This is a note, not a manifesto.
Animation in 2026 is in a strange place. The medium is more visible than it has ever been — more widely watched, more widely discussed, more central to the streaming services and the platforms that have come to define how culture moves. At the same time, the working conditions of the people who actually make animation are not, by most accounts, any better than they were ten years ago. Some are worse. The gap between the cultural ascent of the form and the lived reality of producing it has rarely felt wider.
Within that, the position of independent studios is unusually uncertain. The conditions that make independence possible — patient capital, direct access to audience, room to take time over the work — have moved unevenly. Some have become easier, particularly for studios willing to build their own technology and own their own distribution. Others have become harder, particularly the parts that depend on a healthy ecosystem of mid-size partners. We are increasingly in a situation where the smallest studios and the largest can find their footing, and the middle is squeezed.
Distribution is part of this. The structure of how anime reaches its audience has shifted considerably in the last few years, and the studios that have done well are often the ones that have taken some measure of that distribution into their own hands. Not because they wanted to become technology companies — most didn’t — but because the alternative was to accept terms that compromised the work. The choice is sometimes presented as one between artistic purity and commercial pragmatism. It is more accurately a choice between two kinds of pragmatism, and the better long-term answer almost always lies closer to owning the relationship with the audience than not.
For our part, we have made the same choice. We don’t think it’s the only choice. We don’t think it’s the right choice for every studio. But for the kind of work we want to do, and the timeline we want to do it on, building our own platform is the right answer for us.
Production, of course, is where the work begins. The platform is a means; the medium is what the platform exists to serve. We say this often inside the studio because it is the easiest thing to forget when the platform is also a piece of engineering with its own ongoing needs. The discipline of remembering that production sits above distribution — that the work is the point — is something we try to make a habit of.
There is more to say about all of this, and we will say it as it becomes ours to say. For now, an observation.
This is a good time, in some ways, to be doing this work, and a hard time in others. Both can be true.
— AnimePocky Studio