Anime Industry: Traditional Culture and New Business Technologies

The article is devoted to one of the creative branches of the Japanese economy – the anime industry. The creative sector has become one of the promising and fast-growing segments of the global economy, including the economy of Japan. Anime, or Japanese animation, is a specific kind of animation that emerged in Japan as a unique product in the 1960s. Its distinctive visuals have turned anime into an authentic Japanese cultural phenomenon. In recent decades, the anime industry, like other creative businesses, has faced the need for significant transformation due to consequences of technological advancements and growing competition.

There is a trend towards a drop in demand for animation products offered through traditional media, due to the rapid spread of high-speed Internet connection, which enabled consumers to quickly access content in excellent resolution without relying on physical media. Under these conditions, companies are changing their marketing strategies, in particular switching to the production and distribution of anime for online viewing.

Streaming services have become one of the rapidly developing technologies for the anime distribution. There are several major national streaming services in Japan, which, despite being not very popular outside the country, have a wide audience at home.

The transition of the anime business to the digital plane is inevitably associated with the complexity of copyright protection, since it has become possible to copy video materials without loss of quality and binding to physical media. At the same time, such unauthorized distribution serves as free advertising for the copyright holders, so the industry had been tolerant to this phenomenon until recently.

The development of Japanese animation faces the problem of a shortage of animators. Due to growing demand in the 1970s, studios outsourced part of the work to reduce costs, which facilitated the creation of a multi-level subcontracting structure of the anime industry.

Among the current trends in the development of the industry is the transition to a strategy of multiplatform exploitation of intellectual property – the so-called transmedia franchising, when many secondary works are created around the original intellectual product – an animated work.

New technologies make it possible to make anime more accessible to wider audiences, but production structure and license management policies are not fully adapted to the new conditions, which creates new problems.

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