Anime, the Japanese form of animated films and TV series have been popular since the mid 90s due to the popular titles such as ‘Neon Genesis Evangelion’, ‘Cowboy Bebop’, ‘Dragon Ball Z’, ‘Pokemon’, ‘Digimon’ among many others. These initial hand drawn works which had some brilliant animation and epic storylines captured the world’s attention, thanks to the internet and globalization. Of course, anime was already popular in Japan, the birthplace of anime, but it went on to be popular in countries such as the US, Canada and China thanks to these aforementioned products. But now, another country has risen up with its massive anime fanbase, which was relatively unknown for a while but has now burst on to the anime market with renewed vigour – India.
Phrases such as “anime are cartoons” and “anime is for children” – statements which were never really true but hugely prevalent in India – stopping multiple generations of the Indian anime fanbase from ever really truly expressing their love for it. Well it’s 2021 now, with events like Comic-Con allowing Indians to express their anime passion with other anime lovers. And OTT giants such as Netflix, Disney and Amazon Prime have taken notice.
Netflix has a huge library of anime and India has been a major reason for its expansion and interest in development of original animated films and web series. In fact, the Anime Netflix library in India is bigger than the Anime Netflix library in Japan, where anime was created. Only the US beats India when it comes to the size of their Anime library but it will not be a surprise when India will have access to the US version of the anime library in a few years or even get a bigger library than the one in the US, thanks to the growing popularity of anime within India.
Now what’s missing is anime featuring Indian stories. Canada, Japan, US and China – the largest markets for anime have their own anime studios and are creating stories with native stories in mind (mostly) or storytellers from that country creating their versions of anime. Of course, we do have Studio Durga, an independent animation studio consisting of just 7 core members, which is based in Delhi. They have made an 80-minute long anime film called ‘Karmachakra’, which is in the Bengali language. It is not much, but this film has been well received by the Indian anime community and many call it the first step forward towards Indian animation. Hopefully companies such as Netflix or Crunchyroll will help in pushing this production company off the ground. Check out the first 20 minutes of the film down below:
We’re hiring!
We are hiring two full-time junior to mid-level writers with the option to work remotely. You need to work a 5-hour shift and be available to write. Interested candidates should email their sample articles to [email protected]. Applications without a sample article will not be considered.
