All the News and Reviews from Anime NYC 2026

For Luv Letter Studios, It's All About Survival and Ambition

Kennedy “Kenzie” Freeman sits on stage with her coworkers as they wait for people to enter her panel during Anime NYC's final hours. A young and budding animator in the midst of her late 20's, Freeman bears a look of cautious glee as she sees more and more panelists sit themselves down. She knows that her animation studio, the up-and-coming Luv Letter Studios, is but a small fish in a big pond, remaining almost anonymous within Anime NYC's programming despite earning the privilege of hosting a panel and a booth. And being caught in the mosh of anime premieres, industry events, marketplace stalls, merchandise giveaways, deafening J-pop, and thousands and thousands of cosplayers, artists, musicians, writers, influencers, voice actors, businessmen, staffers, security guards, and plainclothes attendees leaves Freeman and her team little room to make themselves known. Freeman hits the panelists with the hard truth: you've probably never heard of her studio.

The scoop is that Freeman founded Luv Letter Studios back in February 2023 in the hopes that her proud, black-and-female-led team could capture the imaginations of fans around the world with their own compelling animated series. Three years have led them to work on one music video, two commercials, six films, and over 55 shows for studios such as Disney, DreamWorks, A1, White Fox, MAPPA, and Toei, just to name a few. And if that wasn't enough, they are now working alongside the likes of A.J. Beckles, Zeno Robinson, Anairis Quiñones, and Emi Lo, and their portfolio includes assisting with animation on the likes of Ruri Rocks, Dandadan, Re:Zero, Pokémon, One Piece, and Freeman's own personal favorite, Medalist. A clip show provides a quick snapshot of all of Luv Letter Studios' big anime work, something that enraptures the crowd and has them bursting into applause. Freeman approaches the crowd with a look of modest confidence. “Heard of us now?”

Luv Letter Studio's panel, “From Indie to Anime -- Working As An Animator in the US,” features Freeman, her animation director Ellen Block, and indie voice actor Nickeem Latty-Morgan weighing all of the ups and downs of the anime business. It's a panel that broaches all of the classic topics: how the business operates, how you get work, how you meet deadlines, how you get paid, and so on. Freeman approaches the mic and asks her audience how many of them want to work in and know more about the anime industry. Naturally, dozens and dozens of hands shoot up. By my estimates, it's over half of the people in attendance.

Freeman goes on to discuss how she learned the sausage was made. A graduate of BMCC and SCAD, Freeman would assist on various projects, such as the short film Legend of Pipi, before landing an internship working at DreamWorks on the animated series Fright Krewe. From there, she would make the move to intern at Disney TVA, where she helped with storyboarding Alice's Wonderland Bakery and did prop design for Monsters at Work. Interestingly enough, Freeman also had a brief stint at Titmouse, where she worked on Beavis and Butt-Head.

Convinced that she had what it took to make a break into anime, Freeman grabbed some of her sketches and storyboards, flew down to Anime Expo to meet up with producers at Studio Trigger, and then landed work at, of all places, the infamous Tonari Productions before moving on to Fincrossed Studio. When you consider all of the work Freeman has done, along with the strenuous conditions of the animation industry, plus surviving all of Tonari's controversial work procedures, one thing is made clear: Kenzie Freeman and her crew are fighters who refuse to give in.

Luv Letter Studios received their namesake from the Internet handle Freeman had used since high school. Offering assistance with key animation (genka), animation direction (sakkan), and layout assistance, Luv Letter Studios is setting itself out to become a love letter animation studio. They stand as a defiant act of optimism in the face of an anime industry that does not reciprocate the same love back. Forced to hit the ground running, Luv Letter Studios would become all too aware of the brutal work-life of the anime industry almost immediately.

What started as working on Blue Exorcist, Lazarus, and Pokémon became something more. My bet is more than what most people can handle, especially considering how Luv Letter Studios once worked on a whopping ten(!) anime at one time. Even more grueling is how the studio will sometimes get slammed with another batch of work midway through working on one. And then, there are all those dreadful last-minute deadlines guaranteed to spike your blood pressure. Freeman admitted that the worst deadline her team ever got was five hours for an episode that was going to air in eight hours, one that was barely finished with their key animation and in-betweens. And this was just for an anime's first episode. This type of situation became something that Luv Letter Studios, for better or worse, would come very used to, very quickly.

“Shout out to the team for putting up with my shenanigans,” Freeman says to the sound of earnest applause from the crowd. “Sometimes we'll get a message where they'll ask if we can do a shot in, like, twenty minutes. I'll be like, 'Okay, it's 2 a.m., I can see if someone's awake.' And we just figure it out from there. Luckily, I have told a lot of the anime studios that we work with that I put health over work. So when it comes to assignments where they're saying, ' Hey, we need you to work on 140 shots in a week, I'll say, 'No, it's okay.' Even if it's a really big anime. My team deserves to sleep, and the job is not going to pay for that for another month.”

Speaking of pay, therein lies another hurdle Luv Letter Studios has to constantly overcome. Many of the studios that Luv Letter works with don't give out contracts right off the bat. They might not be ready in time, so instead have you working on whatever project is assigned from the very get-go. So essentially, you have to work without a contract or security, which Freeman says is very nerve-wracking when you're American and you're used to having a contract for insurance and protection purposes. “You start, and you don't stop, because you must make a paycheck,” Freeman says.

It gets even harder once you realize that not only does the business overwork its employees, but for those on the American side of the pond who are at the whimsy of invoice pay, it takes up to 30 days for a paycheck to go through. One invoice took six months to process, which had Luv Letter Studios hunting down and cornering whoever they had to to ensure the check reached their bank accounts. And of course, such economic instability leads to everyone at Luv Letter working multiple day jobs for financial insurance.

Then you have voice acting. The British-born Nickeem Latty-Morgan, who has barely uttered a single word thus far, starts to lean into the mic to speak his mind. “Voice acting is one of the coolest jobs in the world,” Latty-Morgan says. “It's really cool, it's really fun, it's super rewarding. You get to do a lot of projects.”

Latty-Morgan continues. “Something I like to live by: before you're an actor, you're a person,” he says. “You will get rejected. A lot. It's a lot of no's. Tons of no's! I had auditioned for Love Letter Studios' original animation way before I got the role. They said no, and I didn't get it. But then two years later, Kenzie was like, 'Hi, I remember you! Can you read this again?' I was like, 'Yeah!' I read it again, and I got it. So keep putting yourself out there.”

One important note that Latty-Morgan emphasizes: learn and practice as much as you can, because you're never as good as you think. Take classes. Lots of 'em. Read everything you can. The cereal box, code, film scripts, anything. “Don't just watch anime,” Latty-Morgan says. “Please. Don't just watch anime. Learn how to act in other methods.”

And post online too! “You'll never know who's watching,” Latty-Morgan says. “Or who's listening to you, who'll give you that big break, who will give you that job. Keep pursuing, keep pushing forward. If you want to be a voice actor, I stand and swear by Iwanttobeavoiceactor.com. That's actually the name of the site.” Latty-Morgan would know. Along with his own website detailing every short and long-form video he has ever edited and voiced over, he has a demo reel uploaded to his YouTube channel that I would imagine he has dished out to companies like hotcakes.

Not all is busy hustle-bustle that would break even the most patient of people. The best part about voice acting? “Screaming at your neighbors!” Latty-Morgan jokingly says with a friendly smile. “No, I just think it's so cool to see the final product. When you record, you usually don't get to see everything until the final part of it. And then you get to show it to your parents. My mom doesn't know exactly what it was. But whenever I show my parents the final product, they get really super excited.” Latty-Morgan discusses his role as voicing the kid Josh and Baby Groot in a commercial for Lego Marvel: Brickverse. Latty-Morgan is speaking quietly when discussing this, and his description of the experience is laced with a few nervous “like”s, “um”s, and repetition of the phrase “super cool.” He's doing his best to remain modest here, although given how impressive his resume is, Latty-Morgan has a right to brag a bit here.

Over three and a half years and a crazy odd number of triumphs and struggles later, Luv Letter Studios is hard at work on their own upcoming project, Towards Galaxy's End. Starting as an illustration for a student assignment, Freeman has let Towards Galaxy's End evolve into her own animated series focusing on a young girl, Ami, who, after being fatally struck down in a car crash, gets another shot at life as a vampire magical girl. There are heartfelt nods to Studio Trigger and Kyoto Animation throughout, and obviously a slew of classic mahou shoujo—in an interview with Animation Magazine, Freeman lists off Magical DoReMi, Heartcatch Precure!, and Little Witch Academia as her biggest inspirations, although if you squint your eyes at the two angel characters, you might see a few drips of Panty & Stocking too. There's some VTuber love as well; the ED features the Japanese VTuber Yuzuki performing vocals, and the main character being named Amina “Ami” Amelia Watson reveals the Hololive influence worn right on the sleeve.

By the time of my writing this, Towards Galaxy's End's first episode is but a little over halfway finished in its production. But for something still in utero, it has garnered quite the reputation, netting the studio awards for Best Pitch Trailer at the 2025 Santa Clarita International Film Festival, as well as the Best Trailer at the 2026 New York Film and Female Actress Awards. Its first episode's Kickstarter reached just a few dollars shy of US$12,000 in funding, roughly six times its original goal of US$2,000. Luv Letter Studios has its eyes set overseas too, with plans on dubbing Towards Galaxy's End for Spanish, Russian, Japanese, French, and Portuguese audiences. To top it off, the studio plans to air their first short from Towards Galaxy's End at New York Comic Con next month.

Towards Galaxy's End | INDIE MAGICAL GIRL Proof of Concept

That's not all the studio is working on. At the panel, they talk a little about X Marks The Spot, a series featuring a teenage outcast who rescues a girl from a secret lab, only to learn that she's a clone herself. The studio chooses not to reveal too much detail, but do mention that they've got a few big anime singers signed up. There's also Lost Girls, a new spin on Peter Pan, and Symphony Witches Orchestra, which Freeman says she started fifteen years ago and is the first show she's ever worked on.

At the Anime NYC panel, Freeman says that one of her goals is to help minorities and young artists break into the animation industry through the power of inclusion and dedication. And they mean it: almost every major character is of African-American descent, and one character is a Cuban exchange student. Though they're proud of their diversity, they've faced their share of discrimination too. The entire industry is already stacked against budding animators and artists, and when you're in the minority, you can feel the pressure threefold. “There's not a lot of black females that might be in those bigger roles,” Freeman said in an interview with ANN back in February. “There might not be a lot of, like Hispanics or like anyone who's like a person of color. It's really hard to see that type of diversity in animation.”

“I feel just in general in animation, you don't see people who look like me at all,” key animator and clean-up artist Jannah Manneh said in the same interview. “Especially being Muslim, and a woman, and black. Growing up, I was under the impression that I would probably never get to work in anime when I was younger. But I feel like people in my life pushed me to think that just because I look or identify a certain way.”

Freeman is optimistic about how she sees how Japan handles creatives. “Japan doesn't necessarily care about diversity in their creatives. They more so just want you to be able to do the work, and they trust that you'll be able to do it if they're hiring you, which has been nice. It's always interesting to see what they may expect if they see me when I turn my camera on, because my name doesn't hint that I'm black. But it's always nice to know that I can still do work. They're just like, 'Well, we hired you because we know you can do it.'”

“I deal with adversity all the time, not only in voice acting but as a production manager,” Ami's voice actress LaKira Porter said in the ANN Interview. “There's always people talking, you know. But as a voice actor, you would think this will be a career where, like, that shouldn't even matter, because you're behind the mic anyway. It always seems like you have to work twice as hard as your counterparts in this field of work.”

Porter finishes off with a triumphant grin. “But that's not going to stop me.”