An ‘Outrageously Attractive’ Medium: Anime’s Global Surge And What Industry Leaders Say Comes Next

At a recent Tokyo panel uploaded to YouTube by Asia Society, three leading figures in the anime world shared candid insights into how Japanese animation has become a global cultural force, and what challenges lie ahead.

Roland Kelts, author of Japanamerica, opened with a sweeping overview of anime’s paradoxes. “When you’re in Japan and you walk into a shop and say, I want to see your anime section, they could show you Disney. They could show you Pixar. They could show you French animation,” he explained. “But as soon as you get on a plane at Haneda and fly out over the Pacific, anime means Japanese animation. So it actually has two meanings depending on where you are.”

Kelts traced that global identity back to legendary creator Osamu Tezuka, whose innovations in manga and anime reshaped visual storytelling. “What Tezuka pioneered was a visual art form that is stylistically, arguably more vibrant, more kinetic, and more adventurous in terms of storytelling than any other manga or anime artist,” he said. By embracing “limited animation,” Tezuka made anime affordable and distinctive.

Kelts compared anime’s stylization to live music. “People even unconsciously hear the slight imperfections of real drumming… your mind engages and fills them in,” he said. “Part of the appeal of limited animation and super-flat imagery is that your mind is able to get into the picture and fill it in.”

That participatory quality has helped fuel anime’s extraordinary commercial rise. “A survey came out a few months ago about how in the United States, anime was more popular than the NFL,” Kelts noted. A Polaris Group projection he cited estimates the market growing from $31.7 billion in 2023 to $72 billion within a decade. “Streamers tell me the great thing about anime fans is they are sticky… If they love your streaming service and you’re serving up what they love, they will stick with you.”

If Kelts set the big-picture stage, Geoffrey Wexler, former Studio Ghibli executive and current head of international affairs at Studio Ponoc, gave a ground-level account of navigating anime’s global expansion.

“When I first joined Studio Ghibli, I heard a lot of grumbles about the quality of the subtitles and the dubs,” Wexler recalled. “They were fine, but they weren’t the films. They were someone else’s rounding-off-the-corners version of the films.” He pushed to rewrite subtitles and overhaul dubbing practices, ensuring that non-Japanese audiences experienced the films as closely as possible to Hayao Miyazaki’s originals.

Wexler also fought to expand recognition beyond Miyazaki himself. “People didn’t know Studio Ghibli. They knew Hayao Miyazaki, which is cool. But they weren’t watching the other films,” he said. His distribution deals insisted that for every Miyazaki feature screened, a non-Miyazaki title was shown as well.

But even as streaming brings films to wider audiences, it poses new hurdles. “Netflix is an excellent partner. No buts. Absolutely an excellent partner,” Wexler said of his studio’s exclusive streaming partner since January 2024. “But they don’t promote my brand. How am I going to grow the Studio Ponoc brand? They have no incentive to, and I don’t expect them to.”

Shuzo John Shiota, president of Polygon Pictures, struck a similarly pragmatic tone. His Tokyo-based CG studio has worked with Marvel, Star Wars, and Netflix, but he emphasized survival in a volatile market. “The industry in America has been terrible, terrible, terrible in the past three years,” he said bluntly. “Many studios have actually crashed.” Polygon endured thanks to steady Japanese projects, even if budgets were lower.

Shiota also highlighted experiments in interactivity, citing Hypnosis Mic, a rap-battle anime film where audiences vote via app to determine outcomes. “There’s been talk about interactive storytelling, it never really actually works. But this works because it’s not interactive storytelling, it’s more interacting with the storyline to promote your team,” he said.

Despite the difficulties, all three speakers expressed optimism about anime’s future. For Shiota, the secret is blending efficiency and creativity: “I perceive animation production as manufacturing. From my standpoint, making animation is quite the same as manufacturing, it’s just all digital.”

With record-breaking growth projections, fiercely loyal fans, and studios still innovating under pressure, anime seems set not just to endure but to continue expanding its influence worldwide. As Kelts put it: “It’s an incredibly attractive medium for Gen Z and millennials. Outrageously attractive.”