Crowdfunding Anime: Nekopara Case Study
Nekopara showed to the anime world what crowdfunding could achieve within the industry — securing US$1,049,552 to the OVA adaptation back in 2017. And last year, the NINJAXIS project earned its target goal to produce an original 2D anime as well, “[raising] 3 million yen (about $25,575 US)”.
The trend of crowdfunding within the otaku-related industry isn’t only limited to Japan either, since in 2021 a France-based light novel publishing house (Lanovel Edition) reached out for funds in the wake of COVID-19, grossing €57,133. This latter example might not have concerned Japanese animation directly, but France is an important market for Japanese entertainment franchises when it’s the second country where manga are the most read, and the Dendrogram anime that aired back in 2020 can’t have been hurt by those source material sales.
According to Wikipedia, “Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people, in modern times typically via the Internet”; in other words it is about leveraging a network. In order to do so, the traction of customers (in a wider sense, since the crowdfunding is about a “project” or “venture” whose success is to be perceived by contributors as a net positive) and their engagement is required.
The entire point of crowdfunding online is to elicit a call to action — “(in advertising material) a piece of content intended to induce a viewer, reader, or listener to perform a specific act” is the definition provided by Oxford Languages. This often takes the form of a landing page on a website built around said type of financement, giving the entire campaign a degree of credibility, the act being to help with the financing.
We now need to recontextualize Nekopara’s Kickstarter campaign. Nekopara is a series of visual novels developed by Neko Works and published by Sekai Project. And the most defining part of those games is the focus on catgirls, focus mostly about moe and cutesy, and at rarer times inspired by its eroge roots. In Otaku: Japan’s database animals, “Japanese philosopher Hiroki Azuma has stated that catgirl characteristics such as cat ears and feline speech patterns are examples of moe-elements. Azuma argued that although some otaku sexual expression involves catgirl imagery, few otaku have the sexual awareness to understand how such imagery can be perceived as perverted.”.
To develop on this, we can continue quoting Wikipedia and T. A. Noonan: “In a 2010 critique of the manga series Loveless, the feminist writer T. A. Noonan argued that, in Japanese culture, catgirl characteristics have a similar role to that of the Playboy bunny in western culture, serving as a fetishization of youthful innocence.”. Indeed, Nekopara is struck by this ambiguity both Hiroki Azuma and T. A. Noonan spoke of, and this is likely why the OVA movie adaptation of Nekopara had no sex scene in it.
The Nekopara movie might also help ensure the franchise’s legacy. Indeed, on November 29, 2021, “[the] company also revealed that the game franchise has sold more than 5 million copies worldwide.”. Seeing as within anime viewership, visual novel players are a minority, a call of action of Neko Works’ Kickstarter might well have been the pride for VN players to see a game they hold dear being adapted into an anime. Indeed, wide-reaching VNs like Steins;Gate, Higurashi, Clannad, and more may have this degree of popularity because of a successful animated adaptation.
To deal more with the subject of the franchise’s legacy, one has to consider what a company within a capitalistic ecosystem should strive to do. Since Nekopara’s formula is a mixture of pastry, slice-of-life, comedy, moe, catgirls and fan-service, and the sales are looking great, the franchise should look into scaling — to increase profitability, and thereby create a healthy lifecycle for multiple products, therehence iterating more on the formula.
Scaling is a complex process that shouldn’t entirely be treated here. “Scaling a business means setting the stage to enable and support growth in your company. It means having the ability to grow without being hampered. It requires planning, some funding, and the right systems, staff, processes, technology, and partners.” However, the part about “planning” and “partners” might resonate with the logic of media mix, a staple of otaku culture as based around marketing.
Indeed, a partner might be the illustrator of a manga, like Tam-U, that drew the Nekopara: Chocola & Vanilla manga. And the planning about organizing different product releases. All of this has certainly been easier after the Kickstarter, for two reasons. First and foremost, having led a financing campaign successfully results in both the traction of people, and their trust in the company’s endeavor — after all, it confirms they have budget. And the Nekopara OVA, a movie with more than 50 000 viewers on MyAnimeList, meant momentum for Neko Works as attention was still given to them.
To conclude, in this article we have delved into Nekopara’s crowdfunding back in 2017, and the various implications for Neko Works. To begin with, the trend of crowdfunding in relation to the otaku industry has been identified, one that is recently still going strong with the NINJAXIS project. Then, we have understood that crowdfunding relied on a call to action, meant to make people pay for a venture or a project. What motivates people to pay for something can be quite complex, and we have tried to depict the kind of playerbase Nekopara might have gathered, to make sense of the call to action of the Kickstarter. Since VN players are a minority in the entire anime viewership, there might be pride involved; or it might just be the attraction for slice-of-life, moe and comedy — or simply the charm and appeal of catgirls. We have also tried to conclude Neko Works’ future with the Nekopara franchise in the wake of the successful crowdfunding campaign, having generated both fundings (and thus trust) and traction (with momentum since the movie also had traction and built fans’ fidelity), allowing for the company to scale, including in investing in a media mix with the manga adaptation by Tam-U in 2018.
Crowdfunding might still have a lot in store for otaku culture. But to entrust money to a company has an initial risk, that of being abused by scammers. One needs to remember that Anime Tube was a thing widely discussed in 2021. Which was a shame, since crowdfunding seems to inherit one of the ideals of the web, that of participatory culture (for more, look up works by Henry Jenkins).
