Bandai Entertainment pulled off a bit of a bait-and-switch in its Friday session at this weekend's New York Anime Festival. Apparently, representatives of its Honneamise label (inherited from the liquidation of Bandai Visual USA over the summer) came out first and announced that the release of the titles sola and true tears was cancelled. But by the end of the panel, Bandai Entertainment reps revealed that the two series are not in fact cancelled outright. Instead they'll be sent directly to the "Anime Legends" label, and will be released as boxed sets.

Fans might be forgiven for considering these announcements on Friday to be rather too reminiscent of the on-again, off-again status of these titles all through 2008.

Earlier this year, the now-defunct Bandai Visual USA announced, with great fanfare, the pending release of sola and true tears, as well as Shigofumi: Letters from the Departed. All three series were then postponed in March, which was the first hint that perhaps all was not well at BVUSA.

Subsequent announcements revealed that BVUSA was to be liquidated over the summer, with all its assets rolled into Bandai Entertainment, its sibling company in North America. (Both companies being subsidiaries of the parent company in Japan, Bandai Namco.) As the early phases of liquidation got underway, BE then revealed that it would retain the former BV label, Honneamise, which would continue selling most of the DVDs, Blu-Ray Discs, and HD DVD/DVD Twin Discs that had been released by BVUSA before May.

Even at that time, sola and true tears were not included on the initial list of titles on the Honneamise label, but Bandai Entertainment seemed to suggest, obliquely, that they would make futher announcements which would probably include them.

Well, on Friday we got the announcement. The cancellation of the original plans to release the series through Honneamise is apparently due to licensing issues, which may involve a "dub versus sub" situation. The earlier planned DVDs were to be English-dubbed, whereas the boxed sets will now feature the Japanese voicing with English subtitles instead. This may explain why the price of the sets is to be considerably lower than what would have been charged through Honneamise: sola will sell at the suggested price of US $44.98, and will include all 13 TV episodes and two video episodes, while true tears will go for the suggested price of US $39.98. Considering that a single two-episode subtitled DVD of other series could go for as much as US $40 through Honneamise, this is a substantial saving.

In other news coming out of Bandai's Friday panel, the Akira science fiction anime will arrive in North America on Blu-Ray in February of 2009. This was another of the titles that was originally supposed to be released by Bandai Visual USA, but Bandai Entertainment will now bring it to the fans instead.

As well, Bandai also announced at the Anime Festival on Friday that it has acquired Kotaro Mori's manga version of the Gurren Lagann anime. Shipment is set to begin sometime in 2009.

Not bad for one evening's announcements, huh?