EXCLUSIVE: American buyers are no longer averse to commissioning anime and anime-inspired content, according to the global animation chief at Webtoon Productions.
Sydney Bright said the Webtoon digital comics behemoth, which has nearly 150 million active users worldwide, has a “really exciting chapter ahead” that will see the production arm make anime content “in a ‘Western storytelling’ kind of way.”
She didn’t reveal what is in the offing but said she feels American buyers are at long last welcoming anime to the mainstream.
“We’re finally at a place at least for U.S. buyers where there is not aversion to [anime] as a stylistic medium as opposed to what it was before,” Bright said in the run-up to the Annecy International Animation Film Festival. “It’s not necessarily ‘official anime’ out of Japan or ‘capital ‘A’ anime’ for the diehards but I think stylistically there is so much respect for that type of storytelling, cinematic expression and character design.”
She flagged the success of Netflix’s live action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender, which launches Season 2 this week and is being watched by both that elusive six-to-11 year old demographic and millennials who grew up with this sort of animation.
“They’re rewatching [the older] Avatar: The Last Airbender, they’re watching [fantasy anime] Frieren and lots of different anime deep cuts that the average person hasn’t heard of,” she added of the latter audience. “And they’re also rewatching those comfort cozy character driven shows that you would have thought were for a six-to-11 demographic.”
Attracting that younger demog is one of Bright’s raison d’êtres. Webtoon is a digital comics powerhouse and many of its biggest hits are written by fans. At Webtoon Productions, which recently rebranded from Wattpad Webtoon Studios, it is Bright’s job to take some of this great work and package it as animation for a global audience.
U.S. kids industry “hit in a really sad way”
She sees opportunities for Webtoon in a U.S. kids TV space that has “been hit in a really sad way” by the death of longer-run network shows. The industry is going through a “transitional phase,” added Bright, who likened it to “an old truck without power steering trying to make a U-turn.”
“It kind of breaks my heart because I grew up with Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon and if you saw an orange splat or the white and black checkered logo you knew what it meant,” she added. “It would be gritty and cutting edge and maybe a little inappropriate. And I think because Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network don’t have quite the same brand presence as they did in the kids and family space in the U.S. market we’ve really limited where that goes. I think folks are really struggling to understand who the six-to-11 audience are.”
Bright’s glass is half full and she refuses to accept that these kids are completely lost to the likes of YouTube. “I think a big part of losing that audience to a platform like YouTube is because we’re not programming for what they watch,” she added.
She has been occupied of late by Lore Olympus, Webtoon and The Jim Henson Company’s animated adaptation for Prime Video based on Rachel Smythe’s smash comic.
Lore Olympus, which has accrued more than 1.8 billion global views on Webtoon to date, reimagines the Greek myth of Hades and Persephone. Bright says this reimagining and subversion of expectations fits neatly with her team’s vision.
“Lore Olympus launched in 2018 at a time when you could probably argue that the perception of comics was that men read comics and women did not,” she added. “And I think Lore Olympus absolutely exploded that concept, because there’s a huge female fan base and there’s also a huge male fan base, and it’s romance, drama, thriller, a lot of comedy and a slice of life.”
Having been revealed in January, Bright says the creative team led by showrunner Julia Cooperman (Colony) is currently “jamming on scripts and starting to see some beautiful things take shape.”
Lore Olympus is a perfect example of IP from a creator that “maybe hasn’t felt like their story’s been represented on screen,” added Bright. Another example she flags is Perfect Addiction, an Amazon Spain movie adapted from a webtoon that reached number one in 38 countries.
“If you’re, say, a huge anime fan, you just go and write an anime-inspired webcomic that has a queer romance and a comedic core, and make your own mash-up of representation,” she added. “The fans feel like they are responsible for the success of that property, and those properties usually have a single creator or a very small team. So we get this amazing snapshot of who the audience really is and what they are liking.”
Bright, who previously worked on the likes of Bob’s Burgers at Bento Box Entertainment, said Webtoon is truly global in the sense that it is constantly looking to adapt comics from different languages into others, often in interesting ways. “We let the fans tell us what migration looks like,” she added.
She was inspired, for example, by the way in which Chinese audiences embraced the Mexico-set Pixar hit Coco “in large part because the Chinese culture has so much respect for their elders, and it had such a beautiful synergy with the Day of the Dead.”
Going forwards, Webtoon has “many deals in the works” that Bright is across as she explores more co-production partnerships in animation, which she says have “come back with a vengeance in a really nice way.”
She is due to speak at Annecy later today on “strategic IP circulation.” Webtoon Productions executives are out in full force by the French lakeside.
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