Hi everyone, welcome to Edition 117. This week I’m looking at what Witch Hat Atelier’s success and physical presence at anime expo means, and what any brand trying to collaborate with anime IP needs to consider.

Plus a couple of Speed Reads on:

Let’s dive into it ⤵️

In one of my WhatsApp groups, two of my fellow pop-culture fiends and I spend a lot of time talking about what we’re watching. Back in May, one of these friends messaged: “Also Witch Hat Atelier 🔥🔥”, and within literal seconds, the other replied, “Big yes!”

I never got around to watching it (sorry, friends!), but I did watch as it went on to become a huge success. 

At the recent Anime Expo in LA, Crunchyroll’s own executives noted the surge in popularity. Fans were everywhere in homemade, tasselled witch hats, a tribute to a show that had only been on the platform since April.

It took ten weeks for a fandom to grow from passive watchers into folks building costumes by hand. Nobody ran a campaign to make that happen. It was a genuine connection to the story - and the manga it is based on - that did work.

This kind of organic growth to me signalled three things. 

1. There’s room here for the right IP-brand collaboration (and if one does come up, it’ll be an interesting litmus test of anime-brand collaboration in the West).

2. Giving fans a place to gather and wear their fandom with pride only increases the value you’ll get out of that collaboration.

3. The anime wave is far from crashing.

For a long time, anime was filed under "niche interest, growing” for folks considering brand-IP integration, but that’s obviously not true anymore.

According to Dentsu's Fandom Intelligence data, which Yoshi Nakano presented at SEG3 London just last month, among US Gen Z, anime now sits alongside the NFL on cultural relevance, and beats most live-action film categories outright. It’s no longer "popular with a subculture”, it’s level with the NFL.

But as I was reading the news about Witch Hat Atelier’s prevalence at Anime Expo, I was reminded of Yoshi’s talk beyond the data he presented.

His argument was that marketers have gotten lazy about reaching new people because the algorithm already feeds everyone what they want. But IP collaboration is a workaround to an algorithm you can’t control. Instead of interrupting the audience, you go stand where they already are, in spaces they’re already engaging in.

But he was equally clear about pitfalls. He described brands that show up and say, in effect, I'm paying, so do this, and treat the IP as a vending machine. Yoshi’s case was that the brand has to act as co-director, not a passenger. You have to bring your brand’s core value into the room and let the IP's story amplify it, rather than diluting your brand to suit the popular IP of the moment.

His example was Coca-Cola Japan collaborating with Jujutsu Kaisen on can packaging, timed a year in advance to land alongside the anime's third season, because his team could see, in the fandom data, exactly when the story was about to break wide.

The link goes beyond simple recognition. Jujutsu Kaisen exists in a contemporary, albeit slightly supernatural, world with contemporary pop-culture markers. Coca-Cola feels natural in-world in Jujutsu Kaisen, where fighting demons goes hand in hand with trips to the cinema and conversations about streetwear and fashion. 

So, basically, your strategy has to go beyond "what character goes on the box." It has to be "what season of this story, what character’s values, line up with what we're trying to say about ourselves", and that only works if you're tracking the IP's core and trajectory, not just its current popularity. 

It also demands a knowledge of audience. After all, all fandoms and platforms have their own cultural and social norms, their own behaviours. As almost every speaker at SEG3 mentioned in some form or another, fans are deeply sensitive to whether a brand actually understands the specific story it's borrowing from.

→ You have to go beyond a brand piggybacking onto "anime" as a vibe.

According to Variety, the global anime market is estimated to exceed $35 billion this year. With this comes an increased interest in anime IP, a demand that the current, fragmented global licensing system can’t support.

To help solve this, Crunchyroll founder Kun Gao just launched AniBiz.com, a B2B licensing marketplace backed by Aniplex, Toei, Dentsu Anime Solutions and a dozen other major rights-holders, built specifically to fix the fragmentation that's made anime licensing feel like a "who you know" business for decades.

Here we see infrastructure being built to meet growing demand. Gao said AniBiz would help “from emerging brands and manufacturers to creators, events, and startups looking to participate in the anime economy.” Catering to brands of all sizes is just another signal that anime has shifted from niche interest into mainstream culture, like the NFL.

Popularity doesn’t just equate to success. Success comes when physical moments produce something worth posting, and digital moments give people a reason to show up in person. 

Without this hand-off, you’re running two separate campaigns wearing the same logo, rather than creating an actual two-way street.

And speaking of the NFL…

There’s a few examples of sports rights holders already building this two-way street. The Chargers published their release schedule using One Piece in 2022 and Minecraft in 2025, MLB has their Heroes of the Game animated shorts, and the MLBPA & OneTeam Partners recently launched the GalaXic Baseball League too.

On the consumer side of things, McDonald’s has been running a smaller version of the same idea, with Happy Meal UNO decks themed around My Hero Academia, Naruto and SPY x Family, each with a QR code that opens an online version of the game. A physical purchase becomes a digital extension of the fandom, not a separate transaction.

Crunchyroll ran the bridge in the opposite direction at Anime Expo. Their "Dubbing Dojo" let fans record their own voice into an anime scene on-site, a physical booth built specifically to generate something people would want to film, share and post online afterwards.

In all of these examples, the physical moment and the digital ones feed each other.

→ Ask yourself: what does your digital experience hand back to the physical one, and vice versa? 

The mechanic (physical hands off to digital, digital hands back to physical) is sound as a strategy, but it only works if the story underneath it is specific and authentic.

A generic "anime collab"  is only going to get you so far, and not for very long. A collaboration that feels authentic and gives fans and audiences somewhere to gather is the winning combination.

We've written before about the in-person side of this, Edition 105 covered how Pokémon GO's stadium activations pull fans physically into MLB parks, and Edition 103 looked at gaming IP that's evolved from something you consume into something you live inside. This is the same principle applied to anime at a moment when it has genuinely caught up to football and reality TV in cultural weight.

For folks looking to collaborate with anime IP, my advice would be not to lead with "which anime is trending." It’s about which anime lines up with your brand’s values and the story you want to tell. Because having that connection is what drives long-term brand loyalty.

Going back to where we began: the witch hats at Anime Expo weren't just a marketing win (though they were that too, inadvertently! Maybe I will watch it now…), they were proof that the story was resonant enough with fans to be worth paying attention to as a partner.

The brand that lines up with Witch Hat Atelier’s values and story is the one that can find long-term value and success in a collaboration. 

Toy Story 5 uses new rendering, rigging and lighting tools that could reshape how animated films are made.

TL;DR

Why you should care

As the technologists amongst you will know, switching from CPU to GPU acceleration mid-production, on a live feature film, is not a routine decision. The result was roughly nine times faster rendering speeds for interactive full-frame work. This is the kind of shift that changes what's economically viable to put on screen, and how much iteration a director can actually afford to do. And the ramifications, obviously, are huge for the animation and production industry at large. 

A conceptually interesting challenge was LilyPad. Building a character whose face, hands, and screen all had to work independently, while also functioning as the primary light source in every scene she appears in, required the crew to build tools that didn't exist. Animators can't typically draw 2D screen graphics in a 3D workflow. So they built SketchPad, a system that lets them sketch in 2D over time within the 3D environment. 

This is one of the things I love about filmmaking - a creative problem necessitates an infrastructure solution, and that solution will go on to enable more creative leaps to be taken in future. 

These changes have ramifications beyond Toy Story 5, of course. They’re developments that will fundamentally shape the future of not just Pixar, but animation full stop. The space to watch is what gets open-sourced or adopted from this production. 

Working on anything cool, or have a press release you would like us to cover? Send it in for the chance for it to be covered in next week’s edition!

That’s all for now, everyone - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report. If you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend who’d enjoy it too!