Anime audience grows via Netflix, other streaming
Misa from “Death Note,” Saitama from “One-Punch Man” and Code:002 from “Darling in the Franxx” walk into a convention center. It’s the setup to what could be a pretty good joke. Like the rabbi, priest and monk, these are religious figures in their own right — anime heroes, favorite deities of a subcultural movement known as cosplay.
By many metrics, cosplay and its guiding form of media, anime, have been undergoing a resurgence in the past few years. Consumed in the 1990s and early 2000s mainly by Japanese teens, and their worldwide counterparts known colloquially as weebs, anime is now a significant programming genre for streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, not to mention the anime-only services Crunchyroll, Viewster and Funimation.
Crunchyroll, which has been around since 2006 and is a subsidiary of Warner Bros., announced in November that it had surpassed 2 million paid subscribers (and 50 million registered users) in a time when niche streamers have been struggling.
But it’s not just licensing deals and niche platforms. In 2014, Netflix — which, per its recent second-quarter earnings report, boasts 152 million subscribers — began to invest in original anime content, teaming up with Polygon Pictures, a 3DCG production house in Tokyo, to make shows like “Knights of Sidonia” (a space opera about genetically engineered refugees who escape from a destroyed Earth to
a spaceship named Sidonia) and “Ajin: Demi-Human.” Amazon would follow suit with series like “Kamen Rider Amazons” in 2016 and “Tokyo Vampire Hotel” in 2017.
With more than 300 anime conventions catering to fans in the U.S., the anime market is robust.
“We’d been distributing anime for many many years from the DVD days,” says John Derderian, Netflix’s director of Japanese and anime content. “When we went streaming, it’s just such a core fanbase, we saw a lot of engagement when we put up something very old and nonexclusive. So that led us to, about five or six years ago, to start co-producing anime, where we would come in as a prebuyer or early investor in the show, and get global rights.”
Netflix launched about 30 original anime in the United States and other parts of the world last year, according to Derderian, who says it’s simple economics.
“We take the resources we can from the money from our members, and allocate it towards what they want, and what we see that they want is more anime,” he says.
Anime’s expansion has the added benefit of it being a complex medium with not just sci-fi series, but a whole panoply of subgenres. Already, Neflix has begun streaming series like the comedy “Saiki K.,” the youth-oriented stop-motion series “Rilakkuma and Kaoru,” and the romantic comedy “Ouran High School Host Club.”
Joellen Ferrer, head of communications at Otter Media, the San Francisco-based Warner Bros. subsidiary that runs Crunchyroll, says the growth of anime has been palpable at the company, which has over 1,000 different programs — about 30,000 episodes of anime. Crunchyroll also does its own anime convention, Crunchyroll Expo, as well as the industry-wide Anime Awards.
“It’s the year of anime,” Ferrer says. “We’ve hit that point where there is the increased competition, but it also forces all of us to be that much more creative and innovative and find the ways that best serve anime fans however they’re looking to consume anime.”