There was nothing wrong with their TV sets. When Indian anime fans tuned in to the soft relaunch of the country’s arm of the Animax network, they found the cleavage of fully dressed female characters digitally blurred.
While different outlets reported on Twitter that this was happening on several shows, at the time of writing, the only well-documented case was the series To the Abandoned Sacred Beasts. Several female characters carry blurs over their chest area, especially prominently the especially voluptuous supporting character Liza Runecastle (pictured above). Male chests, even completely undressed, remain unaffected. The series and the manga it is based on were released in the US in the 2010s without incident.
Anime’s Obstacles in India
Animax has a rocky history in India. The channel started operations in 2004 with a young target audience, broadcasting in Hindi and English. In 2006, the focus shifted to older viewers and Hindi-language broadcasts were abandoned in favor of English-only dubs. Later other formats than anime were added to the program, like American live-action films, variety shows and K-dramas. For a while, anime was only broadcast with the original Japanese language tracks. Operations ceased in 2017. The relaunch, which started this January on the streaming platform JioTV, is still in its experimental phase.
Anime and manga are popular in India but often clash with the moral standards of very vocal conservative circles. Six years ago, a ban on the children’s anime Doraemon was in heated discussion as the popular series was thought to give children bad examples. It features a robot cat helping out its young protagonist with futuristic gadgets instead of letting him solve his problems on his own.
Censorship of movies, television and other forms of entertainment is certainly not an India-exclusive phenomenon. Last year, Chinese censors attached a title card to the latest Minions film, informing audiences that the protagonist Gru returned to his family instead of starting a criminal career and that the film’s villain Wild Knuckles was caught by authorities and ordered to serve 20 years in prison. In the original version, no such things happened. Instead, both rode off together. The anime series Puni Puni Poemy was banned in New Zealand on the grounds that it promoted and supported “the exploitation of children and young persons for sexual purposes.” In Japan, the release of the videogame The Callisto Protocol was recently canceled by its developers as they saw no chance of passing the country’s rating system without drastic cuts.
Outside of India, no cleavage blurring has been reported on any Animax station.
Source: Twitter
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