GeeXPlus, Inc. and its newly announced GeeXProductions division are broadening and solidifying the intersections between anime production companies and the creators behind those anime, laying the foundation for YouTube-first anime IP. At this year’s Anime Expo, alongside the announcement of the GeeXProductions division came a spotlight on that division’s flagship projects: Gigguk’s anime short movie Baan -The Boundaries of Adulthood-, Dillon Goo’s original 3D animated pilot and webcomic Soul Mart, and OtakuVS’ long-running indie anime short series Otachan!. All three are incredibly exciting projects and showed off impressive visuals during the convention to an eager crowd that couldn’t’ve been happier to see such strong content.
We sat down with the three creators behind those flagship projects as well as Masahito Nakamichi, a producer at GeeXPlus, to talk about the three series, the management and marketing agency’s broader strategy, and what it means to gain access to an incredible resource as a creator.
GeeX and Creators
These days, there are countless forms of content creation on the rise, especially when it comes to the anime space. For GeeXPlus, it’s not just about finding the creators with the best stats or the most views, but rather about finding opportunities to enhance the reach of newer creators in the right spaces.
“We aim to collaborate with creators who are centered around the ACG space (that’s an abbreviation often used in Japan for anime, comics and gaming) because we excel the most in those areas,” Nakamichi said. “We strive to bring on new talent who are looking for opportunities that only we can provide with domestic clients and anime companies since we operate in Japan and are able to do business in Japanese and English.”
In general, creators are only able to do so much on their own. This is a sentiment that was seemingly mutually agreed upon between the three creators behind GeeXProductions’ flagship series; while they have access to an incredible network of organically grown fans, contemporaries, and supporters alike, it often takes more targeted and specialized resources to break into the industry as a professional. The connections that GeeX is able to provide with anime companies serve as a catalyst that result in less difficulty acquiring and maintaining those specialized resources. Nakamichi explained how GeeXPlus’s strategy as a catalyzing force has solidified as anime and Japanese culture have spread more and more readily across the world, different generations, and various industries.
“I think the strategy right now is to bring together a very organic, fan-built community with official companies in the industry to generate synergy and a more exciting kind of content. Previously, the anime and comic communities were very closed, as in they only did ‘official’ things in an ‘official’ way. But our approach at Anime Expo is centered around the recognition that we have a community that has power, and we as an agency have the power to connect that community with these larger official players who are becoming open to backing projects with their production power.”
“I do serve as advisor for GeeXProductions; one of the main goals of GeeXProductions is basically empowering creators, ” said Gigguk, referring to the newly created division of GeeXPlus. ”There are so many creators that are on YouTube, or are on different platforms that don’t have the connections they need to to get a dream project done, or get their vision turned into reality. And what GeeXPlus wants to do is be able to bridge that gap between creators and industry. And a big part of their strategy is the foundations they have, being under KADOKAWA, and building up the context, having already had contacts with the anime community and the anime industry itself.”
In bridging the cultural and communication gaps between Japanese clients and international influencers and creators, Nakamichi, whose job is to facilitate just that, is perhaps the perfect person to talk more about the process.
“First of all, I need to understand the content that I’m working with. To understand what makes people excited about it,” Nakamichi explained. “For example, in Otachan, or Baan, or Dillon’s fight scene animations, what’s so good about them is that they really draw people in. Sometimes I’m instantly hooked because their works are really good. From there, I try to transcend that excitement into the communication I’m having with companies. Being a businessman is a minimum standard in these types of conversations, but I think being passionate about the work is more important in building trust and a good relationship when you’re collaborating on content. It’s all about the excitement that the fans and viewers will be getting, and attracting a hardcore fan base that lasts for years is ultimately our shared goal.”
On GeeXProductions’ Flagship Series
During the Anime Expo GeeXPlus Presents: Pushing Content Creation in Japan panel, GeeXPlus brought some amazingly entertaining behind-the-scenes moments and production details about the three flagship series to the public, some of which came from new and exciting trailers and some of which came from showing works in progress, such as genga and drafts of soon-to-be-revealed content. When it came to the origins of their series, all three creators had diverse and interesting inspirations and events that helped precipitate the creation of their work.
For Gigguk, some of that inspiration came from his own life and relationships. During the panel he described how he wove his and his loved ones’ personalities into the characters of Baan. During our conversation, he described how moving at different points in his life felt similar to the experience of an isekai.
“I’m going to be completely honest here – I wanted to get my screenplay approved. And in order to get it approved I needed to pitch it to companies. And what is a genre that I know a lot about that is also very popular and still is getting adaptations to this day? It’s isekai (laughs). So I wrote a screenplay with that genre in mind. But I wanted to bring my own touch to it, and there’s one aspect of isekai that I don’t get to see a lot of and that is this whole feeling of coming home after getting transported to another world – that’s kind of how the initial idea sprouted.”
“I used this feeling of travelling to another world in the same way that I feel when I moved to a different country or moved to a different place. Over my life I’ve lived in a lot of different countries – and obviously I have Thai parents – but I grew up in England. So I have had experiences in a multicultural upbringing. And for a long time I didn’t know where my home was. Was it the place I was born, was it the place I grew up, or was it where my bloodline was from? And through me discovering that answer as I grew up I put kind of all of those feelings and all those experiences into this one screenplay.”
For Dillon Goo, the move into independent animation traced an unexpected path – the creator didn’t major in animation, instead pursuing a degree in computer science, eventually starting to create YouTube content and after that spending some time working with Rooster Teeth before finally returning to independent animation “because of the freedom that you get to have as a director and as an artist to tell the stories that you want.” Soul Mart was one of the fruits of that freedom, set now to be released as both a webcomic and a 3D animated pilot.
“Soul Mart was born from the idea that a lot of today’s society, especially for the younger generation that are just now entering the workforce, is looking a lot different than it did before. A lot of people are finding it difficult to fit into. I think that struggle is really important to address, and I want to tell a story about how people can carve their own path and not have to conform to a lot of these structures that can be outdated and oppressive, especially to people’s creative freedoms and things like that.”
“Soul Mart itself is a story that encompasses that idea. It takes place in a world where demons have found ways to buy souls through capitalism and people have been overrun by that behind the scenes. The protagonists are two neurodivergent characters who are already struggling with their own problems and not able to fit in and they’re really forced into a situation where they have to fight this system head on.”
For OtakuVS, the kinds of anime produced are strongly inspired by the raw combat aesthetics of certain 90s and early 2000s anime.
“I wear my inspirations pretty blatantly on my sleeve. And I do have an obsession with that era. I’d say the one thing I’m most preoccupied with is the structure of an OVA, which is a singularly delivered kind of sequence. It’s a movie. It’s a kind of one and done, as opposed to an ongoing series. In regards to the kind of gritty and inspirations, it’s looking at stuff like Outlaw Star. It’s looking at stuff like Gunsmith Cats. It’s looking at stuff like Ninja Scroll, where it’s kind of hyper-violent, hyper-bombastic, but also very much inspired by a lot of Western cinema, you know, Western influences. So for me, that’s where my major influences lie, and where that manifests the most is in the action sequences, the fight sequences. It’s very grounded, very real. There’s lots of people punching each other.”
“Otachan – I’ll be completely honest, I watched Lucky Star and I saw Akira Kogami and I said, ‘I want to do that.’ [ . . . ] We started off with a live 2D rig. The live 2D rig got too limited in what we wanted to do. Then we moved to basic animation. At the same time, I was always using After Effects. The stories we wanted to tell and the things we wanted to do, we just had to get into the anime industry. It just naturally led us to that kind of place where we could kind of start making the stories we wanted to make. Thankfully, it came about at the right time where the industry was kind of ready for us.”
“I feel that era of that hyper-violent, hyper-kinetic, hyper-action focused – even really flexing the animator’s muscle in terms of fight choreography or even how little mechanical systems work and things like that, that was what people were flexing in the 90s. […] I wanted to create something that’s a reflection of that era. It was very important for me not to be pastiche or trying to just copy something – it was my understanding of that medium and that kind of era, how I kind of see it and envision it and then reflect it for a modern audience. That’s my idea behind Rabbit Season: everything dialed to 10 and see where we can take it”
Enhancing Creators’ Reach
Alongside the launch of GeeXProductions is an opportunity for creators to really lean into YouTube first projects, going beyond what’s traditionally expected in animation and into a combination of the best parts of content creation and the anime industry. For all three creators, the partnership with GeeX massively enhanced their reach and made that push more possible.
“It’s a really big difference to be able to access a part of the industry that you never had access to before,” said Dillon Goo. “Because YouTube has always been so separate from traditional media. Especially when you’re an internet creator. I’ve been basically sitting in my room 16, 18 hours work days the past 10 years. So it’s very hard to actually be able to go out and meet these people who are actually making these big budget things or the more mainstream types of media. And being able to cooperate with a production team who knows how to have those contacts and get into contact with people who can help with the production that we’re working on independently is a game changer. Because we’re able to not just scale up our stuff, but also scale up our reach to an audience that we normally wouldn’t be able to. And hopefully actually get some advice from them as well. There’s a lot of benefits.”
“I’d say in a word maybe on my end in terms of the more traditional 2D anime pipeline, it was somewhat intimidating,” said OtakuVS. “You spend so much time doing it on your own and being this scrappy little machine. And then when something as slick and as polished as someone like KADOKAWA or GeeXPlus comes along, there is that slight fear that you’re not going to measure up to the mark. But what I’ve found working so far is that it does allow, similar to what Dillon said, it’s allowed us to have access to a lot of information and knowledge and industry professionals, for example, in the anime pipeline that we would only have tangential access to before. We’d have to glean it from what we could kind of pass by actually watching an episode. But actually being able to speak to those people who are behind those episodes, their rationale, their mindset behind it – it’s just, again, like Dillon said, a game changer from a creative standpoint, that’s it.”
Gigguk explained his take as well, noting, “So I actually have a different perspective. Because I guess from my perspective, I’ve been with GeeXPlus since the beginning when GeeXPlus was basically just a one-woman army of our [President], Meilyne [Meilyne Tran]. […] Back then it was a lot harder to get contacts and get taken seriously by the Japanese anime industry mostly because they just weren’t aware that YouTube was a platform in and of itself. I think from my perspective, I’ve grown with GeeXPlus, kind of helping with GeeXPlus’ help to bridge that gap between the anime industry and online creators, especially western online creators, which was just not a thing. And it’s happened slowly but surely year over year, where now I can help GeeXPlus sign other creators and give them the same resources that I’ve slowly helped build with GeeXPlus over the years. And I’m excited to do that more in the future as well.”
Concluding our conversation, Gigguk explained his opinion on how the way people interact with anime and anime-related content has diversified with time and anything else.
“I think it’s not exclusive to anime – it’s kind of grown for how people approach all media in general. What gets talked about is a lot of the flashier stuff, stuff that can be easily spread around, whether that be like a cool clip or a big twist or a big kind of moment. I feel like the shelf life for anime or even media in general just isn’t as big as it used to be. Before you’d really get time for people to really reflect and absorb what they’ve seen. But now, because there’s so much anime and just so much media in general, people are always looking to move towards the next thing almost immediately which I find a little bit sad. But I can definitely understand the amount of things out there. I think also the biggest change is that anime is just bigger than ever. It used to be that the anime community was one unified conglomerate almost and now it’s closer to a lot of different bubbles that only occasionally interact with each other. Before if you meet an anime fan you could probably have a sense of familiarity with watching the same shows and now you could be two people who watch anime that don’t have any crossover in the types of shows that you watch.”
As the velocity of anime increases, we’re happy to have spoken with four of the people behind creating those shows that the rest of us eagerly wait for, season after season.
This interview was conducted by Jay Gibbs and Grant Wolfgramm, with questions contributed by Jay Gibbs.
Participate In Discussions