Anime expert Jerome Mazandarani explains more…

There is a scene in Rental Family, the 2025 Searchlight Pictures film directed by Hikari and starring Brendan Fraser, in which a Japanese man quietly explains to his bewildered American colleague that, in Shinto belief, God exists in every creature and every object, even a rock or a flowing river. Literally, in every living thing, and every manufactured one too.

The American doesn’t quite know what to do with that information, and neither, for the most part, does the Western licensing industry.

I’ve spent over twenty years working at the intersection of anime, global distribution, and consumer products. I’ve enjoyed a very privileged opportunity of sitting in development meetings in Tokyo, attending licensing expos in London, and driving distribution negotiations in Los Angeles. The single most clarifying observation I can share with the people reading this is that the Western industry consistently mistakes the content for the asset. Japan never makes that mistake. And the reason why goes back approximately two millennia.

The Spirit That Imbues Everything

In Shinto, Japan’s indigenous spiritual tradition, kami are the sacred essences that inhabit all things, not just living creatures: objects, places, storms, mountains and even the wind. The concept is sometimes translated as “God,” but that’s a reduction. The better translation is closer to “spirit” – a quality of aliveness and significance that the universe distributes generously and without hierarchy.

Have you ever wondered why there are so many mascots in Japan? A quick Google will reveal that the country is home to over 3,000 individual mascots. Almost every prefecture, city, utility and service provider in the country has its own mascot, a totem of that community, business and place, and a physical embodiment of its people, its values and its culture. It is no coincidence, and it isn’t the end result of some sort of advertising trend from the early 1980s. It goes deeper than that. Shinto, which has existed in one form or another for over 2,000 years in Japan, holds that there are yaoyorozu no kami, “eight million gods.” A metaphor for infinity. Nothing in this world is devoid of divine energy.

Duke University anthropologist Anne Allison, in her essential study Millennial Monsters, calls what happened when this worldview met Japanese commercial culture “techno-animism.” An ancient animistic instinct that didn’t fade with industrialisation. It migrated into toys, into manga, and into a small yellow electric mouse on a Game Boy cartridge. Allison documents how Japanese consumers don’t encounter a product; they encounter a being. The character isn’t a representation of something living. In the cultural context that produced it, it simply is.

It is a fascinating subject that helps to explain some of the magic ingredients that make Japan the world leader in the creation of branded characters, as well as comics (“manga”) and animation (“anime”) aimed at kids, teens and adults. Allison’s thesis on animism and technology isn’t mysticism for its own sake, but instead, it shows how this tradition of understanding has direct, measurable commercial consequences. If sacred essence can inhabit a rock or a teapot, it can absolutely inhabit a blind box figure, a limited edition plush, or an EPOS credit card collaboration. The pervasiveness that Western brand managers fear as dilution – the character appearing on everything – is, in the Japanese cultural context, simply animism on a retail scale. Yaoyorozu no kami. Eight million gods. Gotta catch ‘em all! 

Don’t Design a Character. Introduce the Character.

If we examine Japan-originated IP that endures for decades, there is one in particular that truly deserves our attention. Totoro is not a monster. He is a forest kami in the most literal Shinto sense. Hayao Miyazaki (Artist, writer, director and co-founder of Studio Ghibli) didn’t really invent him. Instead, he remembered him as a spirit animal from his childhood. Something tangible, real and comforting, but wild. Children worldwide respond to Totoro instantly, across every language and culture, because the character was conceived as genuinely alive. That aliveness is legible. Audiences feel it without being told to.

Godzilla is perhaps the most commercially instructive example in cinema history. Born from Japan’s trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, from American nuclear destruction in the Pacific. Godzilla is a kami of consequence and catastrophe, reinvested in each era with that generation’s specific anxiety, from the bureaucratic paralysis of Fukushima in Shin Godzilla (2016) to the survivor’s guilt of the immediate postwar period in Minus One (2023) – seventy years unbroken. Because the character doesn’t represent something, the character is something. He is Japan’s relationship with existential dread, made flesh. And audiences, worldwide, feel the weight of that.

Even Pikachu, that “small yellow electric mouse”. One hundred and fifty-one original Pokémon creatures, each designed as if it contained a world. Children form genuine bonds with their starter Pokémon not because of game mechanics but because the people who designed those creatures believed they deserved that bond. Ian Condry, in The Soul of Anime, documents how this collective creative investment: writers, animators, designers, all genuinely caring about the character, is perceptible to audiences. They feel whether something was loved into existence. After working within the anime industry from inception to production, and all the way through delivery, marketing, licensing and distribution, I can personally attest that if the people creating it don’t care about it deeply, it will fail. 

Take Bandai Namco Toy’s Tamagotchi creation. I was never “just a toy.” It was a dependent. Forty million people felt genuine grief when they died. Don’t think of it as a product feature, but more as battery-powered animism.

The IP Isn’t the Anime. The Anime Is Marketing.

Here is the insight that I believe the licensing industry is ready to hear clearly, and which I took from my consulting work on global IP strategy: the IP isn’t the anime. The anime is marketing for the IP ecosystem.

The Western model, at its most reductive, runs like this: commission content, build an audience, hope merchandise follows. The Japanese model, at its most sophisticated, inverts this entirely. Build the character completely, with full emotional integrity. Let the anime introduce it to the world. Build the commercial ecosystem around the connection that results.

Pokémon is the gold standard. The games are the engine. The anime onboards children, who migrate to the trading card game, to the Pokémon Centre retail network, to Pokémon GO. Each channel serves a different life stage and keeps the relationship alive across decades. The anime is extraordinary in its longevity, quality and consistency, and it is also, functionally, the most effective piece of marketing in entertainment history.

Single-channel IP creates dependency and dead periods. If your entire relationship with your audience is mediated through one content vehicle, one theatrical film every three years, one streaming series per platform cycle, then your licensing programme lives and dies on that release window. That is not an IP business. That is a promotional campaign with merchandise attached.

Keiji Ota, TOHO’s Chief Godzilla Officer, articulated this pivot explicitly in 2024: away from film-cycle dependency and toward always-on IP management. Chibi Godzilla is the children’s entry point. The extraordinary Godzilla monument at Haneda Airport serves as a physical discovery channel for the world’s inbound visitors, and let’s also not forget Godzilla Road in Shinjuku’s Kabuki-Cho district. Games, experiences, and licensing as connective tissue between theatrical events. The goal, as Ota stated plainly, is no dead periods in the relationship between character and audience.

While it may be a bit of a stretch to describe TOHO’s strategy as Shinto cosmology applied to brand architecture, you most certainly can describe it as an omnichannel IP strategy. Expect to see this in practice starting later this summer as they commence the international pre-promotion of Godzilla: Minus Zero, coming to screens this Holiday season.

The Japanese way of doing things is no longer exclusive to Japan, and I am not the only one who has been diligently following their ways. The lesson is now also being written by a YouTube-first animation studio in Melbourne. Glitch Productions built The Amazing Digital Circus with no broadcaster, no development deal, and no marketing budget, and to date, it has generated 1.2 billion views. They built the audience before signing any deals. Netflix and Prime Video both came to them, on the creator’s terms. Their model: free content as the engine, community as the moat, merchandise as the monetisation. The streamers accepted non-exclusive deals in which YouTube always premieres first. That is a paradigm shift, and it happened because the IP was built with genuine love before it was built with commercial intent.

The Lesson for This Room

The licensing executives assembled in Las Vegas this week are exceptionally skilled at building programmes around IP. The question worth asking, and I think this industry is ready to ask it, is whether the IP being brought to them was built with the right intentions at the foundation.

The most commercially durable character brands in history: Pokémon, Hello Kitty, Naruto, Goku, Godzilla, Totoro, all share one quality that predates every style guide, every retail strategy, and every licensing agreement: somebody believed in them completely. They created them as if they mattered. As if the character deserved to exist. Think about that and let it sink in. 

That belief is legible. Audiences, particularly the young audiences who have grown up immersed in anime, manga, YouTube, Minecraft and Roblox, have extraordinarily sensitive detectors for whether a creative team loved making something. The data cannot measure it. The spreadsheet cannot manufacture it. But your retail numbers will tell you whether it was there, because when the kids care, the parents care, and the purchase happens. Don’t believe me? Ask your local toy retailer if they have any Jellycat in stock.

Godzilla now stands forty metres wide in the international arrivals hall at Haneda Airport, welcoming the world to Japan. A creature born from the trauma of nuclear destruction. Now, the first face millions of international visitors see when they land. That is what happens when you let a character genuinely mean something across generations, across channels, and with creative integrity intact.

The IP isn’t the anime. And Godzilla, seventy years on, waving hello at the airport, proves it.

Jerome Mazandarani is Head of Anime at 8 Lions Entertainment, contributing writer for Anime News Network’s ANSWERMAN column, and creator of The Accidental Otaku on Substack. He advises on anime and character IP strategy across the EMEA region and internationally.
[email protected]