Why anime is everywhere all at once

Marketplace All-in-One

Marketplace

Business, News

4.5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 28 February 2024

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Anime seems to be just about everywhere these days: film, music videos, the NFL and big streaming services like Netflix and Hulu.

“Anime is colossal. In terms of raw revenue, anime and the NLF are tied at about $20 billion in [annual global] revenue,” said Chris Plante, editor in chief and co-founder of Polygon at Vox Media. “When you think of anime, it can be seen as niche, but the reality is that couldn’t be further from the truth.”

On the show today, Plante explains anime economics, what’s behind the rise of anime in the United States and some of the problematic aspects of the medium.

Later, we’ll discuss how climate change is impacting cherry blossom season and why the commercial real estate crisis could be a big problem for regional banks.

Later, one listener calls in on a landline about landlines. And, this week’s answer to the Make Me Smart question comes from a digital illustrator based in Long Beach, California.

Here’s everything we talked about today:

- “Who watches anime? Polygon surveyed more than 4,000 people to find out” from Polygon

- “Anime Market to Reach USD 62.7 Billion by 2032” from Yahoo Finance

- “Anime Is Booming. So Why Are Animators Living in Poverty?” from The New York Times

- “Sony Jacks Up Prices for Crunchyroll and Kills Funimation” from Gizmodo

- “From Niche To Mainstream: The Unstoppable Global Popularity Of Anime And How It Happened” from BuzzFeed

- “Streaming and covid-19 have entrenched anime’s global popularity” from The Economist

- “Naruto Movie in the Works With Destin Daniel Cretton” from The Hollywood Reporter

- “Cherry blossom forecast: We predict peak bloom in D.C. around March 21” from The Washington Post

- “Early jacaranda bloom sparks debate about climate change in Mexico” from Reuters

- “Commercial Real Estate Market Plunge Has Lenders Facing a Brutal Reality” from Bloomberg

- “Comic: Tienes economic anxiety? Artist Julio Salgado reflects on changes in creative industries” from the Los Angeles Times

Are you a fan of anime? Tell us about your favorite anime series! Leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART or email makemesmart@marketplace.org.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody I'm kind of risel welcome back to make me smart where none of us is as smart as all of us.
0:12.0	And I'm Kimberly Adams. Thank you for joining us everyone. It is Tuesday,
0:15.6	February the 27th and it's Deep Dive Day and today we are diving into the
0:21.4	world of anime one of my favorite topics.
0:24.7	It's clearly, as anybody who listens to the show knows, something I do in my downtime
0:29.5	watch a lot of anime, but I'm not the only one, obviously. We're seeing anime all over the place from
0:35.2	games to music videos Netflix is investing big in anime not to mention all the live
0:40.6	action shows so it's really starting to feel like it's no longer a niche or a
0:45.4	nerd or an otaku thing anymore.
0:48.1	Well, see otaku now I'm going to have to ask what that means and the person I'm going
0:51.5	to ask what that means is Chris Plant Plant he's the editor and chief and
0:54.4	co-founder of Polygon that's Fox's gaming and entertainment news site.
0:57.1	Chris welcome to the pod good to have you on. Thank you so much for having me.
1:01.0	All right that word Kimberly just youths which I cannot even remember 14 seconds later.
1:04.4	What, Kimberly, what did you say?
1:06.6	The simplest version of.
1:08.0	Oh, talk.
1:09.0	Yeah, the simple version is a fan.
1:10.4	That's the easy way of thinking of it. All right. Okay, so look, let's start just because I am the simpleton in this conversation.
1:17.0	And there are many people out there not probably as simple as I am, but who might not be familiar.
1:22.0	So if you had to describe anime to like my mom who's a woman of a certain age
1:28.2	How would you do it? There are any number of versions of it that could be correct and anime where it's
	...

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