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Are NFTs a Viable Collaboration for Creating Anime?

The Azuki panel on Anime Expo's second day was something that I arrived at with mixed feelings. On the one hand, Code Geass creator Gorō Taniguchi was there, and how can I deny the man whose Dostoevskian yarn about crime, punishment, politics, robots, waifus, and Pizza Hut became a staple for me in my early college years? On the other hand, he was representing a company known for its line of NFTs. It left me puzzled.

Given Tanaguchi's superstardom, it's easy to assume that most of the people in the room were there for just him; you could have dropped “Azuki” or “community-driven anime” from the programming guide and replaced it with “the Code Geass dude” and it would have panned out the same way. This dawned on me after Azuki CEO Alex Xu came on stage to golf clap from the audience. It gave me the impression that he was a stranger whose existence people were only just discovering. Director Tatsuyuki Tanaka was unable to attend the panel, although a video featuring him and a mea culpa for his absence was played.

Taniguchi and Xu went on to discuss the importance of collaboration in the busy world of anime. This is something that Taniguchi has discussed before, so his answer came off as a reiteration. “We place emphasis on the need for a new partner, and that is everyone here,” Taniguchi would say. “We realize the necessity to bring a lot of strengths from many other people, and we're not thinking of it as necessarily from fans, so we're not making a clear distinction there. Just thinking of it more as everyone adding on to one process to create one whole story.”

Weirdly enough, despite the company making NFTs their bread and butter, they were barely discussed here at the panel. Not that they entirely shied away from it, but it was only brought up a scant few times, with emphasis given that the ultimate goal of Azuki was to work together with the fandom and the community. Xu introduced Azuki as something that started as an NFT collective but was in the process of expanding to other avenues, and talked about how creating NFTs helped his company navigate the hurdles of licensing and copyright that arise during the creative process. Taniguchi even used an example of Nintendo suing doujinshi artists because they used Pikachu in their work, with Xu following up, saying how NFTs served to counter such unfair copyright feuds.

“One of the reasons why we decided to make this original Azuki project into an NFT collection is because we can embed copyright rights and commercial rights into the NFTs themselves,” Xu said. “If you own that NFT and the character that it represents, then you have full rights to it. And so for a lot of artists in our community, they can do the fan art of these characters, and we like that. The owner of that character will commission work from these artists. I think that's one way these NFT owners own a part of Azuki. It's a win for owners and artists.”

Indeed, Xu's commentary was laced with faint praise and intrigue in working with the fandom and seeing it grow. As the self-appointed “creative team for fans,” they gave advice to aspiring animators wanting to break into the industry, invited people to hang out in the Discord, and discussed the promise and challenges faced by younger generations. One of their talking points concerning the younger generation of animators and the transition from drawing by hand to digital proved intriguing.

“There are both pros and cons of younger animators,” Taniguchi said. “One of the good points is that they've seen so many past works that they know how to replicate those methods. One of the cons—and it's not necessarily their fault, it might be the responsibility of the field of anime as a whole—when they're young, they tend to make cars or robots in computer graphics, so they don't draw by hand. The veteran animators didn't use computer graphics back then, so they had to draw by hand, and they developed unique aspects of drawing. Younger generations have the chance to develop those unique styles being taken away from them. If you want to try that hand-drawn style, these younger generations have to go over to Trigger with Imaishi-san. But the industry recognizes this problem, so they're trying to resolve this issue right now."

A huge portion of the panel's run time featured the panelists discussing their original anime series Enter The Garden. With the production of the anime series' third episode underway, it was a good opportunity to talk about how the main theme of the episode was about challenges. Taniguchi said, “The first episode highlighted the image of Azuki, and the second showcased Azuki's popular characters. The third episode is trying to showcase how far we can go to widen our styles. We feel that the challenge has been going well, and we've been able to move on with the process.”

All of this talk about Enter The Garden's production and optimistic look on the anime fandom seemed to be an attempt to ignore the elephant in the room. Xu would even compare his “community-driven projects” to something similar to Fifty Shades of Gray, which, because it was a fanfic of Twilight, became a massive franchise. There is certainly something to be said about referencing a fanfic that is bereft of anything original. Not that originality in anime or anything else is easy to achieve. I've read Hiroki Azuma's Otaku: Japan's Database Animals and watched enough anime to understand that anime is a medium composed of stories and tropes being reshuffled and retooled for consumption. And I love the anime fandom to death, too. I love seeing fans get together to collab and create something bigger than themselves. But it's weird and a bit disingenuous to see NFT-driven projects as a means for the fandom to reach a newfound zenith.

I highly doubt that Taniguchi's legacy will be tarnished by his new business venture, but engaging in NFTs might leave a smudge mark, especially when the NFT collective in question has only the vaguest idea of what they want to do from here. Regardless, it's still hard for me to see the man whose magnum opus railing against mechanized imperialism would go the way of the tech bro here.