Anime Producer Says Some People in Hollywood Think All Anime Is Porn

Danica Davidson May 7, 2025

Even as anime gets more popular, otaku sometimes still have to deal with people’s inaccurate perceptions on the medium. Producer and executive Marisa Balkus, whose background includes working at Crunchyroll and Netflix, gives a long talk about her career and the anime industry, and part of the talk includes stuff on misperceptions some people in Hollywood still have for anime.

While Hollywood is getting more and more into making anime adaptations (they see the money that can be made) the adaptations don’t always thrill fans, and sometimes it can be an issue that the people behind the adaptation don’t really understand anime or why it’s popular.

So during his The Story Series Podcast, host Brandon Violette asks, “Do you feel like there’s common misconceptions in Hollywood about anime or that genre of animation?”

Balkus answers, “I think so, yeah. I think that there’s still some generations within our industry that view anime as pornography, or something weird, you know. Which is really unfortunate. Or, there’s people who just associate anime with shonen anime and whatever’s coming out of Shonen Jump and nothing else . . . which is really unfortunate, because, obviously, there’s every medium under the sun that anime offers. Yeah, I think that those are the biggest misconceptions . . . or that anything that pertains to what women want to watch or consume has to involve magical girls in some way. . . It is a cliché.”

As Balkus points out, anime offers a wide variety of genres. Some anime titles are pornographic, but the majority are not. Likewise, there’s a lot more than shonen anime and magical girl anime out there.

Here is the entire interview (the part about Hollywood’s misconceptions starts at about 48:47):

The Story Series Podcast #9 – Culture Misfit | Marisa Balkus

Are there any misconceptions about anime you’ve had to deal with? Are any of them the same ones Balkus mentions?

Source: YouTube via Anime Corner

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Danica Davidson is the author of the bestselling Manga Art for Beginners with artist Melanie Westin, plus its sequel, Manga Art for Everyone, and the first-of-its-kind manga chalk book Chalk Art Manga, both illustrated by professional Japanese mangaka Rena Saiya. Check out her other comics and books at www.danicadavidson.com.