Made in the West: When American Studios Try to Grow Anime From Foreign Seeds

Not long ago, the idea of an American studio producing something that could credibly be called "anime" would have gotten you laughed out of the room at an Otakon panel. Fast forward to 2024, and Netflix has entire anime divisions, Riot Games is dropping animated series that break streaming records, and the debate over what even counts as anime has become one of the most heated conversations in fan spaces.

So let's talk about it — the rise of Western-produced anime and anime-adjacent content, what's working, what's flopped, and why this whole conversation is messier than either side wants to admit.

The Pipeline Has Changed Dramatically

For most of anime's history in the US, the flow was simple: Japan makes it, American companies license and localize it. Funimation dubs it, fans buy the DVDs, everyone goes home happy. The creative direction always started in Japan.

That model hasn't disappeared, but it's running parallel to something new. Streaming platforms with global reach — Netflix especially — started funding original anime productions in Japan, then gradually began greenlighting projects developed outside of Japan but explicitly targeting anime audiences. Castlevania on Netflix is probably the clearest early example: American showrunner, American writers' room, animation produced by a Japanese studio (Powerhouse Animation). The result was something that genuinely felt like anime to a lot of fans, and critics loved it.

Then came Arcane. Riot Games' League of Legends adaptation wasn't produced in Japan, didn't follow traditional anime production pipelines, and was animated by a French studio. And yet the conversation around it — in fan forums, on Reddit, at conventions — was firmly planted in anime discourse. When it swept the Emmys and sparked debates about whether it "deserved" to be in anime award categories, it was clear the ground had shifted.

The Authenticity Question Nobody Agrees On

Here's where it gets complicated, and honestly, kind of fascinating.

A significant chunk of the anime fandom — particularly older fans and those with deeper ties to Japanese pop culture — holds firm on a geographic definition: anime is animation made in Japan, full stop. Under that framework, Arcane is not anime. Avatar: The Last Airbender is not anime, no matter how much it draws from Japanese visual language. These fans argue, reasonably, that the cultural context of where something is made shapes what it is in ways that go beyond aesthetics.

But a younger generation of fans, many of whom came to anime through streaming rather than Saturday morning blocks or Blockbuster rentals, tends to think about it differently. For them, anime is closer to a style and a storytelling sensibility than a passport stamp. And that's not an unreasonable position either — especially when you consider that plenty of anime produced in Japan is now heavily influenced by Western genre conventions in the first place.

What neither side fully agrees on is who gets to draw the line, and what's at stake when they do.

Case Studies: The Good, the Contested, and the Outright Messy

Castlevania (Netflix, 2017–2021): This is the success story people point to. Warren Ellis's scripts leaned into the dark, gothic brutality of the source material while bringing a distinctly Western horror-fiction sensibility. The Japanese animation studio executed it beautifully. Fan reception was overwhelmingly positive, and it opened the door for a wave of similar projects. The controversy here was relatively mild — mostly purists objecting to the label "anime" rather than to the quality of the show itself.

Avatar: The Last Airbender: Technically predates the current wave, but it remains the defining case study. Nickelodeon's animated series was created by American showrunners who were deeply, genuinely knowledgeable about East Asian art, mythology, and storytelling. The result was widely beloved — and also constantly relitigated in fan spaces about whether it "counts." When Netflix produced a live-action adaptation, the original creators walked away over creative differences, and the subsequent controversy about cultural fidelity reignited every debate the original series had sparked.

Netflix's Live-Action Adaptations of Japanese Anime: Death Note (2017) and Cowboy Bebop (2021) are cautionary tales. Both were attempts to adapt beloved Japanese anime for Western audiences, and both were received poorly — not just by purists, but broadly. Critics pointed to shallow characterization, clumsy tonal shifts, and the sense that the adaptations understood the plot of the originals but missed their spirit. The Bebop cancellation after one season felt like a referendum.

Blue Eye Samurai (Netflix, 2023): This one's interesting because it flips the script. Created by American writers Michael Green and Amber Noizumi, set in Edo-period Japan, animated in a style that blends anime visual language with Western action choreography. The show was critically acclaimed, won awards, and generated genuine enthusiasm in anime fan communities — despite being entirely Western in origin. It suggests that authenticity might be less about geography and more about craft, research, and respect for the source culture.

What Cultural Adaptation Actually Requires

The projects that tend to land well share a few things in common: the creators did their homework, they brought in cultural consultants or collaborators with genuine ties to the material, and they weren't trying to sand down the Japanese-ness of the story to make it more palatable. The ones that struggle often feel like they're translating the surface — the visual style, the pacing, the big dramatic moments — without understanding what's underneath.

This is harder than it sounds. It requires understanding concepts like mono no aware and ma (the kind of things we've explored elsewhere on Chisou-En) and then figuring out how to honor them without simply copying them. That's a genuinely difficult creative challenge, and it's not surprising that a lot of projects stumble.

The Conversation Isn't Going Away

Western anime production isn't a trend that's going to fade — it's going to grow. As the global appetite for anime-style storytelling keeps expanding, more studios, more streamers, and more creative teams are going to take a swing at it. Some will be brilliant. Some will be disasters. Most will land somewhere in the complicated middle.

For fans, the most useful posture is probably to hold two things at once: genuine appreciation for Japanese animation and storytelling traditions, and genuine openness to what happens when those traditions travel across cultural borders and take root somewhere new. Gardens grow differently in different soil. Sometimes what blooms is surprising.

At Chisou-En, we're watching all of it — the experiments, the controversies, the unexpected successes — and we'll keep bringing you honest takes on what's worth your time and what's just borrowing the aesthetic without doing the work.