are going to get dicked out of their rewards now. Wouldn't surprise me at this point.

Jan 22, 2015 8:01 PM by Jonesy974

Kinema Citrus seems capable. Have to wonder if it will end up as a 1 or 2 cour series, but whatever is most appropriate for the subject material should be the running length.

Is Kozaki Yusuke still involved? Will they be keeping his character designs?

Changing his designs would be the biggest blow for me personally, considering everything we know about the project so far. If nothing else, we should have his beautiful character designs to offset the (possibly) disappointing product with.

Jan 22, 2015 6:46 PM by Deserada

wow...the PV animation..quite intriguing..looking forward to this

Jan 22, 2015 6:39 PM by Llumi

Kinema Citrus have quite a good resume. So i,m gonna be positive

Jan 22, 2015 5:25 PM by Falco1470

Morimoto? Awesome.

Jan 22, 2015 4:22 PM by Alcoholicide

.hack, Onegai teacher, Canaan, I think it'll still be good. :-) Positive thinking!

Jan 22, 2015 4:11 PM by einonymous

Hopefully this turns out good.

Jan 22, 2015 3:23 PM by HuaXue

Oh no : 0 Hope things go well for them

Jan 22, 2015 2:41 PM by AnimeFan500

As long as i get to watch it, i'm not botherd

Jan 22, 2015 12:37 PM by lllllllll

I just want to watch it cause mistychronexia raised money for it

Jan 22, 2015 12:23 PM by ArbitraryMeme

Received their email this morning. At first I thought they had cancelled the entire thing since the title started with "CIA Signing Off".

Hopefully this move will really keep the project's autonomy and creative rights they strived for when they made the KS campaign.

Jan 22, 2015 10:44 AM by ModusOperandi

This is going to end well...

Jan 22, 2015 10:31 AM by dankzel

Does anyone even expect this to be good? I have no idea how it raised so much money in the first place. I suppose anime fans aren't great with their wallets.

Jan 22, 2015 9:55 AM by vegetablespirit

Meh, I never pay attention to producers, anyway.

Jan 22, 2015 9:20 AM by AL19

Everytime some projects doing changing staff, the results of final version will not be the same as when it was first announced

Well atleast the original creator still in there

I hope this anime will ended just like Fumeto Ueda' The Last Guardian

Jan 22, 2015 9:02 AM by SSSS_Shunaria

At this point it's all speculation. But I'm very disappointed with the lack of communication prior to this re-arrangement. I, dimly, hope that they do not continue ignoring the backers. Business politics, their deliberate lack of transparency to gain a better bargaining position and to avoid communication mistakes, really irritate me.

Jan 22, 2015 8:35 AM by asandari

Paulo27 said:

TripleSRank said:

No, I don't understand what you're saying, even with your edit. CIA was the producer. It looks like you're saying "they (Kinema Citrus) didn't do what the producers (the nameless producers that offered a 2-course series) want, they (CIA?) just left the project, whatever happens to it isn't their (CIA's) doing or related to them."

Pronoun reference, please, or clarify what you actually mean.

By "producers" I mean backers, investors, publishers, my bad there, I guess.
Say CIA got the money for a 2 cour anime, they still couldn't do whatever they wanted because they'd have to do what the higher ups wanted to do, in this case they got the money themselves and don't have to rely on anyone else so they could do what they wanted to do, except they left and now someone else who doesn't have the same ideas as them is going to take over, so if someone from outside comes and is like "hey, let's make this into a 2 cour anime" you bet whoever is in charge now is going to jump at it, I argue CIA left because someone actually did just that and they got paid to leave but that's just me.

My point is that the original creators who had the idea for Under the Dog were at and still are with Kinema Citrus, not CIA. CIA is just a producer company that's good at crowdfunding (in this context), so Kinema Citrus chose CIA/Kickstarter over a traditional producer. CIA is the backers by proxy; they are not the people behind the project. (Perhaps you're not saying they are, but your posts make it look like that's what you think.) If Kinema Citrus wanted a 2-course and now have the means to make one, then I would argue it's still in line with whatever creative vision they had from the start. They aren't "selling out" to place themselves under someone else as your post seems to imply, but rather they are removing themselves from "under the backers", despite how little input crowdfunding demands in comparison to a traditional producer.

That's why I find this annoying. They (Kinema Citrus) said, "give us money for our independence", then proceeded to cut off the very people who gave them said independence. Whatever they were going for with the project itself should be just as good as it would have been... Backers just won't get a say in anything now.

So it's a mixed announcement. Kinema Citrus is definitely still getting to do what they want to do, but they're not being very respectful to the people that made it possible for that to happen. It sucks because CIA was passionate about the project and had good communication with the backers for awhile; my speculation is that they were trying to push some backer ideas into the project and Kinema Citrus got rid of them because of that.

Jan 22, 2015 8:25 AM by TripleSRank

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