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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...

Anime's evolution in lands down under The Japan Times For the past quarter century, fans of Japanese pop culture in Australia and New Zealand have been served almost exclusively by a single distributor. Based in Melbourne, Australia, Madman Entertainment boasts over 90 percent of the region’s market share in anime home entertainment, and an even greater share of its anime theatrical business. Not surprisingly, those statistics drew the attention of the Sony Corporation, whose Aniplex Inc. subsidiary invested in Madman two years ago and bought its anime division outright last year. Sony Pictures Television and Aniplex have now consolidated Madman Anime Group into their other recent anime distribution acquisitions: Funimation in the United States, Wakanim in France, and Manga Entertainment in the United Kingdom and Ireland. On March 7 and 8, Madman hosted 12,000-plus fans at its second Madman Anime Festival in Sydney , Australia’s largest city, after presenting simi...

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...

At last, Japan gets it by Roland Kelts The Japanese entertainment industry is finally growing up, says Shin Unozawa, and he should know. Unozawa joined Bandai Entertainment back in 1981, and serves as chair of the Computer Entertainment Supplier’s Association (CESA), co-hosts of the Tokyo Game Show. Now he is CEO of the recently formed Anime Consortium Japan (ACJ) — a multipartner corporation launched last November, with the goal of localizing and consolidating the digital streaming of official Japanese content. The ACJ’s lineup is top shelf: Production and advertising giants Toei, Sunrise, TMS, Aniplex, Asatsu-DK, Nihon Ad Systems and Dentsu have teamed up with major shareholders Bandai Namco Holdings and the government-sponsored Cool Japan Fund. Their primary aim is to tackle piracy and develop the first Japan-centered streaming entertainment and e-commerce platform called Daisuki. It’s as impressive as it is long overdue.