Why the world is so animated about anime

Anime is hand-drawn and usually two-dimensional, unlike the photorealistic 3D animation that has grown more common outside Japan.
Anime is hand-drawn and usually two-dimensional, unlike the photorealistic 3D animation that has grown more common outside Japan.

Summary

  • Japan’s cartoons have conquered its screens, and more

MOST ATHLETES raise their fists in triumph after a win. When Noah Lyles, an American sprinter, won gold in the Olympics 100-metre race in August, he held his hands out in front of him, wrists together and fingers extended, as though getting ready to catch a large ball. The gesture may have seemed odd, but fans of Japanese animation knew immediately that Mr Lyles, an avowed fan of the genre, was making a reference to a popular franchise, “Dragon Ball".

Mr Lyles will have more cause to celebrate on October 11th, with the release of a new “Dragon Ball" series and video game (more than 70m people play a mobile game from the franchise). So will Ishiba Shigeru, Japan’s new prime minister, another fan. Once a domestically consumed niche product “watched by people with no friends at school", as one veteran producer ruefully recalls, anime has become a global sensation. These days its export value in Japan, alongside other content such as video games, is approaching that of semiconductors or steel; it now claims more fans outside the country than within it. Some estimate that around 800m people globally are animated about anime.

Those unfamiliar with the genre often wonder what anime is. “Animation created in Japan" is the simple definition offered by Rahul Purini, the head of Crunchyroll, an anime-streaming service with around 130m users across 200 countries. But there is also an aesthetic connotation: anime is hand-drawn and usually two-dimensional, unlike the photorealistic 3D animation that has grown more common outside Japan. The characters often resemble hyper-caffeinated Tintins, with unusually large, expressive eyes, small noses, strange hair and easily decipherable emotions.

Anime tends to be set in non-specific places, such as vaguely European-looking cities for some films by Miyazaki Hayao, Japan’s most acclaimed creator. The setting makes it easy for non-Japanese audiences to relate; the only barrier is language, and animation is more easily dubbed than live-action films.

Recently anime has raced into people’s homes with Lyles-like speed. In 2023 Japan’s anime industry hit a record high, with revenues of ¥339bn ($2.3bn), up by nearly a quarter from a year earlier, according to Teikoku Databank, a research firm. Anime now makes almost half its profits abroad. Netflix’s anime titles had more than 1bn views in over 190 countries last year; the most popular included “Demon Slayer", about an orphaned boy who battles demons to avenge his family, and “My Happy Marriage", about a girl with magic powers who is underestimated by her in-laws.

Two factors help explain anime’s surging global popularity. The first is streaming, which made anime easier to find and watch. Fans no longer have to depend on the decisions of network programmers or wait a week for another episode. They can binge, explore and discover on their own. Anime viewership boomed during the pandemic, as the world sat at home in front of screens for months. (The year 2020 was the first time anime made more money outside Japan than within.) Since then viewership numbers have continued rising in Japan and around the world. Increased demand is producing increased supply. In 2023 anime studios licensed 300 works in regions such as North America, South-East Asia and western Europe.

Second, audiences have grown tired and suspicious of Hollywood’s neat resolutions. As Susan Napier, a professor at Tufts University and expert on anime, explains, “Technology hasn’t brought us the utopia we thought it would, and the post-cold-war world has become more dangerous than we imagined," which makes happily-ever-after endings implausible. Anime is willing to have heroes killed off and characters suffer huge loss. At the same time, the protagonists are often cute and relatable. “It’s a dark world out there," Ms Napier says, so audiences “want that fluffy cuteness".

Anime’s global growth has been made possible by its own evolution. Japanese comic books and graphic novels, collectively known as “manga", have long provided the source material for anime. Unlike comic books in Britain and America, manga are not primarily or even mostly for children. Thousands of new manga are published every year, on virtually every subject imaginable, from pornography to reflections on war, which gives anime an inexhaustible range of sources.

But around 30 years ago, studios started producing more anime aimed at girls, such as “Sailor Moon", that was less focused on fighting and robots and more on storylines and magic. And as the fan base got older, creators began making more sophisticated works, often with more adult themes. Mr Miyazaki won an Oscar in 2003 for “Spirited Away," a baroque, fantastical story about a girl who rescues her parents.

Around that time “Dragon Ball" and “Pokemon" were engaging a new generation of fans. Japan’s government noticed and eventually took action: in 2013 it launched an initiative called “Cool Japan", in which it invested some ¥90bn to propel Japan’s creative industries abroad. It was a flop, because of poorly chosen investments, but that has not stopped the government from trying again: it wants to quadruple the value of Japan’s content industry by 2033.

The painstaking nature of hand-drawn, two-dimensional animation is providing inspiration for creators outside Japan. Earlier this year, Usman Riaz, a Pakistani director, released a 2D feature film with an anime-inspired aesthetic called “The Glassworker", animated entirely in Pakistan and originally voiced in Urdu. And the forthcoming “Lord of the Rings" film, “The War of the Rohirrim", to be released in December, is in that same style. It is directed by Kamiyami Kenji, who has spent his career working on anime.

Other creators are taking that aesthetic in new directions. Netflix’s superb “Blue-Eye Samurai", about a revenge-seeking young woman in Edo-period Japan, won an Emmy for animation and was among the service’s ten most popular shows in 50 countries following its premiere last year. Created by a Japanese-American woman and her white American husband, its lavish aesthetic and gore pay homage to directors such as Quentin Tarantino.

And appealing to anime fans need not entail animation: last year Netflix launched a live-action show, “One Piece", based on the popular manga of the same name (the original show, launched in 1999, was one of anime’s most popular brands ever, with over 1,100 episodes and 500m copies of the manga books sold).

But for all the experimentation, traditional anime shows no signs of flagging. “People are aware of a world that’s more amorphous and more dangerous, [and have] less ability to believe in the happily ever after," Ms Napier of Tufts suggests. Bad news for the world, but good for Japanese animators.

 

© 2024, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under licence. The original content can be found on www.economist.com

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