As the decade kicked off, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the anime box office was Hayao Miyazaki. Since the 1990s, every film by the director had been a surefire hit: His 2001 feature, "Spirited Away," is still the highest-grossing film of all time in Japan. But a few years into the 2010s came a shock to the big-screen anime world: Following the release of "The Wind Rises" in 2013, Miyazaki announced his retirement, and soon thereafter his studio, Ghibli, laid off the majority of its staff, becoming little more than a clearing house for merchandising rights.
The exit of Miyazaki and Ghibli from the animation scene left a void which other studios scrambled to fill.
"Nothing else has really made as much of an impact," says Renato Rivera Rusca, an animation producer and lecturer at Meiji University. "In recent years, we've seen a lot of theatrical anime coming up in general release and getting more attention. You could've made the same movies, but I don't think they would have been as successful."