Anime is No Longer Just for Geeks and Showcases Its Strength at the Major Animation Festival in Annecy

The pandemic year brought many new experiences. For the first time in the history of cinema, the highest-grossing film of the year did not come from Hollywood. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Mugen Train (in Spain, Guardians of the Night: Infinite Train) is a Japanese movie based on the manga by Koyoharu Gotōge that surpassed 500 million dollars at the global box office (443 million euros) despite the challenges the pandemic posed for film distribution and exhibition, thus becoming the highest-grossing film in the world.

This dominance also illustrated the strength of an animation technique that until then had been minority, known as anime. “It’s a way of telling stories deeply rooted in Japanese culture,” explains Mitchel Berger, executive vice president and head of global commerce at Crunchyroll, the main distribution label for anime outside Japan. “An artistic expression mostly created by hand, full of action and emotion, with complex stories and a very peculiar rhythm, without cynicism, that has become a global phenomenon, with an increasing presence in popular culture,” which expands as it moves through the Annecy festival, the leading showcase of global animation, ongoing until this Saturday.

For a week, the small French town hidden in the mountains, almost on the Swiss border, becomes the world capital of all things animated. Shorts, feature films, documentaries, video games, productions hand-drawn, computer-generated, stop-motion, experimental, industrial, or made with coffee grains and two euros, aimed at family audiences or an audience that appreciates more adult content. Everything that makes animation a cinematic technique and not a genre, as many want to categorize it, meets in Annecy. A forum to which this year anime has joined with full force, seeking the best showcases and a bit of respect from its own community. Because until the overwhelming success of Guardians of the Night: Infinite Train, this style was valued only by a few, considered for geeks or rather otakus (the same term, but in Japanese) and somewhat underestimated by animation scholars and, of course, by awards like the Oscars.

But things have changed. Those who grew up snacking on Japanese series like Sailor Moon or Dragon Ball during the pandemic preferred to retreat into the anime of their childhood rather than baking bread. “It’s incredible how much this artistic form has stayed with them. Especially, though not only, with those from Generation Z,” says Berger, at the heart of this explosion, given Crunchyroll’s importance in providing them content they used to find only by pirating online.

Currently, the platform has 17 million subscribers in about 200 countries, offering a library of over 2,000 titles with about 200 anime series and more than 25,000 hours of content, which includes international hits like Solo Leveling, whose third season is “inevitable” according to its fans, a sentiment that brings a smile to this executive, who looks more like a viking from How to Train Your Dragon than a manga hero.

In Spain, interest has also surged, and what we could call the Netflix of anime has doubled its number of subscribers in the last two years. But Berger wants more of a pie that attracts one billion fans worldwide. A style that religiously connects with 42% of Generation Z and Alpha in the United States, who watch anime weekly at a higher rate than those following sports broadcasts like American football.

The popularity of anime is on par with figures of pop culture like Beyoncé, LeBron James, or Taylor Swift, according to a survey released by the company, and Berger sees great expansion potential in markets like the Middle East, Ibero-America, and Europe. “To this end, we are acquiring and investing in about 40 or 50 series and preparing six to ten films annually,” he confirms on behalf of the company responsible for distributing 10 of the 20 highest-grossing anime titles in the U.S. in 2024. Among its bets is the new installment of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle, “an epic” that he hopes to repeat and surpass the success of Guardians of the Night: Infinite Train this September.

He also speaks of global premieres. Berger is not satisfied with Crunchyroll’s role as a platform. At a time when theater distribution is considered dying, only in the hands of a few stars like Tom Cruise or franchises like Marvel, Berger talks about offering fans “experiences”, bringing them back to theaters to enjoy together this style of animation, whose tentacles also touch music, concerts, conventions, or merchandising.

“Demon Slayer proved to us that we can bring fans back to cinemas. I want to make sure that future generations who truly love anime do not lose the habit of going to the cinema,” states someone who grew up traveling from his neighborhood theater to distant galaxies as a big fan of the Star Wars universe and discovered anime with series like Starblazers or G Force.

To kick off this plan for world domination, Crunchyroll is going “where the fans are.” And where better than Annecy, a city that has gathered over 17,000 professionals and enthusiasts from 200 countries. Anime also benefits from a shift in animated trends. “There is a clear turn in tastes, in content, towards more adult themes,” confirmed Turkish animator Aziz Kocanaogullari from ILM studios, known as pioneers in the field of special effects but now seeking to improve their position in the realm of adult animated series.

Animation with adult content is an upward field, as shown by series like LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS or Scavengers Reigns. Both are part of the filmography as director of the Spaniard Diego Porral, candidate for the latter at the Annie Awards, the Oscar of animation, and also here in Annecy these days. “I’m fortunate to work on projects that I would like to watch as a viewer,” admits this creator straddling millennials and Generation Z. “With the advent of platforms, studios are taking risks on content that years ago might have seemed niche, for geeks. They’ve realized that if the story is good, the audience likes it. And that’s why they’re betting on more and not just on existing franchises,” he elaborates.

Other events in Annecy, like the exhibition dedicated to the successful Netflix series Arcane, on the border of what is considered anime, support or are nourished by the expansion of this animated technique that, as Porral emphasizes, is fully entering the industry. Is it always produced in Japan? Berger does not comment on the possibility of anime being produced outside Japan, perhaps due to Crunchyroll’s association with Japanese studios in addition to Sony or because, in his view, there is something fundamentally Japanese in the DNA of this animation style. However, hybrid examples approaching anime from other countries are increasingly frequent. “Netflix’s anime division in Tokyo congratulated us on the work we did because they couldn’t believe it was Spanish,” recalls director Maite Ruiz de Austri about the series Memorias de Idhún, based on the popular literary saga by Laura Gallego and adapted for television as a Netflix original anime in 2020.

Even projects present at this edition of the Annecy festival, like the film The Violinist, the first co-production between Spain and Singapore, have adopted an anime graphic style to tell a love story set in wartime. “There’s something for everyone in anime,” insists Berger. “Such is the wide range of stories told in anime, for men, for women, LGBTQ+… Did you know that 44% of fans are women?”

Crunchyroll’s expansion forecasts may not yet be fully supported in Europe, or at least in Annecy, where Berger’s presentation did not attract the same crowd or energy that the company is used to in its events in Japan. Ruiz de Austri shares the same sentiment regarding the expansion of adult content animation. “The conversation exists and is seen on the platforms, but at the box office in Spain, there is still much room for improvement,” laments the director. “This isn’t so much the case with anime. We are living in a golden age, but mainly in series. There’s still a lot of development ahead in its hybridization in cinema,” she adds. Crunchyroll hopes to prove otherwise with the premiere on July 18 in Japan (and September 12 in Spain) of its new major bet, Infinity Castle.