I was delighted to notice on twitter that a long awaited anime adaptation has been successfully funded, the series Dies Irae.
Dies Irae, a visual novel released in 2007 was a fantastic urban fantasy romp with extremely confused teenagers fighting against cosmically super powered uber-Wehrmacht. Think Fate/Stay Night but WWII inspired instead of classical heroes of myth.
Dies Irae became stupendously popular, enough to be re-released four more times up till 2012. Despite this and winning numerous awards whereby solidly establishing both writer Takashi Masada and artist G Yuusuke, Dies Irae was never successfully adapted into any other media. This is odd because this is Japanese geek culture; it loves cramming stories into different media weather they need it or not and Dies Irae really does deserve the loving adaptation that fate has decided to deny it.
So it was wonderful to hear that those in charge of the Dies Irae property were crowd funding a pilot episode. The campaign kicked off on the 9th of May and the target was a modest… thirty million yen. Four days later and the episode was funded… only fifty six days of campaigning left to go, which ends July 8th.
One has to wonder if even half this momentum keeps up we could have more than one episode? I have to say “wonder” because unless you have a Japanese bank account you cannot donate to this campaign, as it is hosted on uneedzone.jp who seem to have some kind of allergy to the money of us dirty, dirty foreigners. That is the one sad part to this story as plenty of other anime have been funded using hosts that accept money from as many countries as they can Little Witch Academia and Under the Dog being two good examples.
If you happen to have a Japanese bank account and like the sound of this do check it out: Uneedzone