Highlights
- After 10 years, The Canipa Effect, a popular YouTube channel offering insights into the anime industry, will be ending.
- The channel, created by Australian YouTuber Callum May, started with straightforward reviews and evolved to focus on deepening viewers’ appreciation of the industry.
- May’s content provided valuable resources for learning about the anime industry and showcased his passion for the medium. Although The Canipa Effect is retired, May’s story is not over yet.
As a platform, YouTube is always changing, and as such, anime content on the platform isn’t anything like it was 10 years ago, with many of the biggest members of “AniTube” having left or shifted gears. Appropriately enough, one such channel, The Canipa Effect, recently announced it would be ending after 10 long years of offering valuable insights into the inner workings of the anime industry.
On January 7, 2024, exactly 10 years after starting The Canipa Effect in 2014, Australian YouTuber Callum May announced via social media that he would be ending his series. Additionally, he shut down his Patreon but expressed gratitude to everyone who supported the show and allowed him to make a living producing it.
What Was The Canipa Effect?
Anyone who was actively engaged with anime content on YouTube in 2014 will feel right at home looking back at May’s earliest work. Straightforward-titled reviews, first impressions, and the biggest trend, previews of the current anime season. These were the things that every aspiring anime critic wanted to get in on, and the place to do it was YouTube.
It goes to show just how the content landscape has changed, but even more impressively in retrospect, it reveals how consistent May has been since the start. While his intros have received a gradual evolution, he’s always been a good editor capable of some very eye-catching presentation. He has improved over the years, but his early work is still entertaining and approaches the critique of storytelling and visuals from a nuanced perspective.
In addition to his plain reviews, he created another series called “Vital Three Anime Review.” It was a play on the “Three-Episode Rule” for watching a TV anime – the idea being that one shouldn’t drop a show until they’ve given it at least three episodes. But as early as June 2015, May began a new series, the value of which would become a defining characteristic of his channel: the “Animator Spotlight” series, from which a slew of industry analyses would spawn.
By the start of 2016, The Canipa Effect was starting to look a little different and a lot like how it has looked to this day. Series like Vital Three ended and anime reviews – if they still existed – weren’t always explicitly called reviews. Instead, May became very interested in sakuga (作画), which means the act of drawing – specifically used to refer to animation and the process therein.
Thus, he began to produce more and more content with the intent of deepening viewers’ appreciation of the industry, just as he had been doing for himself over the years. This included spotlights on particular animators and studios, interviews with staff, and retrospectives on key points of discussion within the industry.
Why It’s Come To An End
As May puts it, he simply doesn’t have as much time to bring his numerous ideas to life in as timely a manner as he would like. In his statement on his retirement, he describes the arc of The Canipa Effect as a hobby that grew into a job and ended as a hobby yet again. When it started, he was fresh out of high school, and now he has a full-time job as a localization editor. He’s married and lives in Japan with his wife.
“When working full-time, I’m currently only able to dedicate some weekends to creating new videos, which means that the time between me getting really excited about an idea and actually being able to release the video is a matter of months–enough time for the passion to fizzle out and for me to move onto being excited about something else.”
While this chapter of May’s career is complete, he’s not disappearing off the face of the Earth, nor has he ruled out the possibility of more content in the future. When inspiration strikes and the stars align, he may create a new video either about anime or something else entirely. It might not even be on the same channel.
Why The Canipa Effect Matters
As big as AniTube felt in its heyday, it became evident over time that it was incredibly saturated, which, added to the platform’s changing landscape overall, caused a huge shift. May was clever enough to carve a niche that allowed his content to stay fresh, but it’s a bit more meaningful than that. For casual viewers of anime especially, The Canipa Effect has been a remarkably valuable resource for learning about the industry.
These weren’t just well-written or well-edited reviews of stories and appraisals of the animation therein, but deep dives into exactly who and what contributed to their excellence. It’s the kind of content that can help widen an audience’s vocabulary and appreciation of a medium. Videos like the spotlight on animator Yutaka Nakamura are a great example.
It introduces fans to an individual whose creative touch across numerous projects has made him legendary and helps them understand why the hype is warranted. It’s not some dry informative piece either – May’s enthusiasm is contagious almost to a fault, making one want to reach through the screen and tell him to slow down and breathe. It’s hard not to get excited along with him.
There are few anime YouTubers like May and even fewer with as much passion, and passion is exactly what defines The Canipa Effect, not just in itself, but its message about anime in general. The channel may have started in the vein of similar successes, but it grew to be something of its own; a celebration of the passion intrinsic to a medium.
Anyone looking to deepen their understanding of anime and its creation owes it to themselves to check out The Canipa Effect. Below his retirement announcement, May included a small thread of videos he is most proud of, all of which are a great place to start. And again, this isn’t necessarily the end. While The Canipa Effect is retired, Callum May’s story is unlikely to be finished just yet.
Sources: YouTube/The Canipa Effect (Video) (Community Post), @CanipaShow on Twitter/X
Leave a Reply