Subtitled Anime on Netflix

The great thing about Netflix is their huge selection of movies and TV shows. While it's larger than anything you would get in a video store, it should be noted that they don't have everything. I have about 10 movies saved in my queue (half of which are foreign films) that are simply not available through Netflix. Among their available selection, however, they have a surprisingly large variety of anime, most of which seems to be available on the Watch Instantly service. Instant and unlimited access to a huge selections of anime, you say? It is truly a great day for the nerds of the world!

At least that's what I thought...

Upon closer examination, one realizes that the anime on watch instantly are all of the dubbed variety. If you are a purist, they only option for watching with the original audio is to rent one DVD at a time. So, one is left with two unsatisfactory options. Suffer through the often terrible American anime dubs OR go through a 50 episode series, disc by disc, 4 episodes at a time. Even with maximum efficiency and turnaround, this could take weeks. It is truly a sad day for the nerds of the world!

But wait! Recently netflix has released several anime series with the original audio and English subtitles on watch instantly. This is apparently due to a new partnership with Viz Media. The list of available subtitled anime is very short at the moment but hopefully this will be a new trend and more series will be added soon. Ideally, Netflix will implement something that will give viewers a choice between subbed and dubbed versions of shows. But with limited space for hosting streamable video content, having two versions is a long shot. For the purists, we can only hope that subtitles will win out and become the standard rather than the exception in the future.

The current list of subtitled anime is as follows:

• Bleach
• Deathnote
• Inuyasha
• Naruto (Seasons 1 & 2)

If any of these are on your watchlist but you were waiting for a subtitled version, here's your chance!