I for one am intruiged by this issue. For one, are there any "legal" licensed animes in Malaysia? Sadly not a lot. For one to be licensed, the local licensee must get the agreement with the international distributor for that so called anime. In this case most of the time it's the studio themselves, but in some cases, such as the Korean release of Summer Wars, it's by a well known studio, in this case Warner Brothers.

Since watching animes locally, the only time that I've buy a licensed anime was a locally subbed VCD version of Hand Maid May, the only one that in my memory had the license number that it acquired from the distributing studio (now deceased) Pioneer Entertainment Japan. Other than that, the only one that I can remember was the locally dubbed Slam Dunk and Card Captor Sakura, but pfft, who want to buy those right?

The problem right now is that with the influx of cheap, imitation DVDs from Hong Kong, it's hard to know wether or not an anime is original. There might be the Tulen sticker, but those are easily forgable and highly doubtable. So fans tend not to believe these as originals.

Then what is original? Odex have the license to distribute animes in Singapore, but most of them are crap that even tho they can be considered original, it's worse than buying a pirated one. What about the US import from Funimation/Viz/DelRay? Quite good, but pricey for me. IF you want english in your animu, then this is what you can get

For me, I rather buy the original ones from Japan. Most of the time, you won't get the extras that you get from the Japanese release anywhere else. For example the release of Bakemonogatari's BluRay and DVD surpasses expectation, and why? Because of an extra commentary track that is included in that release. Rumours are you won't be getting this extra track when the series is licensed in and have a US distribution.

In the end, it's something that is vauge.

oh anda