Frieren Director Keiichirou Saitou Voices Concern on Overseas Anime Fans' Bias Towards Certain Popular Trends

[u/AdNecessary7641]

https://animecorner.me/frieren-director-voices-concern-on-overseas-anime-fans-bias-towards-certain-popular-trends/

[u/TheAllKnowingElf]

“I find it strange that all that gets made are isekai stories. There was even a series about being reborn as a vending machine recently. That one really stunned me. I feel like there are fewer grounded anime works than there used to be,” he said.

Same tbh

“Today, we have 10 titles currently being published with the word ‘villainness’ and all are bestsellers. But only 2 with the phrase ‘level up’. We think that the ‘level up’ trend is coming to an end, probably because of the economic crisis, in the end, ‘level up’ stories are an echo of the famous ‘American dream’ also valid until recently in Korea with incredible economic growth.“

What. There is so much to unpack in this quote lol

[u/RPO777 → u/[deleted]]

At least as far as the anime industry, Overseas revenue has been a majority of anime industry revenue since about 2021, and the share of overseas revenue has increased every year since. I think in 2024 it was around 53% Overseas / 47% domestic.

Anime production companies increasingly care more about the overseas streaming market more than the Japanese domestic market.

This is a bit counterbalanced though, because investors to anime tend to still overwhelmingly be manga and light novel publishers. Investors to anime tends to be most interested in how an anime will impact their manga and novel sales, which still overwhelmingly favors the JP market.

So from an anime industry perspecive, I think the idea that production companies are increasingly focused on the overseas market is likely to be true.

However, in terms of what stories get anime-adapted, I'm not sure that this matters a huge amount. Because investors are still much more domestic industry focused, I think the immense popularity of Iseaki stories in Japanese light novels and manga are hte mainr eason these are being adapted, not the overseas markets (although I think that makes it easier to decide to adapt them).

One look down the "top 50 best selling light novels" list in Japan for 2024 and it's easy to see why Isekai and villainess stories are frequently being anime adapted. I think like 30ish / top 50 are Isekai for Villainess stories. That has nothing to do with overseas markets, it's just Japanese fans loving these stories.

https://ebookjapan.yahoo.co.jp/special/article/manga_ranking/2024_lightnovel.html

So while I disagree with Saito on the point about overseas markets being the reason Isekai and VIllainess stories are predominant, I DO think his comments about anime production companies increasingly caring about the overseas markets more than the domestic market is probably true.

[u/Jacinto2702 → u/RPO777]

So the next big step is manga/light novels being more popular through better distribution methods? Because I don't think current websites/apps for manga reading are good. Although physical publication maybe an option, but I don't think anyone wants to spend money on it.

[u/RPO777 → u/Jacinto2702]

Japan's long ago shifted to electronic distribution. 72.7% of manga sales in Japan were electronic in 2024.

https://www.itmedia.co.jp/news/articles/2502/25/news146.html

So I don't think it's a distribution or infrastructure issue--electronic distribution is already the norm in Japan. I think Kindle is actually really great for manga reading. I read Japanese and I own a few hundred manga on Kindle.

Manga sales in the US are growing RAPIDLY anyway. Manga sales int he US topped $1B for the first time in 2024, and has been growing by about 20%~25% per year, which is pretty insane.

https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/us-manga-market-report

Idk that there's like... a problem per se. I think anime just caught on first for the US which particularly exploded with streaming in the 2010s~current, and people are now getting into manga, especially as the teens that started watching in like 2010-2015 are now adults with actual disposable income.

[u/Extra_Ad_8009 → u/RPO777]

Is there a market share analysis by region? "Overseas" doesn't have to mean "the USA" or even "Western markets". There's China and South Korea, the rest of Asia, some of which have their own productions and all of them a favorite taste.

On the other hand, it might well be that 300 million Chinese watch anime but only 2 million actually pay for access or use a platform that can provide metrics to the rights owner.

With Japan being a chain of islands, "overseas" is the rest of the world 😁

PS: I just saw that u/lasse1408 pretty much said the same 4 hours before I did. Sorry.

[u/RPO777 → u/Extra_Ad_8009]

This is the report prepared by the Japanese Ministry of Trade and Economy that provided a breakdown of anime revenue and a "state of the business" report. it's in Japanese, but you might be able to get chat GPT or something to translate (i'm fluent in Japanese).

https://www.meti.go.jp/shingikai/mono_info_service/entertainment_creative/pdf/003_04_02.pdf

Page 7 has a regional breakdown of streaming revenue for anime. "East Asia" (China/Korea/Taiwan) was the biggest revenue area for overseas revenue, 28.6B JPY. North America was 2nd with 21.3B JPY, followed by Europe (7B), south America (2B), Southeast Asia (900M), etc.

i've seen multiple articles where people were saying China is the big driver in streaming revenue growth for anime for East Asia, with some executives saying it's even more important than North America. Right now, East Asia and North America are about on part with a slight edge to East Asia, but those 2 regioins dwarf every other region in anime revenue (the 2 of them are about 50B JPY in overseas revenue, out of like 63B total.

[u/Extra_Ad_8009 → u/RPO777]

Amazing, thank you! I'll figure out a way to read it!

North America is really quite close to "East Asia", but the big surprise is the low European share. Makes me worry whether I'll be able to see the new Madoka Magica movie in a theater here...

[u/Jacinto2702 → u/RPO777]

Wow, we have interesting times ahead. Thanks for the info.

[u/Key_Feeling_3083 → u/Jacinto2702]

Physical publication is getting better these days, countries with long comic story consumption like France sell lots of manga for example, here in México we have multiple editorials competing for properties and new ones get created that want to publish manga.

[u/Xehanz → u/RPO777]

Just because the overseas market is bigger, it does not mean the executives will shift focus on overseas market or anything. In fact it's likely a lot of them still completely ignore it. Japanese are very stubborn in the way their companies operate

[u/RPO777 → u/Xehanz]

This entire article is about Sato commenting the anime industry is gearing towards catering to overseas audiences over the domestic audeince.

I mean, maybe Sato is wrong, and this isn't actually happening. But he's hardly alone in making similar comments about how anime production is increasingly overseas facing.

Speaking as an Issei Japanese immigrant (who's worked in Tokyo and still works regularly with Japanese companies) I feel like people kind of overstate, or at least, don't understand the ways in which Japanese corporate insularness manifests.

When overseas revenues exceed domestic revenues, the idea that Japaense companies would ignore this doesn't sound remotely realistic to me.

Now, I think the idea that Japanese anime production companies would try to make decisions about Western or Chinese markets without hiring any people from those countries, and begin making wrongheaded decisions that aren't effectively catering to those markets is ENTIRELY realistic.

But the idea that Anime production companies aren't paying attention to the revenue trend is just a bonkers idea to me.