Anime Expo is ‘Super Bowl’ for Crunchyroll and Anime Lovers: Q&A

The growing popularity of and intense fandom devoted to anime content is on colorful display in downtown Los Angeles over the Fourth of July holiday weekend. Some 100,000 fans of the art form gathered Thursday at the Los Angeles Convention for the start of Anime Expo, one of the largest annual fan gatherings in the world.

Sony Pictures Entertainment has a sizable footprint in the anime sector through its ownership of Crunchyroll, a subscription streaming platform and content brand. Sony Pictures also jointly owns the Aniplex anime production studio based in Tokyo in partnership with its sibling Sony Music.

With such a significant investment in anime, Crunchyroll and Sony can’t afford to miss the four-day Anime Expo event in Los Angeles. It’s second only in size to the annual AnimeJapan event, which is run by the same organization and drew more than 150,000 fans in Tokyo in March.

For Crunchyroll, the gathering in L.A. is a prime opportunity to promote new projects to fans. And it’s evolved into a key moment on the business calendar for anime creators, producers and distributors to meet with the licensors, brand partners, vendors and other suppliers who are crucial to Crunchyroll’s operations.

Mitchel Berger, executive VP of global commerce for Crunchyroll, says the growth of Anime Expo mirrors the rise of anime as both a lifestyle and art form. For sure, the crowd milling around L.A. Live and the Convention Center plaza on Thursday wore their passion for shows, characters and franchises on their sleeves — and everywhere else, including copious tattoos.

Anime Expo has its humble roots in an event launched by anime buffs at UC Berkeley in 1991. It launched as “Anime Con” and was held the first year at Red Lion Inn in San Jose, Calif. The event moved to Southern California and was held for several years in Anaheim and in Long Beach before settling at the L.A. Convention Center in 2008. Attendance reached 50,000 in 2012. By 2016, it had surged to 100,000, according to Anime Expo.

Berger, who is based in Dallas, spent 21 years as a sales executive with Universal Pictures Home Entertainment before joining Crunchyroll’s predecessor Funimation in 2014. Sony Pictures Entertainment bought Funimation in 2017 and Crunchyroll in 2021.

Here, Berger takes a moment from attending the event that Crunchyroll staffers consider their annual Super Bowl to explain the nuances of the art, the storytelling and the fandom that is unique to anime.

“It is it’s own medium,” Berger says, emphasizing that this is the key to understanding anime and its most passionate consumers. Also sprinkled in below are candid photos of Anime Expo attendees strutting their cosplay stuff in the L.A. sun during the long Fourth of July holiday weekend. So much creative energy is poured into hand-crafted outfits and props among attendees, many of whom traveled from far and wide to be there.

You have a very big presence here. I’m bowled away by the numbers and force of this fandom. What’s the focus for Crunchyroll at Anime Expo?

We are here, first and foremost, for the fans. It’s a wonderful gathering for fans to all come together and share this love of anime. So the first thing we want to do is make sure that we’re here to enable and encourage and accelerate that love for them. To give them sneak peek at content, to talk to them about what’s going on there, to have a booth experience they can come immerse themselves in the shows that they love. Give them a chance to buy some exclusive merchandise. So we want to give them a really authentic, Crunchyroll experience that celebrates their fandom. But we also are really excited that our Japanese partners and licensors are here, so we have a chance to meet with them, connect with them, talk business with them, but also share with them the opportunity to see how their content comes to life and how the fans experience it. To get to see in real time that reaction from fans that are there to love it, that’s a unique opportunity that we are really honored to be a part of.

To see it writ large walking around you – I would imagine you learn a lot about your shows and what makes them click with fans. Do you keep a mental note of how many of your characters you see walking by?

It’s a humbling experience. You’re reminded of the honor that we have to be part of this community and bring anime to folks. It’s great to be able to walk around and interact with the fans. It’s such a community itself that likes to get together in real life. So anytime we have that opportunity to meet the fans, to hear about what they love, to see the passion on their face, to talk to them about the shows and the characters they love. That just re-energizes and reminds me why we do what we do, and the privilege that it is to be part of this journey that they’re on with these characters and stories and this medium that they love.

The people walking around here in elaborate costumes are their own activation. You see how involved the whole fan eco-system is with the merch, the social media, the costumes, the tattoos. It’s intense. How do you at Crunchyroll tap into this intense fandom outside of an event like this? Do you try to stoke it with content, giveaways, etc?

It’s a give and take. We do want to be here and give them information and experiences that they like. The other one is listening. So we are listening to fans. We’re looking at what’s resonating with fans. We’re looking at what trends are going on. We’re paying attention to what kind of things are they buying in our store, what kind of traffic comes through. All of those are signals about how are the things that we are doing resonating with that fan base. What are we getting right? What should we continue doing?

Do you get a sense from an event like this about what shows or what creators are bubbling up next? Do you get instant feedback by being in close quarters for four days with fans from all over?

You can and we’ve had situations where we will announce a show maybe a year or two in advance sometimes. And if you announce something like that at our industry panel, and the place lights up immediately, and you feel the electricity in the air and people are cheering and screaming. Then you know, OK, this is going to be something special.

How important are social media platforms to you in terms of finding and interacting with the most ardent anime fans? Will your teams scour social media in a week to see how the activity here is resonating with influencers and super-fans?

Absolutely. Our social team is probably already right now online, looking at the conversations and participating in the conversations too. We love to respond back to fans. We love to amplify great stories. But yes, we will be looking at what are the stories coming out of here? Where are people resonating with things? What are the amazing human stories that come out of this? And we’ll engage in that conversation. And we’re always talking. We’ve got a massive social media presence, and I think our fan base loves this connection and that we have a two-way conversation. We talk to them here in person, but we also talk to them online a lot, so we’re going to always continue that conversation.

What’s been the most effective way for you to talk to them online? Story tidbits? Sneak peeks?

We’re always creating content. We’re out there creating content to talk about. We are responding in real time on our social media handles. We’ll amplify, sometimes, things that are out there. We’re talking with influencers and giving them the opportunity to interact with content. So our entire social and audience development team is out there themselves as fans, having these conversations and interacting with fans across all Instagram, TikTok, wherever it’s at.

Crunchyroll, Sony and others also invest in theatrical distribution for some of the bigger anime franchises. What do you get out of having titles in the multiplexes? What type of anime works on the big screen?

The reason I think it works is, this younger generation, Gen Z, Gen Alpha — they are passionate about this. They’re just incredibly passionate about this. I think those fans are also craving in-real-life experiences. They want to get together with people that share their passions. Not everybody in the country can come out to Anime Expo. Not everybody can get here or get to [another anime] convention, but everybody can get to a theater. So when you’ve got an opportunity, you’ve got this piece of content that you love, it’s in your town. You show up on a Tuesday night, you’re in a theater with 200 people who love this thing as much as you do. That is an experience in real life that you can’t replicate anywhere else. And I’m a big believer in seeing a film with a crowd. In that world, the crowd also becomes part of the story. It changes the people you’re with, changes the experience you have, and it can’t be replicated. So that one moment when you’re at that one screening with that group of people will never happen again. That’s an experience that you can’t duplicate. That’s why they love it.

Does Crunchyroll act as a theatrical distributor?

We work with so Sony Pictures, we work hand in hand with them. They do all of our distribution for us globally, but we will acquire the films and we work on them and we distribute directly with them.

Let me ask you a question through a TV lens. Is Crunchyroll a destination brand? Or is it specific shows and franchises that drive your audience and subscribers?

I don’t know if I’d call it a destination brand in that construct. Absolutely, when we have large shows that obviously pop, just like anytime you’ve got something that everyone’s talking about, it creates a pop. But it’s important to know that the fandom for this audience is not first rooted in the IP. IP is incredibly important. But the foundation of the fandom is the medium of anime itself. So, from that perspective, I would say, we’re a destination in that as a fan of anime, we have a massive catalog. We have a place to come to really explore what is anime. And yes, once you’re in there, there are fandoms for each of the titles, but they’re not discrete. You can be a “One Piece” fan and a “Solo Leveling” fan and an “Attack on Titan” fan and a “My Hero” fan — you’re experiencing the entire medium. So yes we’re a destination, but we’re also a lifestyle.

As an anime fan, you come in, you experience a show. You fall in love with it. But once you’ve done that, then we want to be there with an experience for you everywhere else, whether you want to go to a theater and see it, you want to go buy a piece of merchandise, you want to go to a convention like this experience, wherever those touch points are, we want to be there with an authentically Crunchyroll experience that accelerates your fandom and gives you the tools to express it to folks. So streaming is incredibly important. That’s the tip of the spear, but it’s only the start of the journey as a fan of anime.

Is there an element to the fandom that doesn’t want anime to become too mainstream in entertainment. If NBC decided to air an anime show, would that be antithetical to the fans compared watching shows on a dedicated anime haven like Crunchyroll?

That’s an interesting question. I’ll answer it this way. A couple years ago, we had opportunity to put Goku in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade as a balloon. He’s the main character of “Dragon Ball Z.” And when that opportunity first came up, my initial thought was, I don’t know. Is it too big? Is it gonna feel out of place? Are our fans watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade? So I wasn’t sure.

We put the balloon in the parade. The fan reaction was massive, just off the charts. And what hit me while reading the comments was, all these fans love this thing they have been cultivating, and they’ve been a part of this community. And when they saw Goku up there as a balloon, it was a validation that said, ‘This thing that I love is up there with Snoopy and SpongeBob and Charlie Brown.’ It was this validation of that fandom.

Would it play on NBC? I don’t know. I think there’s room to grow. From a mainstream perspective, I do think that fans love the fact that more and more people are appreciating this art form that they love.

What do you think is most misunderstood about anime and its fandom among Hollywood insiders and creatives? What would you like them to know about anime?

The biggest thing for me — we talk about this a lot — is that anime is not a genre. It’s a medium. It’s a way of telling stories. What I would love for people to really embrace about anime is that it is another vehicle and another tool to tell great stories. Just like live action, just like stop motion, just like Western animation, just like — you name it. They’re all art forms that are designed to take a creative vision and a point of view and a story from someone and connect it with someone else and make an emotional connection. That’s what anime does. That’s why it’s resonating so much for the young community. It’s authentic, and it connects with them, and it’s telling stories they want to hear. So I would love for people to recognize and embrace the fact that anime is a beautiful, brilliant art form with amazing stories and characters that resonate with a fan base. It belongs on par with everything else there, because we’re just about connecting people with stories, and we do it through anime versus how someone else does it, but the connection is still just as real.

(Pictured top: A father and daughter play with a video activation inside the Crunchyroll installation at Anime Expo)