Now that a respectable number of anime titles are coming out each month on Blu-ray Disc, I'm faced with a fast-growing issue: the number of such titles that don't port well to Blu-ray because they don't have proper high-definition masters ... and never will.

(Warning: this discussion might get technical. Bear with me!)

Up until about the end of the Nineties, all anime titles were created using classic animation techniques: they were painted onto translucent cels and photographed onto 16mm or 35mm film.

For anime that had a theatrical release, the distributors ran off prints from the original film. For TV broadcasts or home-video releases, copies were made onto video at TV resolution.

For the most part, anime distributors outside of Japan have only had access to those video copies. And for the majority of the Eighties and Nineties, it didn't make much difference. The few times they needed a theatrical print they were able to get one from Japan anyway, and the video masters supplied by Japan generally worked out okay as-is.

With the rise of DVD, and now high-definition home video, the situation started to change. DVD's picture quality was markedly better than both VHS and LaserDisc, and masters used to create titles for both of those formats showed their age. Also, DVD had features that previous home video formats didn't have, like the ability to use the entire picture area to produce a widescreen image ("anamorphic widescreen"). Problem was, any non-Japanese distributor that wanted to produce a DVD title was at the mercy of whatever masters were available from Japan.

Some video companies didn't feel it was worth the money to remaster their titles, or wouldn't allow folks from overseas to do the job for them -- no, not even if those folks were willing to pay for the process.

In a few cases, it's because there wasn't an original print left in the first place.

Project A-Ko, being reissued by Discotek Media a little later this year, is a classic example. The original 35mm print of the film is lost, and the only available video transfers from Japan come from the LaserDisc edition of the film. Discotek spent a good deal of time and sweat cleaning up the transfer to make it look as good as possible (and believe me, it's appreciated) -- but there's only so much work you can do on such a source. You can't add back picture information that's been lost across generations of copying.

Project A-Ko isn't the only such title to go missing. Many anime companies went bust during the Nineties and had their inventory liquidated, or they were acquired by other outfits who were not terribly thoughtful about what might happen to the original masters. I'm holding out hope that lone prints of those films will be found in a warehouse somewhere, in much the same way Media Blasters stumbled across the original film elements for Voltron in California and were able to create their remastered edition of the series from them. The story behind that, as told to me by one of the Media Blasters team, was pretty stupefying: they simply called every film storage outfit in California and asked them if they had any cans labeled "Voltron." As it turned out, some did.

(As they say on the IMDB: "This film is presumed lost. Please check your attic.")

The big issue, though, isn't shows on film. It's shows that were on video to begin with.

With the rise of digital production techniques for anime in the late 1990s and 2000s, a new problem began to emerge. Many anime titles were coming into existence that had never been shot on film, but instead rendered directly to video at TV resolutions. This was what happened with FLCL: the only way to produce a hi-def version of the show was to digitally blow up the picture. Anyone who's resized an image in Photoshop or another image-editing tool knows you can't do this seamlessly. Again, you can't add picture information that wasn't there to begin with. FLCL's "upscaling" (as this process is called) isn't all that bad -- trust me, I've seen much worse -- but it's a way to try and wring a high-definition image from a source that isn't hi-def to begin with, and the end result is never all that good.

Every show produced today is now done digitally, but the good news is that they're done at higher than standard TV resolution. Not all of them are done at full hi-def, but those that have been so rendered (Fullmetal Alchemist, Basilisk) do a better job of being ported to Blu-ray than their non-HD-sourced counterparts (FLCL or Chobits).

So what about older shows that were shot on film, and which still have readily-available masters? Well, there's more good news there: many of those shows are being restored, either domestically or in Japan, so that full HD masters can be used. DragonBall Z and Yu Yu Hakusho, for instance, both have HD masters from film for their Blu-ray Disc editions. But the restoration process is slow and expensive, so it's something that at least for the time being will be reserved for a few, really well-regarded (and best-selling) titles. And it's also entirely incumbent on whether or not prints even still exist, or what condition they're in, or whether or not anyone feels it's worth the effort to restore them. Many of the shorter OVAs from the Nineties, for instance, are probably gone for good.

So how do I feel about all this? I've got four basic stances:

1) HD versions of a show should only be made when there's an actual HD source. If there's film, use the film to make an HD master. If there's no access to that film and no HD master already prepped, don't bother. This is the attitude Media Blasters took when they tried to get access to the film elements for Record of Lodoss War and were refused. (See this thread on their official Facebook page for more information.)

2) Upscaled remasters should be clearly labeled as such. For the most part, they are. Chobits reads "SD remaster" on the back cover where the picture information is described, as does FLCL. Contrast that with Soul Eater, which reads "HD native". But that requires a little savvy on the part of the buyer, and since more shopping's done online, they don't always have access to what the packaging says.

2a) The practice of upscaling should be abandoned in the long run except where it is absolutely impossible to do without it. It's a marketing tool more than anything else, and it seems to only produce more bad blood than good between fans and distributors.

3) Japanese rights-owners should do everything in their power to allow more access to their film vaults, and allow Western-financed restoration efforts. Fans are more than willing to pay for quality reissues of their favorite work, especially if it gives them a chance to see all the more clearly the artistry of previous generations of animators. (Some of the work done during the painted-cel era has to be seen to be believed.)

4) There should be an aggressive effort within Japan to look for masters that might be still in storage -- misfiled, mislabeled, or just plain unaccounted for. Even without refrigeration, they may still be in good condition as long as they're in closed canisters. But someone has to do the legwork, because for the most part the rights-holders for many lesser but still worthwhile titles don't seem all that interested.

Images: Chobits, Project A-Ko, FLCL, Soul Eater. Images courtesy Pricegrabber.