Cloverway Inc. was a licensing and distributing company allocated in California, United States. Their aim was to localize and distribute anime and manga to the Americas, including not only the United States but also Brazil and Latin America. To this end, they established direct contacts betweem the companies that produced the aforementioned Japanese media and the local distributors and TV networks. And with very rare exceptions, they never employed censorship on their own, preferring to let the channels or external secondary distributors decide which scenes or contents needed to be edited before the series were aired (for example, this is the reason why Cartoon Network aired the Cardcaptor Sakura anime in Latin America without any trace of censorship, contrasting the case of the United States where Nelvana drastically edited the series and renamed it Cardcaptors before it was aired as such in the US Cartoon Network feed). Cloverway also held close contacts with dubbing companies to commission the dubs for the licensed series, typically one per language.
The company was founded in 1991, and as soon as they did so they began contacts with Toei Animation to negotiate the licensing of their biggest hits for the region. The first such show was Saint Seiya which, under the name Knights of the Zodiac, began airing in Mexico and Brazil since 1992; the success of the series in those countries led to the distribution of Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball to those and other countries, which greatly boosted and popularity of anime in the continent at large. As mentioned before, Cloverway almost never resorted to censorship, so in case the need to do so arose in a country due to local regulations, they issued licensing and distributing delegations to local companies; this was particularly necessary in the United States and Canada. Over time, they have brought more and more series from Japan, but at the same time lost deals with major companies due to either their restructuring (for example, Shueisha became a joint owner of Viz Media in 2002) or their decision to distribute their media by themselves (the case of Toei Animation since 2004). By 2005, due to the loss of licensing rights caused by the aforementioned deal terminations, Cloverway ended up having a limited selection of anime series to distribute, though these included notable series like Love Hina, Trigun and Samurai Champloo (all of which would be aired in Cartoon Network within the Toonami block in Latin America, and later in Play TV within a block called Otacraze in Brazil). In fact, due to much of the company's loss of power and appeal in the United States, they stayed afloat in their final years thanks to the other regions of the Americas, where anime was having a very significant prominence in television (attributed to both the aforementioned channels and the then-recent arrival of Japanese TV network Animax to the region, which also aired series distributed by Cloverway such as Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu, Heat Guy J and .hack//SIGN).
Sadly for the company, even with the ongoing boom and interest in anime in the Americas, they were unable to overcome their financial difficulties (which arose due to the aforementioned licensing deal losses plus the increasingly dificult competition in the anime distribution market), resulting in their shutdown in August 2007; this marked the end of a company which, in the opinion of many Generation Y television viewers and anime fans, left an important legacy. Coincidentally or not, around that time anime was gradually losing terrain in the Brazilian and Latin American channels, with Cartoon Network discontinuing Toonami in those regions (the US feed would keep the block airing until September 2008) and Animax suffering a drastic Network Decay that resulted in their final demise three and a half years later. While a few anime series would since then continue being aired in those networks and others around the region, it would take a few more years until the apogee of streaming services in The New '10s when anime enjoyed a grand return to their former extent of popularity.
Anime series that were, in at least one region of the Americas, licensed and/or distributed by Cloverway Inc.
- .hack//SIGN
- Ashita no Nadja
- Captain Tsubasa (J anime only)
- Cardcaptor Sakura
- Case Closed
- Digimon Adventure
- DNA2
- Doctor Slump
- Dragon Ball
- Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu
- Ghost Sweeper Mikami
- Gungrave
- Heat Guy J
- Hell Teacher Nube
- Kinnikuman
- Love Hina
- Magic Knight Rayearth
- Mirumo de Pon!
- Mobile Suit Gundam Wing
- Ojamajo Doremi
- Rave Master
- Ranma ½
- Saint Seiya
- Samurai Champloo
- Tenchi Muyo! and several of its Spin-Off series
- Trigun
- Vandread
- YuYu Hakusho
