Anime is booming: How Japanese animation became a cultural force

By the time Jason Leigh, a 30-year-old anime fan in Merrick, heard the film "Chainsaw Man — The Movie: Reze Arc" was opening in theaters, seats were going fast. He managed to snap up advance tickets for Saturday and Sunday screenings at the Regal Westbury and attended both — one in Japanese with English subtitles, one dubbed — with two different groups of fellow fans. For Leigh, the experience was a revelation.

"The medium is so popular now," says Leigh, who remembers when anime existed mostly on home video and hardly ever played in theaters. "My friends out of state have seen the ‘Chainsaw’ movie. It was a full theatrical release."

Once a nerdy pastime, now a mainstream cultural force, the Japanese animation known as anime is setting its sights on Hollywood’s box office. In September, "Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba — The Movie: Infinity Castle" scored the biggest-ever opening weekend for an anime film with $70 million domestically. In October, "Chainsaw Man" debuted at No. 1 with $18 million, trouncing such competitors as the Colleen Hoover romance "Regretting You" and the rock biopic "Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere." Beginning Dec. 12, Sony Pictures Classics will release “Scarlet,” a medieval-era adventure, in 10 cities for an Oscar-qualifying run (it opens nationwide Feb. 13).  And on Dec. 5 comes "Jujutsu Kaisen: Execution," the third film in a franchise that has already earned $37.7 million domestically, according to data at BoxOfficeMojo.com.

"The desire for theatrical has grown," says Mitchel Berger, executive vice president of global commerce for Crunchyroll, a streamer and distributor of anime titles including "Demon Slayer" and "Chainsaw Man." Ten years ago, Crunchyroll’s films would have played theatrically for one or two nights, maybe a week at most, Berger says. Now anime titles are competing with big Hollywood releases — and sometimes winning.

"The top 10 anime of all time, a lot of them have come out in the last three or four years," Berger says. "That speaks to the fan base and the work that we've done to get people engaged in the theatrical experience."

The size of the anime market is difficult to nail down, but the Association of Japanese Animations recently reported a record-high revenue of $25 billion for 2024, according to Deadline, more than half of which came from overseas markets. Crunchyroll’s Berger estimated the company’s streaming subscription base at roughly 17 million, more than triple the 5 million subscribers it had in 2021.

Signs of the medium’s popularity are everywhere. In the NBA, the Dallas Mavericks’ Daniel Gafford boasts several tattoos of characters from the "Dragon Ball" universe and the New Orleans Pelicans’ Zion Williamson recently released an anime-themed Nike sneaker. In pop music, Ariana Grande has a tattoo of the hero of "Spirited Away" and Paramore’s Hayley Williams recently dyed her hair to become what she called "an anime version" of herself. And as with all things popular, anime has become politicized: Young protesters in India, the Philippines and other countries have begun waving flags inspired by the anime series "One Piece" that show a skull and crossbones wearing a kooky straw hat.

"It’s big, and it’s only gotten bigger," says Patrick Madden, 34, an events coordinator in Hicksville who runs Tropic Con, an anime and pop-culture convention. "Something that would have gotten you bullied back when I was in high school, everyone’s into now."

Anime has its roots in manga, the Japanese comic books that became popular after World War II. It was a Japanese fan of Walt Disney, Osamu Tezuka, who honed the cinematic, ultra-expressive style of manga that still exists today, according to Keiko Miyajima, an adjunct associate professor who this past spring launched a new class at John Jay College of Criminal Justice titled Manga, Anime, Gender and Japanese Society.  

"If you compare Tezuka’s manga with the comics in the '50s, it’s a very monotonous layout, very aligned, straight," Miyajima says. By contrast, Tezuka "let the picture tell the story," she says, using a mix of panel sizes, close-ups and exaggerated facial expressions. "This is all for the reader, so the reader can be immersed in what’s in the picture."

Tezuka’s manga output included "Astro Boy" and "Kimba the White Lion," both adapted for television by Tezuka's own Mushi Production studio and exported to America in the 1960s. As an animator, Tezuka relied on several cost-cutting techniques — lower frame rates, frozen frames and employing pans or zooms to give an illusion of motion — that today are considered distinctive characteristics of the anime style.

"There’s just something about it that’s so action-packed and story driven," says Manuel Villalobos, who started teaching anime-style drawing classes at The Art Guild of Port Washington two years ago. He adds, "There’s a quirkiness and a cuteness to it, too."

During the 1980s, anime remained a niche interest in America. The sci-fi series "Robotech" went into syndication on U.S. television, and a handful of movies — including the space-opera "Galaxy Express 999” — showed up in some art-house theaters. Meanwhile, the anime style was sneaking into after-school cartoon shows like "Transformers" (produced partly by Japan’s Toei Company) and "Thundercats" (produced partly by Topcraft, led by a former Toei executive).

With its limited animation and superhero-style characters, a show like "Thundercats" may have seemed like mainstream American fare, according to Villalobos, but he notes: "If you look back at that show, that’s anime."

"Akira," a 1988 sci-fi thriller, broke the anime mold, according to Miyajima. "Before ‘Akira’ came out, anime was basically considered a cartoon, something for children," she says, adding that the movie’s dystopian setting and violent content were anything but childish.  " ’Akira’ got a new audience into anime." (In 2010, "Akira" ranked as the 22nd best sci-fi/fantasy film of all time, according to England’s The Guardian newspaper.)

Starting in the 1990s, anime made some of its biggest inroads into America yet. The series "Dragon Ball Z," about a young man who defends Earth against various villains, and "Pokemon," set in a world populated by humans and fanciful creatures, both aired on American television in the late ‘90s, and Hayao Miyazaki’s "Spirited Away" (2001) earned an Oscar for best animated film.

Pokemon, with its video games, trading cards and other merchandise, is often estimated to be the biggest media franchise in the world. Rebecca Seepersad, 35, a lifelong Pokemon fan, says she launched a daylong convention for trading-card collectors called The Long Island TCG show at The Holiday Inn in Plainview in June 2023, which drew 60 vendor tables and 800 attendees. "I outgrew that venue the first time I was there," says Seepersad. This past May, she held her show at the Nassau Coliseum over two days with 400 vendor tables and more than 6,000 attendees.

Seepersad, who also teaches chemistry at Baldwin High School and runs a Pokemon club there, says the franchise is thriving for the same reasons all anime franchises do: "They just have good storylines. It’s always about the lore, the story behind it."

Those stories often involve children or teenagers, says John Jay’s Miyajima, in contrast with superhero films whose protagonists are often adults. Narrative arcs tend to include training (as in "Demon Slayer"), learning ("My Hero Academia") and themes of friendship ("One Piece," about a crew of pirates). Sometimes the friends are animals or pet-like creatures, as in "Pokemon" or even "Chainsaw Man," whose young hero receives his powers from his dog.

"The fans see themselves in these characters and they love these stories so much," says Paul Castro Jr., a Brooklyn-born voice actor whose credits include the "Dragon Ball Daima" series. Castro says he and other anime actors may attend roughly 20 to 40 conventions each year, where they’re feted as celebrities by fans. "They’re coming to see us," he says, "but they’re also coming to see the vessel in which that character’s brought to life."

That kind of fandom may explain why Crunchyroll’s Berger estimates anime’s current audience of roughly 1 billon could double in size by 2030. "Anime has this ability to really invest in a character and create an emotional connection," he says. "And when you make that emotional connection, that's when the magic happens."