After AT&T sold Crunchyroll to Sony in 2021, it was announced that Crunchyroll and Adult Swim would no longer be collaborating on funding original series for either platform. Since then, each platform has helped fund original anime series for its own individual platform separately. For the purposes of this article, I’ll be focusing on Adult Swim and one of the anime series that it has helped fund for its long-running action animation block, Toonami.

It seems like Adult Swim’s Toonami Original anime series have been largely negatively received by regular people, and moreso, influencers, on social media. Hell, even journalists employed by Hollywood trade publications are joining in on this perception, as I’ll talk about later on in the article. Do the opinions of online personalities and journalists actually reflect the opinions of real-life viewers, though? Recent events surrounding certain Toonami Originals, particularly Ninja Kamui, seem to suggest that that might not be the case.

Ninja Kamui‘s huge W

If you missed the Crunchyroll Anime Awards over Memorial Day weekend, then you missed the news that the Toonami Original series, Ninja Kamui, won the award for Best Original Anime during the event. While this may not be huge news in the grand scheme of things, it’s an important milestone, not just for Ninja Kamui itself, but for Toonami Original series as a whole.

Ninja Kamui premiered on Adult Swim’s Toonami in February 2024, and got off to a great start, which sparked a lot of discussion on social media platforms, especially the platform formerly known as Twitter. As the series went on, though, people on social media became turned off by certain aspects of the series, such as its story, its use of mech suits in combat, and its use of CGI animation. The latter two of these arguments (which happen to be the ones I personally disagree with) ended up dominating the conversation around the series during more than half of its run and continues to this day, at the time of posting, especially on platforms like Meta’s Threads. However, these social media discussions don’t reflect the actual viewing habits of people in real life when it comes to Ninja Kamui.

The series spent the bulk of last year in certain “Top 100” charts on iTunes/Apple TV, meaning that a significant amount of people bought either individual episodes or the whole series digitally. On top of that, the series won the aforementioned Best Original Anime award at the Crunchyroll Anime Awards, which a lot of people call a popularity contest, meaning that a lot of people voted for it over its competition to win that award. When combining these two factors, you can see that either a good amount of people watched and liked Ninja Kamui, despite its flaws, or that the series is not as bad as people online say it is. You wouldn’t come to that conclusion on your own if you only followed the social media conversations about the show, though. Just food for thought.

Misinformation from the trades?

If the disconnect between opinions on social media and real life about Ninja Kamui wasn’t enough, then you might be surprised to know that certain Hollywood trade publications are trying to pretend as if the show doesn’t exist, which is what prompted me to write this article in the first place. You’re likely familiar with the subject of this part of the article, and if you’re a fan of movies like The Marvels, or more recently, Sinners, you probably hate this publication. I’m, of course, talking about Variety.

Almost two weeks ago, at the time of posting this, Variety posted an article “announcing” that the next anime series from Sunghoo Park, the creator and director of Ninja Kamui, called Bullet/Bullet, is heading to Disney platforms worldwide (Hulu in the U.S., Disney+ everywhere else). On the surface, the article seems like a typical one that you would find from Variety or other Hollywood trade publications. However, if you take a closer look at it, you’ll notice some serious sins that this article commits.

The biggest sin the article commits is that it tries to pretend that Ninja Kamui doesn’t exist. That title doesn’t appear anywhere in the article, even in places where it should, like the section where the article mentions that Park won the aforementioned award at the Crunchyroll Anime Awards, but not which show he won the award for. Weird choice, but okay. On top of that, the article makes the claim that Bullet/Bullet is Park’s first original anime “in years”, which is straight up not true, because at the time of posting, Ninja Kamui, Park’s most recent original anime, came out LAST YEAR.

I’m not sure what would cause the article’s author to go out of their way to ignore the existence of Ninja Kamui. Maybe the article’s author, or another party at Variety, didn’t like the series for some, or all, of the reasons mentioned earlier. Maybe Disney, the exclusive streaming partner for Bullet/Bullet, paid Variety to keep Ninja Kamui‘s name out of the article, so that the Mouse House can claim that it has the first original anime series from Park “in years” to make Bullet/Bullet feel like a more special release. I wouldn’t put that past Disney, after all. Maybe it’s something else entirely. Regardless, that Variety article contains a lot of misinformation, which stems from trying to pretend that Ninja Kamui doesn’t exist, on top of it not announcing anything that wasn’t already public information (Hence why I put ‘announcing’ in double quotes earlier). Getting opinions about Ninja Kamui from people on social media that may not reflect real-life viewership is one thing, but seeing news sources that people are supposed to trust trying to pretend like the show doesn’t exist is far worse, and that is something worth calling out.

Let’s bring this article home. It’s pretty clear that what you may (or may not, in Variety’s case) see online about Ninja Kamui doesn’t reflect the real-world viewership of that series, which is definitely more positive than what social media would have you believe. I hope that Ninja Kamui’s win at the Crunchyroll Anime Awards, as well as this article, can start to change the online narrative around this series, as well as the Toonami Originals as a whole, which hasn’t been very positive. Only time will tell. In the meantime, just remember this…

Social media is not real life.

What do you think about the perception around Ninja Kamui and how it differs from real-world perception and viewership? Leave a comment and let me know. I may end up making this kind of article a series in the future. Don’t forget to follow me and Cels & Circuits on social media for more on animation and technology. Until then, I’m Chibueze, signing off.