Your films are spread across every major streaming service: the Ghibli library at Max, Wolfwalkers on Apple TV+, more recently Look Back on Prime, and others on Netflix. You've found a lot of success without owning your own streaming platform like competitors Crunchyroll or Sentai’s HiDive do. What are your streaming and licensing ambitions going forward? Increasingly, we are having to be nimble in terms of the exact philosophy we take for each film and what rights are available or not. At the end of the day, it's really about just trying to get the films seen. So there's a couple of different ways we interact with streaming services. We're executive producers on Wolfwalkers, which was a streaming original for Apple with Cartoon Saloon. We've also handled the Studio Ghibli library sale to Max in the U.S. We also act as a distributor for titles that have already had global streaming deals in place, and so then we serve as distributors for theatrical or for home video or other rights; Look Back would be an example of that. That was a sale that originated in Japan. That's just such a beautiful and sort of remarkably emotional movie that needs to be seen with an audience, so we felt strongly that there should be an opportunity for that. Obviously for a younger audience, streaming plays a hugely important role: Streaming and digital are where these films have the majority of their life cycles these days. You're competing against some of these other services for licenses. What bumps on the road do you run into day-to-day? One of the biggest challenges we're still finding our way around is just the fact that for our history, we've been an American or North American distributor. We started the company and came of age at a time when it was very, very typical for independent distributors to split up rights across the globe. You had your big global studio pictures, and then you had your independent films that went through sort of the festival circuit, and they got split up among several dozen different distributors in each territory that handled these types of films and specialized in them with streamers. Now everything is back to being globalized, so streamers are de facto studios. Films that 10, 15 years ago would've almost certainly gone through this more independent route having specialist distributors in each territory are now like, “Hey, look, we have a global deal. You might be America, you might be a big, big territory and vital to the success of a film, but you're also part of this global package.” We increasingly have to find ways for us to get involved at a global level, even though much of our release strategy and our interest is the local market. Did your desire to get involved at a global level play into the Toho acquisition? Yeah. Definitely. There's pluses and minuses for everything in terms of the way that filmmakers get their film seen and the way that these streamers operate. But I think that ultimately, looking down a few years into the future, it's pretty obvious that this is only going to get more and more globalized, not less. We wanted to find a partner that we felt like could help support us in those global ambitions. Before that purchase, you had something in common with Toho. The wait to stream both your 2024 Oscars movies — Toho’s Godzilla Minus One and GKIDS’s The Boy and the Heron — in the U.S. was very long. What were the reasons? Yeah, Godzilla has some specifics to it that I think are unique to that franchise, but ultimately, both films come from Japan. This is something that we run into quite a bit. Japan has very specific holdback structures for their content that are just different from America’s. In Japan, the theatrical release is still very dominant. Toho also owns one of the most powerful and largest exhibition chains in the country, and so they're very heavily invested in the theatrical space and exhibition. And Japanese films, especially when they're successful, tend to have windows that are more like six months or up to a year for a blockbuster film. They just keep playing in theaters. Compare that to America: Post-COVID, especially, that window is getting shorter and shorter. So 18 days, 30 days, 60 days. I'm used to saying, “Okay, I know this one was opening in theaters. I know it'll be available for premium video-on-demand rental within a couple of weeks, and then it'll be on streaming in probably a month or two.” And that's just not the case for Japanese films, especially big popular anime films. So we sort of have to operate on this different timetable, and it can be a little frustrating. Do you delay the theatrical release long after the Japanese release so that you can give domestic audiences what appears to be a normal-looking timeline to them, or do you try to rush the film out in theaters so that fans here can enjoy something at the same time as fans in Japan or other countries? Often, you sort of split the difference. It's definitely something where I think that the Hollywood studio push on the windows is unique within the global industry. How will your new subsidiary relationship to Toho affect your future licensing and streaming partnerships? Will they be more involved in conversations around what titles go where? For the time being, it's going to be very similar. We continue to work really well with a lot of partners. We've been thoroughly disabused of the notion that consumers want another streaming service. For us, it's really a question of the available services — we work with pretty much all of them — and how their day-to-day or month-to-month strategies can change. We're now as responsive to the programming needs of the buyers as much as imperatives from our side. It's often a game of catch-up — keeping in contact with the different services and hearing from programmers things like, “Oh, now we're all in on this genre,” or “Now I need to understand what this kind of catalogue looks like in a couple of weeks before we change again.” Everything is so fast-moving in the third-party licensing space because it's become hollowed out in a way. All the streamers are now so focused on originals that library licensing and third-party licensing in general have become more challenging, except for the winner-takes-all model where it's the big films that do well in theaters that have a proven audience, proven fan demand. Those are obviously going to have their pick of potential streaming partners. Our job is to try to cultivate those relationships so that all of our titles, big and small, can find a home. In a 2017 interview, you said that GKIDS was unlikely to make serious plays into TV. Since then, you've had a string of classic anime-license rescues — Neon Genesis Evangelion, Miyazaki’s Future Boy Conan, Nadia and the Secret of Blue Water, and the much more recent show Arcane. Now your strategy is to preview shows like Dan Da Dan and the new Gundam show Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX as theatrical compilation films. What changed? Are you getting more aggressive in TV? I guess that's a lesson in terms of not ruling anything out in the future … Not intended as a gotcha! No, not at all. That was a case of sometimes it's hard to imagine what your role can be until someone comes with an idea. Earlier, I wouldn't have called it an aversion to TV, but it just seemed less likely because we didn't own a network. We didn't own a streaming platform, and so there were limited ways that we could be involved. Since then, a couple of things have happened. With the general exit from the home-video space and physical media, a lot of studios created an opening for rescuing and curating what I think of as some of the most important series of all time. That's good business for us. Those are great titles for our library and also really important to us as fans ourselves. People who work at the company are all really motivated by that. And then over the last couple of years as it's become clear that the volume of production and release is staggering, and ultimately there is a role for marketing and curation and audience development that a lot of times these series desperately need — especially when they're launching — in order to find enough fans to get them on their way. That was a really exciting idea that we tried last year for the first time with the Dan Da Dan season-one premiere — a highly anticipated Shonen Jump anime adaptation from a manga that I love and from a studio, Science Saru, that we've worked on many feature films together. We knew the creative team, knew the property, knew that it was going to be something really excellent, and we wanted to experiment with how we could help launch something that was ultimately on multiple streaming platforms. They were going nonexclusive, and so that was a really interesting opportunity because there wouldn’t be one platform that owns that brand. You have the ability to find an audience across multiple channels. Are you looking to use the resources of Toho to get your own streaming platform one day? No, I mean, it's hard to imagine. There's “never say never,” but that one's one I would almost say never on. There's really just so many markets. The platforms that exist are run by some of the largest entertainment companies on earth, and that doesn't necessarily mean that they've also succeeded in finding audiences. I suppose there's still plenty of interesting things that'll happen over the next couple of years in terms of the expected merging, consolidating. We just have to kind of wait and see what that process looks like. But I believe that, certainly from the audience side, it doesn't seem like the audience, our fans or anyone, is crying out for another niche service they have to subscribe to. Does it get messy when you want to put a compilation film of a given anime's episode in theaters while another licensor has the series streaming rights and is trying to figure out their own strategy around that? Yeah. Ultimately, we work with the licensor, with the producers and the studio, and they work with the streaming partners as well. It's a heavily negotiated experience to be able to present episodes of a series before they've released, but at the end of the day, I think it's a huge net positive for the streaming release. The amount of people who see it in the theater, those are your core fans who are so excited that they want to see something early, that they want to see it in a large format like a theater, and to be able to experience that together as an audience. It plays the same role that anime conventions have played for years in terms of building buzz. So I view it as an incredible additive experience for streaming, and not competition at all. It really just ensures that for a couple of weeks, there's a lot of positive energy around a series before it releases. I think that any series that we would be involved in has to be high enough quality that you're going to come out of that screening excited. There's no negative word of mouth that could come out of this, or else it wouldn't be a candidate for a theatrical proposal like that. Your immediate upcoming releases are all in the anime space, but your roots are also in independent, international animation at large. I’ve seen fears, especially after the Toho acquisition, that animation from places like France or Belgium or Ireland or Spain or China — that these other countries won't be prioritized as much. How do you respond to that anxiety? Generally speaking, European films, independent animation, non-anime, remain a really important part of our business and part of our mission. That's true for Toho as well. As the animation business gets increasingly globalized, a lot of these boundaries are starting to shift. We had a film last year, Ghost Cat Anzu, which we helped executive-produce and was a Japanese-French co-production. There’s a lot of exchange of animation talent, especially as Japan hits various production crunches. But even beyond that, Europe remains really important, and Latin America and China. All these countries and markets have vital filmmaking happening inside them, so we want to continue to champion that. One of the exciting things for me this year — even though it strikes some piece of competitive spirit within me — is the nominations and the success for Flow and for Memoir of a Snail. Those are two films that I would've loved to have. In the scheme of things, it's actually really healthy that we have competitors take on titles. The more we are a niche unto ourselves, the less healthy the industry is, and so the more that theaters and studios can sort of see the success that they can also have with these beautiful animated films, the better it is for all of us. That really helps grow the market in exciting ways. Did you try to license Flow or Memoir of a Snail? Did you pitch for them? Uhhhh. You know, it's complicated. [Laughs.] We're used to competing for a number of titles now. It used to be for years when we started that we would wait a couple of weeks after a film festival ended, and if a film hadn't sold yet, we would offer a very modest guarantee and take that on. That's how we built the company for the first few years, because these titles were just, frankly, undervalued in America, and someone had to prove that they were worth something. As that audience has grown, as the market has matured, it's a great thing to see A24 with Marcel the Shell and Sideshow with Flow and IFC with Memoir of a Snail. These are all really great things. As opposed to: The more we act as the animation distributor, I think, the more it sort of reinforces some ideas that animation is just one thing when, in fact, it should be a healthy part of any studio's portfolio of titles. There should be no reason that we're the sole company chasing any of these films. And we're not, definitely not anymore. What does the future of the international animation space look like to you? Here in the States, Miyazaki's Oscar win felt massive. Flow feels like it’s having its own moment. What comes next? We have a real opportunity over the next couple of years with a new generation of audience that is more willing to take animation seriously. We started our Los Angeles film festival Animation Is Film as a declarative statement several years ago. In some ways, that has a defensive tone to it; you have to defend the idea of animation as film. But the younger audience has shown that they're really open to animation of all types and all stories. That's really, really exciting, and you start to see now a lot of animators and filmmakers who are also inspired by the older generation to create really exciting films. So it feels really positive. I obviously have concerns over the production ecology of the world at large. It’s not great. Generative AI obviously is a big thing that hits animation and illustration pretty hard. There's a lot of doom and gloom out there. But I have to put that aside and think that for me, some of the most exciting work I've seen has been all created in the last couple of years. I really think that if we can support these artists, that we have a new golden age coming up, just around the horizon. | 