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They’re all reverence, too, even if it ventures into high-cringe territory. Now both streaming services, Funimation and Crunchyroll cater to the diehard American otaku community-a community that, many times a year, attracts hundreds of thousands of cosplayers, artists, and fans to conventions across the United States, where they might communicate in weeb-Japanese ( Baka! Kawaii desu!) or feast on the aforementioned rice balls (perhaps stuffed with fried chicken). “We’re bringing our fans an experience as close to what they’d see on Japanese broadcast as possible.” “Authenticity is our currency,” says Crunchyroll’s head of global partnerships, Alden Budill. It’s an approach shared by Funimation’s anime distribution competitor and sometime-collaborator, Crunchyroll. “Not only is it from Japan, but these creators-if you’re not doing an eight-armed supernatural love story set on Mars, you’re not trying, you know?”Īmerican fans fell in love with a Japanese cultural product so, by the time they get it, it had better still be Japanese. “A lot of what is appealing about anime for audiences around the world is that it represents such a different POV,” Decker says. This dazzling stained-glass window into a distinct foreign culture is a large part of what charmed millions of Westerners looking for a little escapism. (Although now, some animation is outsourced to Korea and China.) Its stories tend to take place in Japan, with Japanese characters doing Japanese things. The storyboarders, writers, and producers are in Japan. The manga that inspires it is made in Japan. Anime is a Japanese product, definitionally. “But we view it as stewardship.” Decker’s approach is all deference. “We’ve been a big part of the internationalization of anime,” says Colin Decker, Funimation’s CEO. Eventually, though, these awkward localizations faded from view, as specialist companies like Funimation, founded in 1994, began distributing anime VHSes and DVDs.
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American-French TV production company DIC removed Sailor Moon’s mature themes. Pokémon’s onigiri rice balls became jelly donuts in the US. Sometimes, symbols of Japanese culture eroded in the process. A decade later, Cartoon Network, specifically its Toonami programming block, would inject Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z into the consciousness of millennial America. In the ’80s, before the genre had entered the American mainstream, resourceful otaku ordered whispered-about anime from enthusiast magazines and local video shops, sometimes pirating them to add in their own translations. At the same time, Netflix is among the biggest contemporary shake-ups in the 60-year history of Western anime distribution. A media company, maybe, and definitely a tech company. It would be a serious mischaracterization to call Netflix a distribution company. “I am,” I respond, “for better or for worse.”ĭragon’s Dogma is a Netflix anime based on a Capcom video game. “Oh really? You are a fan yourself?” he asks. When I tell him I hid my anime figurines for the interview-a corporate-culture compulsion-he seems surprised. At one point, he excitedly shows me the prize of his collection, a replica of the Smithsonian’s saber-toothed tiger skull. On Google Meet from his home in Tokyo, Sakurai is all smiles and easy candor, seated in front of a wood table scattered with dinosaur fossils. “I found out after I joined that they were serious about it,” Sakurai says. Netflix executives could just drop a stack of cash on licensing a well-liked shonen or two and call it a day. Even then, Netflix was regarded as a streaming platform, not exactly a studio. When he was interviewing to be the company’s chief anime producer back in 2017, Netflix suits insisted he’d get to form superhero teams of anime creators, manage the direction of a couple shows. For a while, Taiki Sakurai wasn’t sure Netflix was serious about anime.