Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Definitive Anime Review. Sorry for disappearing for a few months, I was busy at work on a story exposing Sir Issac Newton as the leader of an evil organisation. You know how these stories are right?

Well a few days ago, Fufuro-chan handed over another assignment to me. Her connections ended up getting me an interview with this guy in the anime industry! I’ve never actually conducted an interview before so I was dreadfully underprepared but I felt like this might uncover the truth about anime production to the loyal readers of Definitive Anime Review. So I accepted.

Why do I get the feeling that Fufuro-chan is winding me up getting me to do this?

Enter one Jared Musk, the CEO of a relatively new animation studio known as Tombi Animation. Jared was a CEO that believed he had the answers to save the anime industry from itself using the power of technology! Tombi Animation has credits across many different shows with a worldwide workforce, a workforce mostly living on Mars but the workforce still encompassed the world.

Below is the full interview, I hope you all learn a thing or two because Jared seemed like a pretty knowledgeable guy.

The Interview

build: Hi there Jared, thank you for taking part in this interview today.

Jared: Hey, do you want to buy my monkey?

build: Excuse me?

Jared: It’s my non-fungible tokens! I bought him for 100 grand and I really think you’d like him.

build: Why do you have so many of them? Are you sure you’re responsible with your money?

Jared: Yeah, I get that a lot from people. Trust me though, I am a respected anime CEO.

build: Ahem, well my first question is about how anime is made. Can you tell our loyal readers how anime is made in case they’re not aware?

Jared: Anime is made through hard graft and lots of blood, sweat and tears from the moment you wake up to the moment you get to bed. Sometimes, I’ll have 100 people work on a show and then people on Twitter moan that it’s a sign of industry collapse.

build: Wait, that doesn’t seem to be how it works? You need 100 people?

Jared: Well not every episode that’d be silly. I’d have 48 people work on a single episode.

“Wait, did you just say 48 people working on this episode!?”

build: Apparently Tombi Animation employs a lot of Martian people. Why do you do that?

Jared: Anime is an incredibly brutal industry. One that grinds people to dust. It also pays pretty badly. Did you know that some anime pay animators less than a fiver an hour? I did my research and I found out that Mars doesn’t have the labour laws that Earth companies have so if they’re paid that much, they’re essentially millionaires in their community. I feel that, here at Tombi Animation, we’re improving animator pay not by lobbying studios to improve their pay to their staff but to just make it look like the pay is absolutely enormous to people that don’t realise it’s that bad.

build: Wow! I didn’t realise that was legal!

Jared: Me neither! My brother, Ultimate Supreme Executive Kaiser Neo Elon Musk X, sure does a great job running that Martian colony!

build: I heard you did a GoFundMe recently to get resources to join the anime industry in a book and now the book is now a wiki. What happened to that?

Jared: We got some folks in the industry to write some stuff for the book over the course of a year. Eventually, I realised that I lost money somewhere. I swear I checked behind the sofa at home.

build: How do you lose ten grand behind the sofa?

Jared: Very carefully.

I never got to visit Jared Musk’s house but it probably was about as fancy as this.

build: Alright then, here’s another one. Some fans are disappointed in your views on NFTs, do you feel guilty for this?

Jared: My monkey pictures are my family! I care for them incredibly deeply! I keep them in a folder on my laptop! The folder is called “Best Buddies”! Those fans just don’t understand me!

build: ok.

Jared: Do you like monkeys?

build: Err…I like playing Ape Escape on the PS1. Pretty cool game.

When I’m not interviewing people in the industry, I’m playing the best video games.

build: So how about that new Artificial Intelligence trend?

Jared: I love AI. One day all anime will be created using AI and we wouldn’t have to pay the AI any money so we can essentially make anime forever! Unfortunately, AI has to rely on the drawings of squishy artists who aren’t robots or AI at the moment so we can’t have perpetual anime. I hope one day the animator AI will be smart enough to make its own anime.

build: wait

Jared: Or better yet, we can teach the AI to train itself on anime that already exist and then make it use the anime to make more anime. I can’t see anything going wrong with this.

build: So how many layers deep are we going here?

Jared: Toei Animation would be so neat to train an AI on. You’ve got to think they’ve made more anime than anyone else in the world so they’d make the most inventive new anime with all of that under their belt.

build: I can’t wait for Stretchy Pirate! Pretty Cute by the way. Did the AI create that one?

Jared: How did you know? I thought AI anime would be indistinguishable.

build: So do you think there’s too many anime being created? Many industry observers seem to think so and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Jared: As you know, squishy artists can’t keep up with the demand of the anime industry and training animators takes a long time and effort. So having the AI do the hard work on its own saves a lot of time and hassle. Like I said before, we can make infinite anime, why would we possibly want any less of it?

build: Probably because the industry can’t really sustain this for much longer. Sending waves of people to save an episode of Black Flower isn’t really something that can be done forever.

Jared: But what if the anime production companies had infinite money too? As we all know, we can make NFTs of anything because anything fungible can become non-fungible and that means cold hard cash!

build: People don’t really make that much money off of NFTs surely?

Jared: Well the monkey man I bought my monkeys from was absolutely loaded and drove a car that was made of 24ct gold. Anime companies must be looking at that guy and thinking, “wow I wish I had a golden car, how many people do I have to exploit to get one of those!”.

build: I mean, I don’t really dispute that. The corporate greed part of that statement.

Jared: Can you imagine if anime companies had even bigger budgets because of NFTs? Just think of the animators that they won’t be paying good wages to with that sort of money.

Every anime CEO aims to own one of these.

build: I’m curious, what other exciting ways have you got to save the anime industry?

Jared: Well, I’m glad you asked! One thing that’s absolutely not a good look for the anime industry is the lack of Japanese animators. They are leaving in droves and not even looking for work in anime. I proposed to my good friends at Kadokawa a new invention to reinvigorate and revitalise the workforce. The Animator Baby Machine.

build: baby…machine?

Jared: It does exactly what you think it does.

build: It’s a robotic baby?

Jared: It creates new animator babies that can quickly be raised to work on Attack on Giant: The Final Season: The Final Part: The Final Passage: Chapter Final: Final Part: The Final. It also looks like a giant robotic baby.

build: Are we sure that you aren’t a robot?

Jared: No. I am a robot!

build: no…

Jared: Welcome to the anime revolution! My robot animator army will take over the industry! Every anime will be non-fungible!

The Animator Baby Machine looked like this, except entirely gunmetal grey and roughly 50 feet tall.

It was at that point that I left the maniac CEO behind in his office and walked out of the building. As I did, a large 50ft robotic baby was launched from behind the building. I swear I could have heard some crazed laughter from the room Jared Musk was in, I could have been imagining things.

After that, I told Fufuro-chan that she better properly vet these interviews in future. I’m not dealing with nutters again.

This is a work of fiction, any resemblance with any real person or event is purely coincidental. No anime CEO actually has a giant mecha baby or access to Martian outsourcing. The part about Sir Isaac Newton is 100% true though.

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