Illumitoon Entertainment was a production company based in

Fort Worth, Texas Fort Worth is the fifth-largest city in the U.S. state of Texas and the 13th-largest city in the United States. It is the county seat of Tarrant County, covering nearly into four other counties: Denton, Johnson, Parker, and Wise. According ...

that specialized in

anime is Traditional animation, hand-drawn and computer animation, computer-generated animation originating from Japan. Outside of Japan and in English, ''anime'' refers specifically to animation produced in Japan. However, in Japan and in Japane ...

. It was founded in January 2006 by former

Funimation Crunchyroll, LLC, previously known as Funimation from 1994 to 2022, is an American entertainment company owned by Japanese conglomerate Sony as a joint venture between Sony Pictures and Sony Music Entertainment Japan's Aniplex that specializes ...

executives Stephanie Giotes, Richard Ray, and Barry Watson. Illumitoon's goal was to have its shows aired on television and offer unedited dual language DVDs.

History

Illumitoon shared facilities with CRM Productions in

and Westlake Entertainment was used for distribution. The company's first anime license was

Beet the Vandel Buster is a Japanese manga series written by Riku Sanjo and illustrated by Koji Inada. It takes place in a fantasy world where humans have been suffering from the attacks of the demon-like Vandels. Humans can fight back by becoming a Vandel Buste ...

and Beet the Vandel Buster Excellion. They also licensed

AM Driver ''AM Driver'', known in Japan as , is an anime series produced by Studio Deen, TV Tokyo and Nihon Ad Systems. It is directed by Yūji Yamaguchi, with Satoshi Namiki handling series composition, Eiji Suganuma designing the characters and Kazu ...

B't X and stylized as B'T X, is a manga series, written and illustrated by Masami Kurumada. It was serialized in '' Shōnen Ace'' from 1994 to 2000. The series is set in a fictional universe where science has progressed to the creation of mech ...

, and BT'X Neo. Illumitoon joined with Westlake for the licensing of

Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo is a Japanese comedy manga series written and illustrated by Yoshio Sawai. It was serialized in Shueisha's ''shōnen'' manga magazine ''Weekly Shōnen Jump'' from February 2001 to November 2005, with its chapters collected in twenty-one '' ...

. Several Illumitoon releases had production issues including music being changed, the use of dubtitles (subtitles created from the dub script), and inoperable discs. Replacements with translated subtitles were offered for the first DVDs of Beet, Bobo, and B't X that were later found to be DVD-Rs. AM Driver and B't X were licensed by The Anime Network for VOD, but only 14 episodes of each series had a complete dub. After Westlake ceased distribution of their titles, future releases from Illumitoon were cancelled in late 2007.

Post Illumitoon

AM Driver was never released on DVD and all series remained incomplete until S'more Entertainment relicensed Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo. This release also experienced issues due to the lack of subtitles. B't X was relicensed in 2016 by

Anime Midstream is Traditional animation, hand-drawn and computer animation, computer-generated animation originating from Japan. Outside of Japan and in English, ''anime'' refers specifically to animation produced in Japan. However, in Japan and in Japane ...

References

External links

* Anime companies Companies based in Fort Worth, Texas Mass media companies established in 2006 {{anime-org-stub

History

Post Illumitoon

See also

References

Further reading

External links