Significance and Challenges of the Anime Industry

Compared to its cultural and social significance, "anime" has not had sufficient research and development support for production practice.

• A remarkable cultural accumulation since the 1950s
• A growth industry: market size doubled in 10 years, and overseas expanded fivefold [AJA, 2025]
• Growing attention from industry and government, including the new Cool Japan strategy [Cabinet Office, 2024] and Entertainment Contents ∞ 2024 [Keidanren, 2024]

• Massive data production: about six cardboard boxes per 30-minute episode in paper terms, and hundreds of TB per day in full-digital workflows
• Highly complex production pipelines involving hundreds of people

Challenges Across Industry and Academia

Animāre（アニマーレ） had been preceded by over five years of discussions among researchers and R&D leaders from both industry and academia, through opportunities such as ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2021 (coverage: CGWORLD vol.283), ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 (coverage: CGWORLD vol.322), and ACM CHI '25 AnimeSIG.

In particular, we focus on the following issues:

• Industry-side challenge: Tacit knowledge is strongly embedded in production practice, making external technical support by researchers and developers difficult.
• Academic-side challenge: Computer science, which often over-emphasizes technical novelty, makes it difficult to sustain long-term research rooted in culture.

What is Animāre?

Animāre（アニマーレ） is a project launched in October 2025, with a planned duration of 5.5 years until March 2031, based on the background above. Jun Kato (AIST) serves as project lead, and Akinobu Maejima (OLM Digital, Inc.) and Yuki Koyama (The University of Tokyo) serve as co-leads. The origin of the project name and the full member composition are available on the top page.

We aim to achieve the following:

• For researchers and developers: Breaking through highly tacit current practices from a tool-centered perspective, and building benchmarks for tool development
• For creators: Realizing a technically diverse environment where creators can iterate and experiment to make better works
• For both researchers/developers and creators: Establishing long-term reciprocal relationships in which both sides influence each other

At the same time, we do not aim for the following:

• Research and development that values only technical novelty (without cultural context, it is not meaningful)
• Automation that interferes with creators’ iterative exploration (it does not improve the work)

We would be grateful for your support.

Contact

📩Email: M-anime-pi-ml@aist.go.jp