Why is Anime booming right now like it has never before?

I have started watching anime since last year, I am not really sure why I did, because I am that person who ranted about it, calling it a cartoon. “It’s for kids”, I would say. Besides, there are few other reasons why I never gravitated towards anime earlier, one being the length, all the popular shows that I heard my friends talk about were too long, to begin with, none having any fewer than 100 episodes; with some exceptions being like the Death Note, and that was a huge commitment on my part. Another very important reason was the lack of accessibility. Internet was not that common back then and I am just talking about a few years ago, I could barely afford a smartphone, there was no way I could have paid for the very expensive internet connection. So, what changed now? Why a sudden interest in these cartoons that I ranted before? It is a well-said phrase, “Never judge a book by its cover.”

Well, everything was going just fine. I was in college, studying, didn’t have enough time to commit to never-ending animes. And then the pandemic hits, me including everyone, gets sent back to their homes and imprisoned in their houses for months. With it comes the zoom university, which required an active internet connection. The prices didn’t go any lower but now rather than being a luxury, it was a necessity. So, with an enormous amount of time to spare, and decently fast internet, I set my voyage to the world of anime and spoiler alert; God, it was good.

This blog is not about how I ended up watching anime. Although most of the reasons I gave, possibly apply to a lot of people. So, with the pandemic, people trapped in their houses with not a lot to do got their asses onto watching anime. Earlier, the only animes that I had watched like “Pokemon” or “Dragon Ball” were only telecasted on a few television kids’ channels with its dubbed version. While movies from studios like “Ghibli”, had only theatrical releases with very little availability of DVDs for them. And due to the age restrictions of the television, channels had to limit to a very small pool of animes. Making it harder, for people to really experience the diverse nature of the content. With the growing popularity, media streaming platforms like Netflix, bought licenses to tons of anime to be streamed easily and have even started to produce Netflix’s original animes and that made it a lot more mainstream. Another popular streaming platform, ‘Crunchyroll’ has crossed the 4 million mark on its paid subscriber count, which is big considering that it doesn’t really work in most parts of Asia. With the easy access to such diverse content, people irrespective of their age, have gravitated more and more towards anime.

Now, with the growing popularity of this genre, we can expect to see subtle changes in the content and the animation, the differences in animes like ‘Attack on Titan’ and ‘One Piece’ are quite apparent. While the former doesn’t rely on extreme visuals to express comedic scenes, the latter has been doing it constantly; “Sanji”. The defining trope of old anime shows that focused on the explicit expression of emotions, is completely discarded in a show like AOT. Needless to say, it still exists, as we can see in last year’s most popular anime, ‘Demon Slayer’. The character of Zenitsu is seen expressing emotions with the character’s comedic deformation.

The anime community is growing, it is not that niche segment of the popular culture anymore that only otaku’s watch. With content that can communicate and intrigue people of any age group, it has a very bright future.