When Garnt Maneetapho started presenting his own original anime short film to companies, he made sure to be upfront about his aim.
“They’d always ask me, ‘What is the business plan for this project?’ And I was completely transparent from the beginning in telling them there is no business plan,” says Maneetapho, 35, who runs the YouTube channel Gigguk. “I am not planning to make money off of this.”
Rather, Maneetapho wanted to make his lifelong dream of creating an original work come true. The resulting 18-minute film, “Baan — The Boundary of Adulthood,” which centers on two characters living in different worlds trying to find a home, was turned screen-ready by studio daisy and director Yoshimitsu Ohashi. The short premiered Aug. 24 at Grand Cinema Sunshine Ikebukuro, and will be released for free on YouTube Sept. 20.
“(YouTube) is, to me, the platform I understand the most,” Maneetapho says. “I just want as many eyes on the film as possible.”
The decision to release his film on the video site also seems fitting given Maneetapho’s place as arguably the most influential anime YouTuber in its history. He started posting anime reviews and analysis in 2007 while still in college, eventually taking a stab at making it his career in the mid 2010s (“Hi I'm Gigguk and I quit my job to make dank anime videos,” he wrote on the site Patreon. “I’m an idiot.”).
The move worked out: He has now amassed over 3.5 million subscribers on YouTube, and, in late 2019, he relocated to Japan as one of the first members of Tokyo-based influencer agency GeeXPlus. He also launched Trash Taste, a pop culture podcast with fellow anime-centric creators Joey Bizinger and Connor Colquhoun.
“I think a big skill set that is underestimated by a lot of YouTubers is their storytelling ability,” he says, using his work as an example. “Even though I talk about anime, I talk about my emotional journey and my connection to different series and try to bring my own story when talking about any shows.”
Maneetapho says he’s always been thinking up stories since childhood, but the idea of making something in the anime space seemed farfetched at a time when “YouTube was just a bunch of guys making videos in their basements.” The first hint that something could change came in 2016 when American electronic artist Porter Robinson worked with animation studio A-1 Pictures and streamer Crunchyroll to create an anime music video for the song “Shelter,” made with French artist Madeon. Maneetapho praised the video upon its release, hinting at his own desire to make a short film.
“That project showed me that even someone traditionally outside of the anime industry (can do it). ... There is a way to get a dream project made.”
Once settled in Japan, he would start pitching ideas for a short film to various companies, starting with the parent company of GeeXPlus, Kadokawa Corp., a move that shaped what would become “Baan.”
“My goal was to get it greenlit, right? So I was looking at it from a purely numbers perspective. What genre did Kadokawa have the most expertise in? Isekai,” he says, referring to a genre of anime built around characters traveling from one reality to another.
While Kadokawa didn’t take it, the isekai format remained because Maneetapho says he believed he could put a new spin on it.
“A lot of isekai protagonists live a power fantasy (where relatively normal people become powerful or heroic). I wanted to use the vehicle of traveling to a different world to be akin to going to a faraway place,” he says. “Because the best writing advice I’ve gotten is write what you know — and I’ve lived in a lot of places.”
Maneetapho was born in England to Thai parents, and he says his childhood was split between the U.K. and Thailand. As an adult, he has spent extended time in China, the United States, Thailand and now Japan.
“When I first came here, I was like, ‘It will be for a year or two.’ Then it’s, ‘I could do another two years.’ And then another two pass,” he says when asked if he’s found a home now. He’s still not certain — while he loves living in Japan, he could see another phase of his life nudging him elsewhere.
“I’m still figuring myself out.”
While Maneetapho has kept most of the details around “Baan” a secret before its premiere, he’s open about talking about how the work is personal to him. The short follows the characters Arai Daichi and Rinrada Ratchamanee — the prior in Japan, the latter in the fantastical world of Euthania — trying to escape into the other’s realm.
“I wrote the story as kind of therapy, actually,” he says with a laugh. “That was kind of the big question I tried to answer for myself through this story: Where is my home? Where is anyone’s home?”
Maintaining creative control was vital to Maneetapho and one of the reasons he largely bankrolled “Baan” himself. “I wanted to be as creatively involved with it as possible. I didn’t want my name to just be slapped on it. I wanted to learn and be part of every aspect of its creation.”
He still listened to what veterans at studio daisy had to say, noting how he originally wanted to use natural colors, especially for the characters’ hair, something the animators urged against. “Psychologically, she is not going to feel like a protagonist. We recommend you go for this other color,” he remembers them saying.
“I trusted their opinion, and when I saw the final version, wow, they were right,” he says. “I learned that you have to trust expert opinions even if it goes against what you initially want.”
He also learned to take in a wide variety of perspectives on his creative work.
“I finally had a draft written that, oh my god, I was happy with,” he says. “I showed it to my wife (YouTuber Sydney Poniewaz) and she was like, ‘It’s good, but the main character kind of feels pathetic.’” Maneetapho agreed and got back to rewriting.
“It’s obviously humbled me a lot and deepened my respect for anyone creating — not just anime but anything creative,” he says of the process. It also allowed him to better understand the anime industry, especially the business side of things. “If I were to do this again, I would definitely need financial backing, more of an eye on how to recoup money from this,” he says. “This took two years, and it was the busiest two years of my life. ... For about five months this year, I had no days off between ‘Baan’ and YouTube.”
Still, Maneetapho found the process “addictive” and has already felt a sense of accomplishment from the response the trailer alone has gotten — even the ones that haven’t been particularly positive.
“It’s the negative feedback of people setting expectations, saying it’s going to look like this or that, or comparing it to other anime that have been released,” he explains. “It resembled normal conversations around anime. People weren’t just treating this as a weird YouTuber project but just as a normal anime.”
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