japanamerica

Three years ago, I asked Kun Gao, a co-founder and former CEO of anime site Crunchyroll, whether he thought the medium on which his company relied would ever go mainstream. We were sitting in what were then Crunchyroll’s headquarters on the seventh floor of the sprawling Westfield Mall building in San Francisco — a space once occupied by Microsoft. He smiled. “It’s still niche,” he said. “But it’s a pretty big niche.” Last week, Sony took a big bite into that niche by purchasing Crunchyroll from American telecoms giant AT&T’s WarnerMedia for a cool $1.2 billion. The deal puts the company Gao co-founded 14 years ago with five other computer engineering grads (and self-professed “nerds”) from the University of California, Berkeley, at the very center of Sony’s push to become a direct-to-consumer player, joining the fray with behemoths Netflix, Amazon, and Disney. Entertainment, and anime in particular, will be its cornerstone. To industry observers, Sony’s purchase, while likely over...

U.S. anime market matures in 2019 The Japan Times The third annual Animation Is Film Festival kicked off on Oct. 18 in Los Angeles with the United States premiere of Makoto Shinkai’s latest Japan box-office hit, “Weathering With You,” followed by an onstage Q&A with Shinkai, who flew in from Tokyo for the event. Demand for tickets was so fierce that organizers added a second overflow screening at the city’s historic TCL Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. According to festival founder Eric Beckman, CEO of U.S. distributor GKIDS, tickets to the second screening sold out in “less than three minutes.” WEATHERING WITH YOU, image courtesy of GKIDS /  ©2019 “Weathering With You” Film Partners Six years after the global anime industry was jolted by the retirement of its most loved and bankable artist, Studio Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki, developments in the North American market are transforming 2019 into a banner year. Through consolidation, the flowerin...