This year’s Crunchyroll Anime Awards pulled out all the stops to make the 2023 event the biggest in the anime distributor and multimedia producer’s history. Set in the heart of Tokyo, the event featured an all-star line-up of presenters, including Cobra Kai star Jacob Beltrand and WWE Superstar Zelina Vega, honoring the biggest and best anime shows and movies in the world, like One Piece and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. The size of this year’s event serves as an indicator of how enormously popular Crunchyroll and the anime medium have grown.
In an exclusive interview with CBR the day before the award show in Tokyo, Crunchyroll Chief Marketing Officer Gita Rebbapragada and Chief Operating Officer Brady McCollum explained how they leveled up the 2023 Anime Awards, reflected on how the award show has evolved over the years, and unpacked Crunchyroll’s expanded support from its parent company Sony, with thousands of Sony Music videos and concerts available to stream through the platform.
CBR: The 2023 Anime Awards really feels like the culmination of everything Crunchyroll has been working on since the awards started in 2017. It’s the first time the awards are being held in Japan, the first in-person award show since 2020, the first since Crunchyroll was acquired by Sony, and it features the biggest presenters in the history of the award show.
Gita Rebbapragada: Well, I didn’t feel any pressure until now. [laughs] I think it is a metaphor for the growth of anime itself. The viewership is exploding. There are so many amazing titles and so many more fans watching. Anime has become big, and the Anime Awards have become bigger. That’s how I see it.
This also feels like a full circle moment in that the Anime Awards has a major Japanese media presence with the press and presenters this year, and Crunchyroll is now part of a Japanese company. How was it taking the event from a company spreading Japanese animation worldwide back to its roots, so to speak, with this year’s award show?
Rebbapragada: It was full circle because we’re trying to bring the fan love back to the creators. We take the content and bring it to fans. We’re trying to bring that love back. That’s the mission of our [award] show — to say “Thank you” to the creators from the fans that watch the shows all over the world.
Brady McCollum: I will say that it is something that we’re super excited to see the excitement for tomorrow, whether it be the interest in voting; we had 18 million votes across the globe from fans wanting to highlight their favorite shows. We’re really looking forward to the acceptance speeches and the genuine interest from the industry, [and] from partners and presenters. We really want to play a part in this to recognize the great stories, and we look forward to more.
This year marks the first award show where social voting has factored into the top honor, Anime of the Year. With all the changes that have since come to Twitter, how was it partnering with Telescope to tally the ballots and ensure fidelity for voting this year?
Rebbapragada: Telescope helped us on multiple fronts. They managed all the social voting for Anime of the Year. It turns out fans actually like filling out the long forms, which was interesting in learning [that]. They want to fill out all the categories, not just Anime of the Year. Telescope also helped us manage the counting process, making sure every vote had integrity and was verified, all of those things. I was really happy with how it turned out. It was the first time we used them. As the Anime Awards gets bigger and bigger, it’s important that we have incredible amounts of fidelity around the voting process.
The Anime Awards has always had an evolving set of categories, with some shelved temporarily — like my personal favorite, Best Fight — while new categories are introduced. How is it deciding which categories are going to be recognized each year?
Rebbapragada: We have the data and know what people are voting for. There are some categories that are super fan-favorites, and we’ll always keep those. We’re always looking to create new fan-favorites, so we want your ideas. If you want a category back, let us know. We want the fans to tell us! The Anime Awards is a fan-fueled event that is voted on by fans, and we want to incorporate as much feedback as we can to make it super exciting.
For presenters, you have everyone from filmmaker Robert Rodriguez to new Super Bowl champ JuJu Smith-Schuster. How was it selecting who would help provide the face for this year’s award show?
Rebbapragada: When we decided to bring the show to Tokyo, we didn’t really know what to expect. What was amazing was how many people just came out of the woodwork once we said we were doing it in Tokyo. We wanted to have super fans or to have [anime] influence their work in some way from the people who came out of the woodwork and wanted to participate. It was awesome to see!
I wouldn’t say there was a whole lot of science into that other than we wanted people who loved anime, and you could hear it in the way they wanted to participate and/or it had a profound impact on their own craft, like Robert Rodriguez.
McCollum: Even with the first Anime Awards, we had Mike Daniels with the presenters. Just to see the fan interest and being able to make sure that fans were able to showcase it is exciting, and we’re looking to do more because it’s been really exciting to see the fan interest from all sides, whether it be presenters and, of course, the fans, which is who this show is for.
Rebbapragada: Thinking about the early conversations we had with people and hearing such genuine excitement about knowing what they wanted to present and what they wanted to say was contagious!
One of the things being announced at the 2023 Crunchyroll Anime Awards is Sony Music providing music videos and concerts on the service while Sony Bravia is adding a Crunchyroll button to its device. How has the vertical integration with Sony been since the acquisition?
McCollum: It’s a great home for Crunchyroll, looking at the partnership and support, with Sony Music Solutions providing support to tomorrow’s event being a key factor, as well as the music section [on Crunchyroll]. There are many ways of support from so many divisions across the company to get the most from anime across all the different ways to experience it.
Rebbapragada: Sony really is a great home. Sony really gets anime, not just from streaming but also from films, music, games, and all those different forms of entertainment. We’re at a really great moment and have a lot of support. There is a lot of excitement to come!
To watch the 2023 Crunchyroll Anime Awards in full and see this year’s award winners and nominees, be sure to check out Crunchyroll’s Anime Awards site.
