Meet the man behind the anime at Netflix
Netflix is animated about anime Roland Kelts Taito Okiura Netflix’s director of anime, Taito Okiura, tells me he feels like a local baseball player who got drafted into the U.S. Major Leagues. Except, he doesn’t play the sport. A producer and entrepreneur with over a decade of experience in the industry, Okiura was offered the job twice by Netflix before joining last October. He was unavailable three years ago when first tapped by the company to help open its Japan branch. In 2016, he took a conference call with the talent acquisitions department from corporate headquarters in Los Angeles. “I told them I wasn’t sure how serious Netflix really is about anime. Then I hung up the phone,” he says. (© BONES / PROJECT A.I.C.O.; © KAZUTO NAKAZAWA / PRODUCTION I.G) But Netflix knew how passionate Okiura was about anime. In 2007, he was a key producer on the then-groundbreaking transcultural project, “Afro Samurai,” written and illustrated by Takashi Okazaki, a...