Bringing 4K and HDR to Anime at Netflix with Sol Levante
By Haruka Miyagawa & Kylee Peña
Some might dismiss them as simple cartoons, but anime’s diverse and fantastical stories, vibrant style, and delicate lines are an art form that has evolved and grown in popularity, variety and sophistication over the last fifty years. From its likely roots in colorful painted lanterns in the early 20th century, to gaining mainstream status in Japan in the 1970s, viewers now have hundreds of anime series and films to choose from all over the world.
Our Creative Technologies team wanted to elevate the technical quality of anime’s visuals, discover what new creative opportunities that would introduce, and to learn what it would take to increase anime’s resolution from HD to 4K and introduce the wider color palette of high dynamic range (HDR) to artists’ toolsets. When 4K entered the conversation, most animators in Japan asked for one thing: a bigger piece of paper! But the artists at Production I.G. saw the future in digital. A bigger, more colorful collaboration was born — and the resulting short, Sol Levante, is now available for streaming on Netflix in 4K Dolby Vision and Atmos!
The Creative Technologies team at Netflix focuses on how we can improve our content creation practices for the long term, and works with various partners on research and development to bring these improvements to real world workflows. Combining high quality and longevity with an authentic presentation experience is a part of our team’s core mission, as is opening up new creative opportunities. Given the rapid adoption of consumer 4K HDR capable devices, it’s easy to imagine that it will be the primary viewing experience in five years.
We’ve had great success remastering titles like Knights of Sidonia, Flavours of Youth and Godzilla from SDR to HDR over the last few years. But what if we increase the resolution and create anime with HDR in mind from conception? How would creative decisions change? What creative and technical challenges would pop up? How would the budget and timeline be impacted? And what new creative opportunities would emerge?
Known for projects like Ghost in the Shell and the anime portion of Kill Bill, Production I.G. in Tokyo brought an experienced crew who felt comfortable working in digital from scratch and wanted to answer these questions too. Our combined curiosity led to the creation of an experimental 4K HDR Immersive Audio anime short called Sol Levante. [In order to help the industry better understand 4K HDR and immersive audio in anime, we’ve released the raw materials used in Sol Levante for download and experimentation.]
The Current State of Anime: Business
While the incredible stories in today’s anime will never become obsolete, the anime workflow developed in Japan hasn’t changed much over the years. To recognize why this experiment was necessary on a small scale, it’s important to understand the reality of creating anime in Japan.
Since the turn of the century, the anime industry has shifted from the traditional system of an anime studio owning most or all of the copyright to the current business model of a “Production Committee” system. While it became easier to create content for the studio thanks to all the financial support, more stakeholders are involved which creates a lot more complexity.
Some or all of the production is subcontracted to multiple companies and freelancers in many cascading tiers. With so many subcontractors involved, it’s hard to align everyone with changes in technology and new creative opportunities. The number of freelancers depends on each project, but those who are working at home have limited equipment compared to those working at studios.