Click here to read the full article.
Netflix’s anime viewership is soaring, from 1 billion views in 2023 to 1.5 billion views in 2025, Yuji Yamano, Netflix director of content in Japan, revealed Tuesday at an Annecy Netflix Anime panel.
150 million households
in 190-plus countries view anime in 34 languages, he added. The increasing prevalence of anime viewing on the platform was a panel focal point. More than 50% of Netflix members watch anime, Yamano said.
Even so, key phrases in the early parts of the presentation were “creative first, local first” in terms of the streaming service’s approach to anime. The presentation underlined a desire to be “creative partners” with the committees and filmmakers and not just distributors – using their established partnerships with Studio Colorido (“Drifting Home,” “Cosmic Princess Kaguya”) and Kyoto Animation (“Violet Evergarden,” “Sparks of Tomorrow”) as examples of how Netflix seeks to primarily appeal to a Japanese audience and collaborate with Japanese studios, with global reach being a result of this approach.
Anime viewer recognition is part reason Netflix’s hiked investment in dubbing and localization, pointing out its importance by underlining that 80% of global viewers watch anime in their local language.
It’s clear that the streaming giant’s participation in the industry has changed dramatically in even a short time, just that time, and the panel looked to demonstrate the various evolutions of its partnerships and audiences alike, as well as show off some of the most highly anticipated shows in its slate.
This included first teases of “The One Piece,” a new anime adaptation of Eiichiro Oda’s long-running manga by Wit Studio (“Attack on Titan”) as well as anime-adjacent shows such as “Blue Eye Samurai,” returning for a second season.
More details:
“Fool Night”
Netflix announced an adaptation of “Fool Night,” based on the critically acclaimed manga by Kasumi Yasuda, which will stream exclusively on Netflix. The show will be directed by Atsushi Yukawa and animated in a first-ever collaboration between Sunrise (best known for “Mobile Suit Gundam”) and Shaft (best known for “Puella Magi Madoka Magica”). A teaser trailer for the new project at the panel showed off its rather dark tone. That darkness is literal too: the series is set in a dystopian future where the Earth is deprived of sunlight by thick clouds, leading to a permanent winter and eternal night. To balance out oxygen levels, a process which turns humans into plants is invented, called “transfloration.” As a result of this grim setting, the imagery in “Fool Night” is flush with decay and death (and plants) as humans skirt the line between these elements and eke out their survival. Variety has published in exclusivity two first look images.
“The One Piece”
Alongside the brand new shows came a first look at a revitalization of an anime evergreen: “The One Piece,” a new anime adaptation produced by Wit Studio of Eichiro Oda’s beloved and long-running manga, “One Piece.” The footage, showing off the first minute of Episode 1, displayed familiar scenery in a new light, with a famous pirate named Gold D Roger’s final words before his execution galvanizing a worldwide treasure hunt.
“We want you to experience a new “One Piece” from the beginning again with visuals you want to watch over and over,” explained series director Masashi Koizuka in an interview video, drawing a sketch of main character Luffy throughout. The director expressed with a laugh that he first came across “One Piece” 30 years ago, and through this series is chasing the feeling of reading it for the first time. The team reimagined the color schemes, designs and even sets while hoping for new angles on this more compact version of the story. Even then, the show was originally planned to be shorter than its 300-minute running time. “The runtime got longer and longer,” Koizuka laughs, “as there’s so much I wanted to include.”
“The Ribbon Hero”
Amidst other new clips was a new trailer for “The Ribbon Hero,” an upcoming anime feature film by acclaimed director Yuki Igarashi (“Star Wars: Visions – Lop & Ocho”), based on Osamu Tezuka’s 1953 manga “Princess Knight.” The animation studio is Outline.
Igarashi, in an interview with Variety, spoke about how the film’s forward-thinking visuals were inspired by the Takarazuka Revue theater’s all-women productions. This was part of Igarashi’s way of paying homage to Tezuka’s original work, which itself was inspired by Takarazuka. “I wanted to preserve that same impact, that sensation that teenagers experienced in the ‘50s,” Igarashi says. “I wanted to reinterpret that for a modern audience.”
“Cyberpunk Edgerunners,” Season 2
The hotly anticipated second season of “Cyberpunk Edgerunners” also debuted electric new footage during the presentation. The brief clip showed off a new cast of characters, beginning with fuzzy television static before exploding into a montage propelled by intense music and kinetic bursts of action, carrying on the spirit of the first season through energetic animation and heavily stylised art.
The dystopian sci-fi series is based on the “Cyberpunk” franchise created by game designer Mike Pondsmith, and shares a universe with the popular video game “Cyberpunk 2077,” developed by CD Projekt Red. The new season, like the first, is produced by the anime studio Trigger, with much of the creative team from the first season returning, including director Kai Ikarashi and lead character designer Kanno Ichigo.
As a whole, the Netflix Anime presentation made a point of Netflix’s vision for anime being “anime at its purest,” but still left room for series which they consider anime-adjacent:
“Blue Eye Samurai”
This includes new footage of “Blue Eye Samurai,” returning for a second season after a critically acclaimed first. Created and written by Amber Noizumi and Michael Green and animated at Blue Spirit Studios in France, the series is influenced by Japanese film and animation, even if the connection is only in spirit.
The new footage picked up a short time after the end of the first season, with warrior Mizu (Maya Erskine) traveling with her hated enemy Abijah Fowler (Kenneth Branagh) as she heads to London in order to track down the remaining targets of her revenge. The footage jumps ahead to Mizu, disguised as a man, in an underground fight club: the fight ends quickly and gruesomely, in a flurry of broken bones and stylish movements which so characterized the show’s first season.
“Bass X Machina”
Another anime-influenced series is “Bass X Machina,” from creator LeSean Thomas and exec producer Bryan Tyree Henry. The show, following an anime spin on the famous Black sheriff Bass Reeves, is a combo of steampunk, Western, supernatural horror and family drama, animated at Studio Mir in Korea. The anime-inspired work looks for a creative synthesis from creators who speak both languages of animation. A gunfight on a train set to a dramatic remix of Kendrick Lamar’s “The Blacker the Berry” proved a raucous display of this mixed approach.
So What Does Netflix’s Animation Slate Say About Anime?
It feels clear from Netflix’s animation slate that anime has an incredibly strong influence not just in the lineup of shows and features being licensed but within the artistic directions of shows outside of its anime label. “Blue Eye Samurai” is still placed in an “anime-adjacent” position, while new series “Bass X Machina” leans heavily into the stylings of the industry through creator Lesean Thomas’s own enthusiasm for anime.
That influence has spread well beyond the confines of Japanese animation as so many Western blockbusters seek to capture the style of what in turn had captivated their makers.
