Recently, something has been done in the anime industry that hasn't quite happened before, at least, not to this extent. A studio known as Yaoyorozu was asked to produce an animated series based on a mobile game known as Kemono Friends. A lot of mobile games get their own series, but here's the problem: The Kemono Friends game ended service months before the show began production, the team creating it only consisted of ten people in an apartment, they had 500 days to complete it, and they had a 500,000 dollar budget. To put that in perspective, most anime studios consist of 90+ team members, and it only takes them about 9 months to finish a top tier production with a much larger budget. The team was essentially left with a product that was dead on arrival, but instead of giving up, the team decided to write their own extensive story for the series and severely cut the quality of animation in favor of making a quaint but fun show that destroyed everyone's ideas of how an anime production should be. In a stagnant industry full of tired tropes and demographic pandering, they set out to make something truly unique with the meager resources they had. No one expected anything from them, and they used that to their advantage. When Kemono Friends finally aired, it was met with the criticisms one would expect. Many thrashed the show for it's awful animation quality, but what they didn't know was that it was building up to something much greater. By the fourth episode, most people were hooked. The plot thus far had been about a girl living on an abandoned island that used to be a zoo. She meets another girl who happens to be a serval, and learns that all the animals on the island have been turned into human-like beings known as "Friends". The girl does not know what species she is, so serval gives her the name Kaban, which means "bag" due to the fact she wears a backpack. She and serval set off to discover what kind of "Friend" she is. Of course, the viewer instantly, and correctly assumes she is a true human, but the real mystery is the nature of the island they live on and the nature of the Friends. As we get to episode 4, we learn a little bit about the strange history of the island, and the alien menace it's inhabitants spend their days avoiding known as the "Ceruleans". By the end of the series, as long as you are willing to look deeper, every question brought up in the series is answered in a satisfying manner, and upon a second viewing, you realize that everything was foreshadowed in the very first episode, and I mean EVERYTHING. The show carries an underlying theme of existentialism to keep it's otherwise calm and almost childish setting interesting. Folks who stuck around in spite of the horrible CG absolutely loved it, and it rose to the top of the charts for the season, and it is the second most tweeted thing on twitter. Sales on Kemono Friends merchandise sky-rocketed, and so did attendance at zoos. The anime industry is full of success stories, but none of this caliber. Many people now refer to it as "the Miracle of Kemono Friends" and it will be interesting to see how it changes the industry landscape. Hopefully studios will go back to focusing on trying to tell good stories again instead of selling blu-rays to a niche audience. Here's an interesting video about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkCMRBWYoKc
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