Demon Slayer is, by the numbers, the most popular anime franchise on the planet right now. A glance at the box-office charts really drives it home. Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle is outperforming not only Superman, but F1: The Movie and Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning. Think about this: Tanjiro Kamado is putting more butts in seats than Brapi (as the Japanese affectionately call Brad Pitt) and Tom (as we all affectionately think of Cruise.) And, apparently, Marlon Wayans. After Demon Slayer sacked the opening of his football-horror flick HIM last week, he publicly declared “Fuck anime!”
There have been anime booms before. Remember Pokémania? Pokemon: The First Movie raked in hundreds of millions way back in 2000. But something feels different this time around. Anime – a form of animation traditionally made by and for Japanese people, with outsiders a total afterthought – is now going toe to toe with the titans of the American entertainment industry. It’s literally rocking Hollywood’s hegemony.
A great deal of ink and pixels have been spilled about the sheer quantities of money Demon Slayer is making, but few reporters seem to be asking the bigger question of how the hell did this happen? I have spent a long time investigating and writing about this very topic, so let me shed some light.
Anime is far more than simply a form of foreign movie. It is the product of a fantasy-industrial complex – a pop-cultural machine with many moving parts, a web of interconnected companies and industries that, in concert, have honed their collective ability to deliver animated shows and films that resonate deeply with audiences.
For a long time, those audiences were mainly in Japan. But post-industrial societies around the globe have come to resemble Japan in many ways (there’s a book about this!) As a result, they’ve come to appreciate anime, too. And they can get it, in huge quantities. As an American kid growing up in the Eighties, I had to hunt for anime. Now streaming services like Netflix, Amazon, and Crunchyroll provide a deep back-catalog of it “on tap,” anytime, everywhere.
But this is true of many kinds of entertainment, including plenty of American shows and films. Yet something about anime hits different. “Very few people here in America have the balls to do what anime does,” the American animation director Tim Eldred told me. “The bulk of animated shows made in the US still skew toward the younger set, often topping out at 12 years old. Shows that intentionally skew older, such as Arcane or Blue-Eyed Samurai, are still a minority.” Anime doesn’t have to compete for mindshare among the adolescent demographic; there’s barely any competition.
There’s another huge factor in anime’s success, and it can be summed up in a single word: manga. The most successful anime franchises – Demon Slayer included – tend to be based on popular manga. The biggest serializer of manga is Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump, which I profiled for The New Yorker a few months back. Getting published in Jump is a big deal for any manga artist, because it offers such a huge platform – over a million copies printed every week! But there’s another reason why it’s a big deal, and that’s real-time feedback.
Every Jump artist is assigned an editor who works closely with them to refine stories, and they do it through a combo of experience and hard data. American comics companies like Marvel and DC have long accepted feedback in the form of letters from fans. But Jump harvests it systematically, using multiple-choice surveys that are included as postcards in paper editions and as links online: which was your favorite series this issue? Who was your favorite character? Did you like the art? etc., etc. The answers are then fed back to the artist-editor teams, who can use them to guide their creative decisions with more precision.
This system can be brutal – putting aside the long hours needed for artists to deliver the requisite 19 pages of manga a week, any series that doesn’t rank high enough for long enough in surveys will be mercilessly cut from the lineup. But the regular, almost instantaneous feedback gives editors and artists the tools they need to shift gears when they sense possibility.
And that happens quite a bit. It might surprise you to hear that the classic Dragon Ball didn’t fare particularly well at first in Jump; it was only after artist Akira Toriyama shifted focus from adventure to martial arts competitions that it took off in reader surveys. The Nineties smash Yu-Gi-Oh! is remembered today as a card game, but it didn’t begin that way – the cards were introduced as the gimmick for a single story arc, but when surveys showed how popular they were with readers, the artist leaned into them hard, to huge success. These are but two of many examples. Jump — and other Japanese manga magazines that utilize surveys — thrive by making readers part of the editorial process.
Hollywood productions are the result of creative collaborations, too — writer’s rooms being a prime example. But manga are the product of years of continuous feedback between consumer and creator. Even the most talented writer or well-oiled writing team is going to be hard pressed to achieve the same results.
And that brings us to the final reason why anime is succeeding. Anime is based on manga, and there are a lot of manga artists in Japan. Takeshi Kikuchi, the head of the Manga Research Institute, estimates that roughly ten thousand are working in the industry today. He uses a Japanese saying to evoke how manga produces hit after hit: “the tallest peaks have the widest bases.” In other words, something like Demon Slayer didn’t coalesce in a vacuum; it’s the inevitable result of countless manga artists competing in the marketplace of ideas, each episode of which is subjected to close scrutiny by editors and readers. No matter how much money one threw at the problem, they couldn’t conjure something like Demon Slayer out of thin air. It is the product of a great number of people working in a system designed to identify and amplify the most compelling ideas. The chances of any one manga artist striking it big are low. But the chances of the industry as a whole discovering the next big thing are quite high.
All of this sounds calculating, even perhaps a little sinister. But Japanese creators and companies absolutely did not plan to take over the world. They are pretty much immersed in little worlds of their own. (When I asked the editor of a major manga magazine how much thought they gave to foreign consumers when planning new series, they told me none — because how would they know what foreign people wanted?) The majority of anime studios are too busy trying to “keep the lights on” to think long-term. Many distributors only recently started taking foreign audiences seriously. Japan’s content industry built a vast library of shows and films naturally, over many years; it just so happened that this library proved a perfect fit for American streaming platforms hungry for large quantities of binge-able content. And for audiences who resemble the Japanese for whom the productions are made in the first place. A perfect storm.
None of which is to discount the talent and effort required to make hit manga and anime. Jump is, in many ways, one of the most exquisitely tuned talent finders the world has ever seen. And it is but one of many manga magazines serializing content in Japan. And they are in turn but nodes in a vast fantasy-industrial complex consisting of creators professional and amateur, large-scale fan events, animation studios, television stations, music companies, toy companies, game companies, fashion companies, and more, all working together, sometimes in collaboration and sometimes in competition, all trying to get their piece of the next big thing. This is a system far bigger than any Hollywood auteur, writer’s room, production company, or film studio. It’s enough to make one say, whether out of frustration or admiration, fuck.
Great piece and profoundly interesting. I reposted it on Notes. (I am a Spanish guy living in Japan).
You mentioned the cooperation and competition between all the players involved in the industry. I think is not exclusive of manga/anime industry. Somehow, I feel that Japan's soft power boom cannot be understood without that competition/cooperation duality that is entwined with Japanese's business approach.
I kind of feel like challenges to Hollywood's hegemony are largely due to them putting themselves there, too? Media consolidation in the US has built these massive, too-big-to-fail behemoths that simply cannot take risks on the then smaller number of projects they produce, so you get absurdities like a superhero movie considered a failure if it doesn't break a billion. And then there's what seems like the algorithmic tuning of the content within; it feels like manga however is better for the simple fact that there's still human taste involved in shaping content served up by their data collection. Truly the best of both worlds.