Since 1979, the Emmy Awards have made space, between the many live-action series it honors, to hand out some recognition to animated programs through its Outstanding Animated Program category. But in the nearly 50-year history of the trophy, a large, increasingly important subset of the medium hasn’t even been eligible to compete: anime.
The rules for the Emmy Awards state that, for a show to be submitted in the Primetime Emmys ceremony, the show needs to be produced at least partially by an American company. As a result, the uniquely Japanese art form — despite its growing popularity in the West — has only been able to compete in the international category for “Best Kids Animation.”
Six series produced in Japan have been nominated in that category since 2012: “Digimon Xros Wars,” “Ronja, the Robber’s Daughter,” “Shimajiro’s WOW!,” “Design Ah!,” “To Your Eternity,” and “Rilakkuma’s Theme Park Adventure”; “Ronja, the Robber’s Daughter” won in 2015, thus making it the only anime with an Emmy Award to its name.
As the medium has risen from a cult interest to a massive industry in the United States — and as American distributors of the medium have dipped their toes into production work — more anime have technically become eligible for Primetime Emmys, but none have actually managed to crack into the awards conversation. This year, though, anime streaming service Crunchyroll is hoping to change that, with an Emmys FYC campaign for one of their biggest hits, Season 2 of the Korean webtoon adaptation “Solo Leveling.”
A co-production between Japanese entertainment company Aniplex (which operates Crunchyroll as a joint venture with Sony Pictures) and animation studio A-1 Pictures, “Solo Leveling” has been submitted by Crunchyroll for consideration in the 2025 Emmys race in the Outstanding Animated Series category. Should it get a nomination, the show — which tells the story of Sung Jin-woo, a nobody who acquires incredible powers to become a warrior known as a Hunter — would make history by cracking into the Primetime Emmys category.
It’s a milestone that, as Vice President of Communications at Crunchyroll Brian Eley told IndieWire, would reflect on the growing dominance and cultural ubiquity of anime in the United States. “I wouldn’t say it’s the future, because it’s not,” Eley told IndieWire during a recent interview. “It’s right now. It’s happening right now.”
Because so much of their content is distributed from Japan, Crunchyroll is still a very new company to the awards conversation. They first submitted to the Emmys in 2022, when Eley joined the company, with the popular series “Ranking of Kings.” At the time, Crunchyroll had to lobby for the series — produced by Aniplex — to qualify for Emmys consideration.
“We didn’t really know exactly what we were doing,” Eley said of that first campaign. “We had to do a lot of education with our production partners on what is an Emmy campaign, what does it entail. And our Japanese partners don’t like to do a lot of lobbying. They like the content to speak for itself.”
With the current campaign for “Solo Leveling,” which aired its second season from January to March this year, Eley said that the lessons from their past efforts helped them stage a more comprehensive and complete campaign. “We were able to really talk to the producers from Aniplex, from A-1 Pictures, and get them excited about the possibility, and really get them to realize that voters are really just fans who have a lot more weight,” he said. “There are a lot of voters out there who are fans of anime and fans and solo leveling. So you’re really talking to just kind of a subset of your fans already, and at that point they really want to talk to fans. Japanese partners always want to get out there and go to cons and the conventions and premieres, because they wanted to see their creative through the lens of how fans react to it.”
For the “Solo Leveling” FYC campaign, Crunchyroll flew out several creative producers behind the series — including Aniplex’s Sota Furuhashi, A-1 Pictures’ Atsushi Kaneko, and Crunchyroll’s Kanako Takahashi — for an April 30 screening at the Television Academy. Other ways the campaign worked to reach out to fans included a Reddit AMA with the three producers, as well as a press junket toward the end of April.
When talking about why Crunchyroll chose the series as the one to put their backing behind during this awards season, Eley pointed to the show’s popularity and broad global appeal. Based on a web novel by Korean author Chugong, the series became a breakout hit when it first premiered in 2024, and only grew in popularity during its second season. While Crunchyroll doesn’t provide streaming data, the show notably has more ratings and reviews on the streamer, beating out series like “One Piece” that have well over 1,000 episodes and counting. When Crunchyroll announced the nominees for its 2025 Anime Awards, the show’s first season was one of the most recognized overall, receiving 14 nods.
Part of what made the show such a hit are its high-quality fight scenes, many of which have gone viral online: Eley described the series as “dominating” in terms of engagement on all Crunchyroll social media accounts. That animation takes an enormous amount of resources on the part of A-1 Pictures. Speaking to IndieWire, Atsushi Kaneko said the average episode had 150 to 200 people working on production in some capacity. In addition, while Kaneko estimates that the average episode of a Japanese animated series might take three to five months to develop and produce, the longest episodes for “Solo Leveling” Season 2 took 10 months to create, resulting in roughly 30-minute episodes that contained worlds of detail.
“Japanese anime produced for television, It’s typical to count them in the number of frames that the animators have to create, and I would say 7,000 to 8,000 frames for a single episode is already quite impressive. Some especially action-heavy anime might go above 10,000 frames for an episode,” Kaneko told IndieWire. “For Episode 24 of ‘Solo Leveling,’ there was more than 17,000 frames, so it completely eclipsed all other types of anime done in the past. That’s so effing crazy. As an animation producer, that’s probably something I should have intervened and stopped. But I think the challenge and the kind of dynamic that we have as three companies, it almost empowered us to say, ‘You know what, let’s do this.’”
In addition to the main animated series category, Crunchyroll additionally submitted the show for consideration for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation Emmys, which are determined by a jury, rather than a vote among nominees. One nomination was for Character Animation for Yoshihiro Kanno and, the other for Character Design for Tomoko Sudo. Eley said that convincing the producers behind the series to submit for individual categories proved to take “a little bit of convincing,” thanks to Japanese culture’s emphasis on team effort rather than individual achievement. “Those two are really just leaders of a larger group, and they would say the same thing,” Eley said. “They would humbly take it away, because that’s the only way to get the show more, you know, more accolades and more press.”
As a series based on Korean source material, “Solo Leveling” is a small rarity in the anime space, as the vast majority of anime produced within Japan come from manga or light novels produced within the country. According to Aniplex producer Sota Furuhashi, the company’s goal while making the series was not to cater and alter it for Japanese audiences, but instead to find a way to serve the international audience that the original source material had already picked up.
“Of course, the comic had a lot of Japanese fans as well, but I think larger than that was the international community and fandom. Thinking about how an anime would be received by them was really the focus and the goal and mission of ‘Solo Leveling,’ whether it’s the character names, how those are localized and adapted, even down to a lot of the detail in the background that kind of really express and showcase the world setting,” Furuhashi told IndieWire. “There are a lot of decisions that were made from, how do we serve this to the fans in a way that’s very palatable and is seamless to the fan and audience experience?”
“Crunchyroll and Aniplex are both part of the Sony family, so to speak. But, in spite of that, there hasn’t been a lot of joint ventures of this nature,” Crunchyroll producer Kanako Takahashi added. “So whether it’s the localization of the franchise and the adaptation the marketing, there’s a very close communication and approach to how we took ‘Solo Leveling’ from manga to anime to the international audience.”
In working on Emmys campaigns for anime, Eley told IndieWire that one factor Crunchyroll has to consider is education and outreach towards voters who aren’t necessarily familiar with anime, and teaching them that it isn’t a niche genre, but instead a large medium with a diversity of tone and a large, growing base who consume it frequently.
“Maybe you’re not watching anime. We can tell you that probably any person around you who might fit within the 18 or 34 demographic, and even younger, is watching anime and is very familiar with it, and watches it multiple times a day,” Eley said. “You might not know about it, but the people around you know about it.”
Eley is optimistic for “Solo Leveling” and its chances to break into the Emmys field — even as he jokingly noted that the Animated Series categories tend to gravitate toward the same few shows like “Bob’s Burgers” or “The Simpsons.” He pointed to Netflix’s “Blue Eye Samurai,” which won the category in last year’s ceremony, as a sign that that voters today are open to giving the medium a chance. The show isn’t technically an anime — it was produced by French studio Blue Spirit — but it’s a blood-soaked tale of revenge takes many stylistic and creative inspirations from the medium all the same.
“It’s good to see that for the anime ecosystem. Agnostic to brand, whether or not it’s French or anybody else, it’s great for the industry,” Eley said. “It’s great for people seeing animated content from other areas of the world. To us, that’s a win, and I think if we can get more of those, it really can showcase the power of anime.”
Every episode of “Solo Leveling” Season 2 is now streaming on Crunchyroll.
