In the ’80s, before the genre had entered the American mainstream, resourceful otaku ordered whispered-about anime from enthusiast magazines and local video shops, sometimes pirating them to add in their own translations. At the same time, Netflix is among the biggest contemporary shake-ups in the 60-year history of Western anime distribution. A media company, maybe, and definitely a tech company. It would be a serious mischaracterization to call Netflix a distribution company. “I am,” I respond, “for better or for worse.”ĭragon’s Dogma is a Netflix anime based on a Capcom video game. “Oh really? You are a fan yourself?” he asks. When I tell him I hid my anime figurines for the interview-a corporate-culture compulsion-he seems surprised. At one point, he excitedly shows me the prize of his collection, a replica of the Smithsonian’s saber-toothed tiger skull. On Google Meet from his home in Tokyo, Sakurai is all smiles and easy candor, seated in front of a wood table scattered with dinosaur fossils. “I found out after I joined that they were serious about it,” Sakurai says. Netflix executives could just drop a stack of cash on licensing a well-liked shonen or two and call it a day. Even then, Netflix was regarded as a streaming platform, not exactly a studio. When he was interviewing to be the company’s chief anime producer back in 2017, Netflix suits insisted he’d get to form superhero teams of anime creators, manage the direction of a couple shows. For a while, Taiki Sakurai wasn’t sure Netflix was serious about anime.
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