Anime is booming. Netflix has announced the production of 40 new anime titles this year, an indication of the genre’s global popularity. Meanwhile, in Japan, the three biggest box-office films of 2021 were all animated.
But as Kohei Yoshino’s frenetic, if revealing, “Anime Supremacy!” shows us in knowing detail, the business of making TV anime is brutally competitive and, for animators themselves, a time-sucking grind. The home life of the director heroine, played with febrile intensity by Riho Yoshioka, consists of brief moments with a neglected cat.
Based on Mizuki Tsujimura’s novel of the same title, the film is hardly an expose of exploitative industry work practices, however.