Mari Yamazaki Talks About Sharing Culture Through Anime

After today’s announcement for Netflix’s 2021 Anime lineup, Netflix had a special talk session with Mari Yamazaki, manga artist behind Thermae Romae and Shuichiro Tanaka from David Production. The panel talked a lot about the importance of anime, and how it’s helped intercultural communications.

Yamazaki, who lived in Italy, says that there’s a lot of shared passions between cultures. She stressed that we should be “utilizing anime as a tool” to share these cultures, especially since anime has become such a worldwide phenomenon.

“Our attitudes towards creating things has changed”, she says. “Netflix as a platform is uniting different values together”.

She says that despite how segregated people are by things like geography and nationality, anime helps bridge that divide. “That’s something we can all relate to”, she says.

Shuichiro Tanaka also talked about his experience with anime. He recalls being enamored by Evangelion at a younger age. “They have such a freedom,” he sighs dreamily.

Of course, one of the biggest barriers for anime was traditionally believed to be its inherent “Japanese-ness”. That’s why you can look back and find many older anime heavily localized, such as the Pokemon anime.

“When you think too much about localizing, you take away voices”, Yamazaki says. Rather than make sure stories share universal themes, Yamazaki implies that its much better to have a diverse series of stories being told, so that more cultures can come together based on them.

The Future Of Anime

Commenting on the future of anime, Yamazuki says it’s very much going to keep its pace. She describes the medium as a communication tool, once again going back to the diverse audiences who consume it.

“It’s like a common set of gates or windows”, she says.

Similarly, the boom of anime is having an effect on corporate mindsets, as well. After all, if you let a story be good first, you won’t have to worry about things like focus studies.

“You don’t have to think too much about content going globally”, says Taiki Sakurai, Chief Producer at Netflix Anime.

Earlier in the presentation, he’d also shared the statistics on anime consumption on Netflix. According to Sakurai, over 100 million households had chosen to watch anime on Netflix in the past year.

Both Sakurai and Tanaka’s predictions on the future of anime lie in its limitless nature. As a medium, it has the potential to go anywhere, which will be key to its longevity.

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