Brazil is the 3rd anime market outside of Japan and China
It is no exaggeration to say that, among Brazilians’ vast list of passions, are Japanese designs.
It’s an old love: it started on TV in the 1990s and, with the push of streaming and the pandemic, the country became the third largest anime market outside of Japan and China, behind only the United States and India.
No wonder Ana Maria Braga appeared dressed as Sakura, and Zeca Pagodinho dressed up as Naruto.
This week, the g1 publishes a series of reports on the strength of Asia in pop culture. With a new boom in anime, companies are investing in dubbing and combating piracy. Hollywood responds with more Asian representation in films and series.
“There is a lot of celebration of Japanese culture in Brazil, which is why it is so important for us to get involved in projects in the country,” says Gita Rebbapragada, director of operations at Crunchyroll. The main online platform for consuming anime in the world, the company set up a team in São Paulo, has invested in translating titles into Portuguese and expanded participation in fan events, such as CCXP, which takes place in the capital of São Paulo.
Photo: Arte g1 / Vitória Coelho
To get here, some help was invaluable to the segment: that of the “Knights of the Zodiac”. The cartoon about the orphan Seiya in search of his kidnapped sister debuted in 1994, on Rede Manchete. It inaugurated the first “boom” of anime in Brazil.
At the time, Japanese productions were an easy choice to fill children’s schedules on Brazilian TV stations, due to their low sales and dubbing costs. Long before Knights of the Zodiac, titles such as “Man of Steel”, “Zoran: The Space Boy”, “Fantomas”, “Speed Racer” and “Super Dynamo” arrived in the country in a first wave, starting in the 1970s.
But it was with the Seiya saga that this type of animation began to gain market status, with toys, music, events and all types of merchandising. One fever would pass and then another would come. It was like this from “Pokémon”, with its desired video games, to the monsters in “Yu-Gi-Oh” and the cards that spread throughout schools, shopping malls and squares.
The success of anime on Brazilian TV opened the door for the explosion of manga — the comics on which most Japanese cartoons are based.
In 2001, the monthly magazines for “Dragon Ball” and “Knights of the Zodiac”, with an average of one hundred pages, became fortnightly after just a few editions. This success surprised many people in the publishing world, who did not believe that a black-and-white comic book with reverse reading could work here.
“Our biggest difficulty was not with the public, but with the members of the comics market in Brazil: from distributors to journalists (including those specializing in comics), everyone saw the arrival of manga as something minor, without great importance. Of course that the resounding success of ‘Dragon Ball’, ‘Knights of the Zodiac’, ‘Evangelion’ and ‘Vagabond’ changed all that”, explained Rogério de Campos to g1, in 2008. That year, he was editorial director at Conrad Editora, one of the first to launch manga in Brazil.
Two decades have passed and, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the anime market experienced another turning point.
At the height of lockdown in 2020, when total box office sales in the United States plummeted 80% for the year and Japan’s movie theater market fell 45%, the anime industry contracted just 3.5%, with a market value of around of US$ 21.3 billion.
Photo: Arte g1 / Vitória Coelho
With screen time growing especially among young people, global demand for the genre has soared. According to consultancy Parrot Analytics, the demand for anime content grew 118% worldwide between 2020 and 2021.
“Generation Z [dos nascidos a partir da segunda metade da década de 90] He started looking for different stories, from different places, something like portals to other worlds, and animes are exactly that”, says Crunchyroll’s operations director.
“With the pandemic, there was an acceleration in the number of consumers and fans, which we had never seen before. Some titles have simply entered the cultural zeitgeist.”
This is the case of “Demon Slayer”, a story about a boy who becomes a demon hunter after seeing his entire family killed by one of them. A film released in the first year of the pandemic, between the first two seasons of the cartoon, grossed more than US$504 million in cinemas around the world, becoming the biggest cinematic success of all time in the anime industry.
It is clear that the favorable moment boosted business in the sector. In 2021, Sony Pictures purchased Crunchyroll from AT&T for $1.2 billion. The decision was to merge with Funimation, its own anime streaming service, creating the largest specialized platform of the genre.
The company’s main effort currently is to dissociate Japanese cartoons from childish images and prejudiced stereotypes attributed to otakus — fans of anime and manga –, who have often been represented as socially maladjusted people.
“You can’t say that anime is still part of a niche, but it doesn’t have a super incredible flow yet. We’re trying to figure out ways to expand that,” explains Terry Li, executive vice president of emerging businesses at Crunchyroll.
To win more viewers outside of Japan, the secret has been to diversify narratives. Far beyond “Dragon Ball”, “Naruto” and others in the shounen genre (in the categorization borrowed from manga, action stories with male protagonists, usually teenagers), it is possible to find anime about politics, romance, music, travel, sport, investigations police and a multitude of other subjects.
“With global demand growing, streaming companies – like ours – share information about the performance of titles with studios. This way, they better understand the types of stories most sought after in each territory. This has generated very interesting projects”, says Gita Rebbapragada, from Crunchyroll.
“International markets today play a very important role in terms of determining what each studio will create, because they are where much of the demand will come from in the future.”
Among the highlights mentioned by the executive for Brazil, one of them draws attention for uniting two of the country’s passions. “Blue Lock” has a story about football, with the Japanese team trying to get back on its feet after an embarrassment in the 2018 World Cup. Pelé, Neymar and Zico are even mentioned in the cartoon.
