“It’s increasingly becoming a borderless form of mass entertainment.”īut anime also continues to operate by its own unique logic. “We’re seeing more and more appetite for anime throughout all demos, in all countries,” notes Gaku Narita, executive director of original content for Japan at The Walt Disney Co., which is also in the process of dramatically boosting its output of licensed and original anime titles on Disney+. Other platforms report the same findings. Characteristically, the streamer had data to justify the expansion: In 2021, over half of all Netflix subscribers worldwide watched at least some anime content on the platform. It’s not just a few nerds from your class who go see - now the entire class is going to go.”īizinger adds: “And I think that’s the big reason why the streaming sites are trying to get as much anime as possible, because they see the bigger potential in it now.”ĭuring the AnimeJapan convention in Tokyo in March, Netflix revealed that it would launch 40 new anime titles, spanning a growing range of genres, in 2022 alone. That’s why anime films are just becoming such a massive thing. “It’s going through this motion that gaming went through in the 1990s, where if you played games you were a nerd, until suddenly everyone played games. “Over the past five to 10 years, in Japan and in the West, there’s almost been this anime renaissance that has happened, where it went from being this thing you would get bullied for liking to being something all kinds of people want to talk about,” says 27-year-old anime influencer Joseph Tetsuro Bizinger, who goes by Joey the Anime Man on YouTube, where his channel has grown over the past decade to 3.2 million followers. Once the province only of otaku - Japan’s hard-core anime and manga fans, formerly stereotyped as socially awkward misfits too absorbed in their fantasy worlds to participate in “normal society” - anime is already far along the well-trodden path of niche subcultures that have found themselves suddenly embraced by mainstream society as the next cool thing. The key force behind such growth has been a widening demographic embrace of anime culture, both within Japan and among consumers virtually everywhere. During the decade before the pandemic, from 2009 to 2019, Japan’s anime industry doubled in total market value to $22.1 billion, according to the Association of Japanese Animations. Those who are tapped into Japan’s anime industry say the precursors for these boom times have been building for years. “Japan is such a unique market, where even though total box office in 2020 was almost half of what it had been in 2019, still there was this rare content that did better than ever.” “Even in pandemic times, still the anime market thrived,” noted Kana Koido, a partner at Japanese indie distributor The Klockworx, during a recent panel discussion at the Far East Film Festival. Shannen Doherty, Catherine Zeta-Jones and More React to Kate Middleton's Cancer RevealĪccording to consultancy Parrot Analytics, global demand for anime content grew 118 percent over the past two years, making it one of the fastest-growing content genres throughout the pandemic (the firm measures its demand metric by combining consumption data with social media activity, social video and independent research). The top three titles at the Japanese box office in 2021 were all anime hits and Jujutsu Kaisen 0, a dark fantasy anime based on a manga series of the same name by Gege Akutami, brought in $106 million there earlier this year, as well as a healthy $34 million in North America for a $187 million worldwide total. And the outsized earnings for anime have only continued. In that same fraught year, the anime business also produced its biggest theatrical hit of all time: Demon Slayer the Movie: Mugen Train, an action-packed period fantasy that earned nearly $48 million in North America, $365 million in Japan and $504 million worldwide, becoming the biggest theatrical blockbuster of any kind in 2020 (it beat the Chinese war film The Eight Hundred, which took in $461 million in its home market). box office sales fell 80 percent for the year and Japan’s theatrical market slipped 45 percent, Japan’s total anime industry contracted just 3.5 percent, with a market value of about $21.3 billion (more than 2.4 trillion yen). One of the most curious new facts to emerge is that Japanese anime might just be the world’s most COVID-resistant form of popular entertainment.ĭuring the height of pandemic lockdowns in 2020, when total U.S. The coronavirus pandemic has yielded many surprising insights for the global film and TV business.
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