Funimation has announced the acquisition of home entertainment, broadcast, and digital rights to the 12-episode Sekirei anime and the 26-episode Tetsuwan Birdy Decode from Aniplex.  Funimation has also acquired home entertainment, broadcast, digital and merchandise rights to the 24-episode Full Metal Panic science fiction anime series and the 12-episode Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu from Kadokawa Pictures.  The two Full Metal Panic series were previously released in North America by ADV.

The Sekirei anime series, which was broadcast in Japan in 2008, is based on a seinen manga series by Sakurako Gakurakuin, whose Aquarian Age: Juvenile Orion manga was a hit here for Broccoli Books.  Keizo Kusakawa (Inukami, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Strikers) directed the fan service-filled Sekirei anime, which was produced by Seven Arcs.  

Sekirei is a science fiction series about a hapless hero who has failed his college entrance exams twice.  After he meets a beautiful buxom girl who literally falls from the sky, he learns he can be an Ashikabi and bond with the girl who is a Sekirei, one of the 108 humanoid creatures manufactured by the mysterious MBI corporation in order to stage gladiatorial-type conflicts.  A second season of the Sekirei anime series is slated to air in Japan in the winter of 2010.

Tetsuwan Birdy Decode is a science fiction anime comedy based on a manga by Masami Yuki (Patlabor).  A one-volume shonen manga published in the 1980s inspired a four-episode OVA directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri.  In 2003 Yuki began a new seinen manga series that was adapted into the 13-episode Tetsuwan Birdy Decode anime that aired in Japan in 2008 and was followed by a second 13-episode season in 2009.  Both seasons were directed by Kazuki Akane and produced by A-1 Pictures.

The sexy heroine of the series is Birdy Cephon Altera, a cosmic police officer who heads to earth to apprehend alien criminals.  On one of her forays she accidentally kills an innocent earth boy and has to fuse with him in order to allow him to keep living until his body is rebuilt.  When trouble happens however she has to revert to her shapely crime-fighting form.