How Netflix and other streaming services are doubling down on anime

People walk past images of anime characters in the Akihabara district in Tokyo. Consumed in the 1990s and early 2000s mainly by Japanese teens, and their worldwide counterparts known colloquially as weebs, anime is now a significant programming genre for streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, not to mention the anime-only services Crunchyroll, Viewster, and Funimation. — AFP

LOS ANGELES: Misa from Death Note, Saitama from One-Punch Man, and Code:002 from Darling in the Franxx walk into a convention centre. It’s the set-up to what could be a pretty good joke. Like the rabbi, priest, and monk, these are religious figures in their own right – anime heroes, favourite deities of a subcultural movement known as cosplay.

By many metrics – not simply the more-than 100,000 attendees to Anime Expo in Downtown Los Angeles this month – cosplay, and its guiding form of media, anime, have been undergoing a resurgence in the past few years. Consumed in the 1990s and early 2000s mainly by Japanese teens, and their worldwide counterparts known colloquially as weebs, anime is now a significant programming genre for streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, not to mention the anime-only services Crunchyroll, Viewster, and Funimation.