During its annual corporate strategy presentation, Sony Group Corporation announced plans to launch an academy dedicated to developing talent for anime creation.
Sony holds a significant monopoly over the western streaming rights to Japanese anime, largely due to its ownership of Crunchyroll, which recently merged with Funimation.
This merger has effectively made Crunchyroll the sole legal streaming provider for anime in many regions. Additionally, Sony owns Aniplex, a company involved in the production of anime, music, and merchandise.
Aniplex of America, based in Santa Monica, California, handles the distribution and licensing of Aniplex titles in Western regions, bringing many popular Japanese anime series to the West.
Animation studios A-1 Pictures and CloverWorks are both subsidiaries of Aniplex.
Sony has, over the past eight years, demonstrated a contentious relationship with Japanese game developers, often mandating various forms of censorship for their games released on the PlayStation 4 console.
This shift in policy coincided with Sony Interactive Entertainment relocating its main headquarters to California in 2016, a move initiated by then-CEO Andrew House, cementing the fact that Sony can no longer be considered a Japanese company.
Under the leadership of Jim Ryan, Sony has intensified its scrutiny of Japanese developers, targeting content that might appeal to straight gamers or clash with their globalist agendas.
This includes censoring games that feature attractive women who show skin. Paradoxically, Sony has allowed mature Western games with nudity and explicit sex scenes, such as The Last of Us Part 2, Cyberpunk 2077, and Baldur’s Gate 3 on its consoles.
This double standard extends even today with instances of Sony imposing censorship on the art book for the English release of Tsukihime: A Piece of Blue Glass Moon and implementing a day-one censorship patch for Stellar Blade.
However, after the “Free Stellar Blade” campaign garnered over 90,000 signatures, the censored costumes were reintroduced as separate additions.
Japanese anime is experiencing a surge in popularity, with companies like Kadokawa reporting impressive quarterly financial results. This success is driven by popular anime adaptations such as Oshi no Ko, The Eminence in Shadow, and Re:Zero. Additionally, novel sales for titles like Sword Art Online and Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation are contributing significantly to their financial performance.
The number of anime adaptations released each season has noticeably increased, but there’s a growing concern about the declining animation quality compared to productions from over a decade ago. However, despite this trend, publishers and producers like Kadokawa are still making significant profits. Now, with Japanese anime gaining global popularity, Sony is looking to claim an increased share of the lucrative industry.
The globalization of anime poses a dilemma. Anime has traditionally been a uniquely Japanese art form tailored to Japanese audiences, which has greatly contributed to its appeal. It offers a creative outlet that Western animation has often overlooked or struggled to replicate.
Yoshida Kenichiro, Chairman and CEO of Sony Group, along with Totoki Hiroki, President, COO, and CFO, stated, “The launch of a project to establish an academy aims to nurture anime creators in global markets, primarily by Aniplex and Crunchyroll, in collaboration with industry partners.”
The initiative to “nurture” anime creators in global markets, spearheaded by the progressive Westerners at Aniplex America and Crunchyroll, raises concerns about eroding the Japanese identity inherent in the product. This approach shifts the focus away from the unique Japanese culture that birthed anime in the first place.
At first glance, this decision may appear harmless or even beneficial, fostering animators and talent with the potential for more creativity. However, it’s crucial to recognize that companies like Sony have vested interests in shaping a particular narrative. They outright fucking hate sex appeal unless it’s queer-centric.
In doing so, there’s a risk of missing the essence of what makes anime truly unique and special, resulting in a mere imitation rather than an authentic representation.
Similar to Crunchyroll’s own High Guardian Spice, created by Western activists at Crunchyroll, the series suffered from poor storytelling, subpar dubbing, and the use of stock photos in the background, detracting from its overall quality.
Crunchyroll for instance is a company that absolutely hates true anime fans, considering the fact they’ve bastardized the Hatsune Miku Expo with hilarious cost cutting procedures, they’ve been stealing user data alongside the fact that there has been countless instances of localized anime either being censored of deliberately deviate entirely off the original Japanese script to impose political and or sexist rhetoric.
With their most infamous examples being the censorship of Sword Art Online and Mushoku Tensei whereas localized renditions of Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid and ONIMAI: I’m Now Your Sister imposed political rhetoric such as “patriarchal societal demands” and removed gendered language respectively.
When asked about the inclusion of political references like sexism in the localized dub of Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, one of its script writers and voice actors, Jamie Marchi, responded during a panel by stating that she and her colleagues were “funny talented women” and declared confidently, “we are out here, it’s going to happen.“
She concluded with the statement, “I have a vagina, deal with it. I’m sorry you’re not getting laid. It’s not about you, move on.“
This further underscores the intrusion of these privileged activist individuals into our hobbies at a production level. Their insistence on cultural colonization stems from their disagreement with the original content, leading them to drastically alter Japanese material to align more with their own sensibilities. They prioritize avoiding offense to individuals like themselves and aim to make the content resonate more with Western audiences who often engage with anime merely for its trendiness.
These are the sorts of people that Sony employees, they themselves had established an utter hatred for Japanese game developers for damn near an entire decade of censorship, leading to the implosion of Marvelous’ Senran Kagura franchise. For Sony to nurture globalized talent to produce more anime is exactly what such corporations want. For anime to lose its cultural identity and be driven into the ground as they continue pushing for the one world message behind the vaneer of the pitch for global audiences.
Anime is already beloved worldwide without such interventions. This isn’t about nurturing a medium but an attempt to homogenize entertainment into the same bland, indistinguishable, ESG/DEI-laden content that characterizes much of the American animation industry.
Sony appears intent on flooding the industry with poorly written, poorly produced Western-made content infused with culturally appropriate beliefs and values. Their aim seems to be the erosion of Japanese cultural values, vilifying genres like “ecchi” and likely reserving fanservice exclusively for progressive LGBTQ+ characters.
Sony has already nurtured game developers for global audiences, with its first-party portfolio including numerous Western development studios like Santa Monica Studio, Naughty Dog, and Insomniac Games. These studios now frequently incorporate progressive themes and values in their cinematic single-player narrative games, featuring protagonists who are lesbians, wholesome LGBTQ+ sex scenes, and or diverge away from the traditional source material.
Everything under Sony has to align with progressive and LGBTQ+ themes, resulting in content that feels like DEI-riddled slop. Anime is globally loved specifically because it is made by the Japanese for a Japanese audience. Now, Sony intends to dilute the medium for global audiences, much like Sony Interactive Entertainment has done to the gaming industry.
