Annecy International Animated Film Festival

Shiota:  The challenge is also a big benefit that we have been seeing in the past two years.  Because of the advent of the streaming video like the Netflixes, the Amazons, and the Hulus, there is suddenly a huge window of opportunity to show our work whereas before our genre, which is anime.  .  .  it was very difficult to find a place to show it in the international media.  But with the steaming video, we are able to produce shows and show them to many, many different countries at the same time.  So the challenge actually is that we have more than enough demand to create a show and there is now an opportunity to license the show for lucrative amounts of money. The challenge is actually how do we create the show facing the demand and how do we produce a show with these parameters.  It’s a matter of finding enough talent [and] finding enough interesting projects, because the opportunities are there. 

Shiota: We are having more strategic relationships with publishers – Japanese publishers like Kodansha – to find properties.  We are coming up with ideas on our own.   The elementary [aspects] to these things aren’t changing, the challenge is to find enough talent, great talent, to help us produce the shows.  We are sourcing talent not just from Japan but from all over the world.  We have created a studio in Malaysia to offshore some of the production and to make it manageable within the schedule and the budget.  It’s more of how do we find enough animators, talented animators to help us produce the show.