Tate Anime / Anime Beans

» see animebeans.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

タテアニメ launched on 5 June 2017 after slipping from an April date, proposed by Yuji Otsuka out of Production I.G's planning office and billed as the first anime service made only for smartphones and only for a vertical screen. Episodes ran about three minutes. A new one landed on weekdays and a series was ten of them. The first episode of anything was free, and after that you spent points, which you earned by logging in and watching an ad inside the app, or bought.

The pitch was unusually clear about who it was fighting. Production I.G said in interviews at the time that the rivals were the phone games and manga apps people already opened on the train, and that television anime sat in a different bracket entirely. Three minutes is a station and a half. The studio did not do it alone either: Sammy, m-up, Hakuhodo DY Media Partners, Koku Kitaru and YD Creation came in on the business together, and IG Port announced the app to shareholders as a company initiative rather than as a studio experiment.

On 6 April 2018 Production I.G announced a full renewal and the end of the old app. タテアニメ ran until 31 May 2018. The replacement pre-opened on 30 May and launched properly on 8 June as アニメBeans, with the money rearranged: everything free on a rotation, and you paid only if you did not want to wait for the episode you were after to come back around. Anime Beans also began carrying ordinary horizontal shows from the I.G Port catalog, and that is the point where the vertical idea stopped being the product and became one of its features. The service ended on 31 March 2023.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

Anime Beans added English subtitles and opened to the rest of the world in December 2018, so it was not technically closed off. It was still built for the Yamanote line. The catalog assumed you knew who てぃ先生 was, the promotions ran in Japanese, and nothing about the release rhythm made sense unless your commute was a Japanese commute. There is no Turkish version of this story to tell. In 2017 I was thirty-three and working in Ankara, and the vertical video on my phone was other people's, not a studio's.

The lineup was better than a three-minute app has any right to have. 孤独のグルメ, the Solitary Gourmet, got vertical shorts. So did 秘密結社鷹の爪, and Junji Inagawa's ghost stories, and Rieko Saibara's できるかな. アフリカのサラリーマン started here as a vertical short in June 2017 and went on to a full television series in 2019, which makes it the one clean success the platform produced.

~ what got buried with it ~

When the service closed, the shorts closed with it. Most of these were never pressed to disc, never given a television slot and never moved to another streamer, because there is nowhere obvious to put them. A vertical master does not survive being dropped into a horizontal player, and no anime distributor in 2023 had a shelf shaped like this. The manga several of them came from is still in print. The animation is wherever Production I.G keeps things it is not currently selling.

~ the funny part ~

Production I.G was right about the format and five years early, which turned out to be the same as being wrong. TikTok went international the same year タテアニメ launched. By March 2023, when the successor app was switched off, vertical short video was the dominant thing on the planet and every platform that mattered had built a feed of it. The studio that had gone first put out a closure notice instead. Its page for the app is still on production-ig.co.jp, logo intact, which is where the logo above came from.

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