The Streaming Revolution and a New Golden Age — When the World Watches Together

Last time, alongside the phrase ‘Cool Japan’, we watched anime step out into the global market. Even while plagued by an endless chase against piracy, Japanese anime had truly begun to be loved across borders.

And yet, an event that would fundamentally change the very way it ‘crossed’ those borders was already close at hand: streaming. Not a broadcast slot on television, nor a cinema screen, but a time when people all over the world could watch the same work on the screens in their hands, almost simultaneously. When that era arrived, anime entered one of the most dazzling golden ages in its hundred-year history. In this chapter, we will look — within what has been reported — at that brilliance, and at the shadow it cast over the floor that sustained it.

Borders Dissolve — The Arrival of Streaming Platforms

In the 2010s, video streaming services that delivered moving images over the internet spread across the world. Among them, vast distributors like Netflix had the power to deliver the same work to more than 190 countries and regions.

This mechanism transformed how anime reached people. Until then, watching anime overseas meant waiting for a local television station or a home-video release, and even for popular titles a gap of several months to several years was the norm. As we saw in the previous chapter, piracy had spread by slipping through that gap. With streaming, however, a work could be delivered to the world with subtitles or dubbing almost at the same time as its broadcast in Japan. The long-standing weakness of the ‘time lag’ was being filled in by technology.

Distributors were not content merely to stream existing works. They began investing themselves, setting out to make works on the premise of worldwide release. From around 2018, Netflix advanced comprehensive partnerships with Japanese anime production companies, and in 2020 announced new partnerships with the likes of Science SARU and MAPPA. Works planned from the outset to reach 190 countries simultaneously were thus born one after another.

People around the world discussing the next part of the same story in the same week. Impressions crossing borders flew back and forth on social media, and popularity drew still more popularity. Streaming was both a means of delivering works and a device for generating worldwide fervor.

Two Works That Rewrote the Records — ‘Your Name.’ and ‘Demon Slayer’

In this period, within Japan too, anime films set off phenomena that swept up society as a whole.

Director Makoto Shinkai’s ‘Your Name.’, released in August 2016, ultimately recorded box-office takings said to be on the scale of 25 billion yen, becoming a historic hit for a Japanese anime film. Its meticulous, beautiful depictions of scenery and the universal story of a body swap are said to have drawn even people who do not usually watch anime into cinemas. It was the emergence of a new mega-hit following the works of Hayao Miyazaki, and an event that showed the depth of Japan’s anime film tradition.

Then, in 2020, another enormous phenomenon occurred: ‘Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train’, based on the manga by Koyoharu Gotouge and produced by ufotable. The popularity that had ignited with the television series exploded with the film, and its domestic box-office takings were reported to exceed 40 billion yen. This was the record that overtook ‘Spirited Away’, long the holder of that seat, to become number one in Japan’s all-time box-office takings. Its worldwide box-office takings also grew greatly — a moment when anime born in Japan stood at the center of the world’s entertainment.

A social phenomenon at home, and a global hit through simultaneous worldwide release. The overlap of these two, from the late 2010s into the early 2020s, is remembered as one of the most radiant golden ages in the history of anime.

Behind the Radiance — The Shadow of the Production Floor

But, as we have seen again and again in earlier chapters, where there is light there is also shadow. In speaking of anime’s brilliant successes, we cannot look away from the production floor that brings each of those works to life one drawing at a time.

Anime production is labor-intensive work that piles up a vast number of hand-drawn and digital frames within limited time. As the streaming era raised demand from around the world and the number of works produced increased, the working conditions and treatment of animators — those who carry the floor — have long been pointed to as a problem.

Surveys of actual conditions by groups such as the Japan Animation Creators Association (JAniCA) have reported that the average annual income of those handling the process once called ‘in-between’ work was at a very low level, and low wages and long working hours have drawn attention as a social problem. The fact that many of the workers are said to earn their pay not as employees but as freelancers or self-employed, in a form close to piecework, has also been discussed as a background to the instability of their treatment.

A golden age in which the world is enthralled all at once, and a debate over the treatment of the floor that creates those works. These two are not separate stories. For the culture of anime to continue into the future, the question of how to support the lives of the people who produce its brilliance lies before us as an issue that cannot be skirted. The more we speak of the magnitude of the light, the more the existence of the shadow, too, ought to be looked upon honestly.

What the Golden Age Asks of Us

The streaming revolution brought two great changes to anime. One was that it dissolved the wall of borders through technology, so that people around the world could share the same story almost simultaneously. The other was that, as demand from around the world rose, the question of how to support those who carry the work grew weightier than ever before.

The records set by ‘Your Name.’ and ‘Demon Slayer’ proved that Japanese anime could stand at the summit of the world’s entertainment. That is also one point of arrival in nearly a hundred years of endeavor — beginning with the hand-drawn dawn of Kenzo Masaoka and his peers, through Toei Doga’s challenge of feature-length films, Osamu Tezuka’s television anime, Gundam and Ghibli, and Evangelion.

But the summit is not the end. In the very midst of a brilliant golden age, anime still goes on searching for an answer between prosperity and sustainability. Now that it has gained the power to reach the world, where is this culture headed? In the final chapter to come, I would like to survey the future that lies beyond a hundred-year story — without rushing to an answer.