Welcome to Deadline’s International Disruptors, a feature where we shine a spotlight on key executives and companies outside of the U.S. shaking up
Welcome to Deadline’s International Disruptors, a feature where we shine a spotlight on key executives and companies outside of the U.S. shaking up the offshore marketplace. Today we’re talking to Essam Bukhary, CEO of Saudi Arabian animation company Manga Productions, who makes his first trip to the Annecy International Film Festival in France this week. Bukhary has been instrumental in putting Saudi Arabia on the map as a country that not only consumes manga and anime but also creates and distributes it too with milestone productions such as The Journey, Asateer and Grendizer U.
When Deadline catches up with Essam Bukhary, CEO of Riyadh-based animation company Manga Productions, ahead of Annecy over Zoom from London, he is a distant figure at the far end of a long boardroom table in an office in Tokyo. Five minutes into the discussion, an assistant reconnects him on a laptop for a more intimate face to face conversation with the personable exec.
“I’m here one week of every month,” explains Bukhary, who speaks fluent Japanese having worked as a Saudi cultural attaché in the country for close to two decades from the mid-1990s onwards.
Bukhary used this experience to build the foundations of Manga Productions when he was asked to head up the company in 2017.
A subsidiary of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Misk Foundation, aimed at cultivating youth learning and leadership, the company’s creation followed in the wake of Saudi Arabia’s opening up as part of the 2030 Vision plan aimed at weaning its economy off a dependence on oil.
Bukhary was well placed to take on the role of CEO.
“Like many Saudis, I grew up watching Japanese anime and it made a huge impact on my life,” he says, noting its influence continues with his daughter, who took up volleyball after watching Haikyu!!, the anime series devoted to the sport.
“When I first went to Japan to learn the language, I watched the anime that I had watched in Arabic in Japanese to help me,” he continues.
Later, when Bukhary returned in a diplomatic capacity, he commissioned mangas as a way to illustrate Saudi Arabia and Saudi culture to the Japanese. On his return to KSA in 2015, the exec spent a year working at Saudi Research and Media Group (SRMG), before being tapped for the CEO role at Manga Productions.
“When I started, we had no staff, no studio, no schools to teach anime or games or comics in Saudi Arabia, but we had the vision, we had the big dream and the passion,” he says.
“Starting from zero, my first mission was to negotiate with Toei Animation to provide opportunities for young Saudi talents with internships. We sent 11 Saudi young talents to Toei for two months.”
Manga would also secure stages with video gaming and interactive entertainment company SNK Corporation, which Misk would acquire in 2022, Square Enix and Kadokawa Corporation.
“Over the past six years, we’ve trained more than 4,000 Saudi talents,” says Bukhary, who hired the most promising as part of his strategy to build the company.
He notes that the company has additionally introduced 3.5 million high school students to anime through an educational online program.
“I like to call Manga Productions a youth empowerment company,” he says. “The young talents who joined the company are working on the frontline, in production, distribution, in everything.”
The Journey
Manga Productions
The next large step was landmark 2020 Japanese-Saudi movie The Journey, co-produced by Manga Productions with Toei Animation.
Japanese director Kōbun Shizuno, who attended Annecy in 2018 with Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters and Godzilla: City On The Edge directed the film, with production taking place in Tokyo and Riyadh.
Set some 1,500 years ago, the drama revolves around a disgraced warrior who redeems himself by defending the holy city of Mecca from foreign raiders.
Japanese, Arab and English-language voice tracks were created for the movie, which was released theatrically in Saudi Arabia and the wider Middle East region as well as Japan in 2021. Crunchyroll streamed the show in territories outside of the Middle East in 2022, and it is now available on Netflix.
Quizzed on its legacy, Bukhary responds: “It was our first movie to be delivered; the first Arab movie to win in the best experimental movie category [of the Septimius Awards in Amsterdam]; the first Arab movie to premiere in the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, and the first Arab IP to be made available on the Chinese platform BiliBili.”
“The great thing about the journey, is that it’s not made in Saudi, it’s not made in Japan, it’s made in Saudi with Japan. It showed how this type of co-production could work and provided a new concept, new ideas and artistic style, which was essential for the upcoming decades.”
Further Manga-Toei collaborations included Asateer (Future Folktales), taking inspiration from folklore on the Arabian Peninsula.
“Last year, we had the second season, which played on eight platforms and TV channels including TV Tokyo and MBC1, which reaches 500 million people in the Arab world. We are now working on English, Spanish, French-language versions.
“Asateer also won the award at Saudi Media Forum for the best marketing campaign because the team did an amazing job in marketing Asateer in different languages and for different generations, and also created a mobile game in three languages, which generated half a million downloads.
“It did well, but if you ask me what is the greatest achievement of Asateer? I think it’s the involvement of Saudi talents. For the first season in 2018, we sent them to Japan on internships. On Asateer 2, one of the episodes was directed by our Saudi talents in Riyadh.”
Character design and pre-production was done in the Riyadh office, while Manga Productions also ran an online competition to find the voices for the show.
“The judges were the legends of Arabic dubbing from the 80s and 90s. The first positions were won by a young man from Algeria and a young lady from Saudi Arabia,” explains Bukhary. “They participated in Asateer, playing the main characters, while the side characters were played by legends.”
Bukhary says Manga Productions has another 10 projects in development, the details of which are under wraps.
Grendizer U
Manga Productions
In another milestone, Manga sealed a strategic partnership in 2022 for popular anime series Grendizer about a super-hero robot, with Tokyo-based Dynamic Planning, the licensing company of its creator Go Nagai.
Under the deal, Manga Productions acquired the rights to utilize Grendizer IP in products and characters in cities and entertainment events worldwide, outside of Japan.
One of Manga’s first activations in Saudi Arabia was the construction of a record-breaking 33-meter-tall high statue in Riyadh during the culture, entertainment and sports-focused Riyadh Season in the fall.
“We did the “Grandizer Experience” and also advertized the character on potato chip packets,” says Bukhary.
Manga and Dynamic have since collaborated on the reboot of the series, Grendizer U, which incorporates Saudi Arabian, French and Italian backdrops and was released in July 2024.
Prior to the series launch, Manga Productions also released the game UFO Robot Grendizer: The Feast of the Wolves in MENA in cooperation with the French company Microids.
“Grandizer is a very famous successful IP in Middle East, in France and Italy but there hadn’t been any new seasons for 40 years. We talked with Dynamic and decided to bring it back,” says Bukhary.
The series also enabled Manga Productions to expand its local and international distribution and marketing activities.
“The distribution of The Journey was handled by our talents. It was in-house. They [Dynamic] evaluated our performance, and the ask was, why doesn’t Manga Productions do the global distribution of Grendizer U, excluding Japan. For the first time, a Middle Eastern company was doing animation distribution for Japanese IP.”
The Manga Productions team handled the marketing in English, French, Italian, Arabic as well as global distribution.
“ROI was amazing. I can’t share the numbers, but financially it was a big success. At the same time, we did the Arabic dubbing. Thirty minutes after the show was available on Japanese TV, it was available in the Arab world in Arabic language. It was a big, big challenge to deliver it at the same time,” says Bukhary.
“We were focusing on IP creation, but with Grendizer we moved into IP utilization or IP management. So we’re not only limited to creating IP, but are also involved in how to license, distribute, publish and utilize IP in entertainment. Based on that, we are now representing Riyadh Season in Japan to bring more and more Japanese IP to the entertainment sector in Saudi Arabia.”
Manga Productions has also since struck similar partnerships with Tsubasa Co., for its Captain Tsubasa IP, under which the Saudi outfit distributed the show in the Middle East, and Production I.G for Great Pretender.
Recently, the company moved into publishing games from Japan, kicking off with an agreement in November 2024, with Koei Tecmo Games to release its Dynasty Warriors: Origins in MENA in early 2025.
Developed by Omega Force and published by Koei Tecmo, the games franchise based on the Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, had never been released in the Arabic language before.
“It’s a very notable IP, but people from the Arab world could not understand the game, so we translated 500,000 lines. We modified the game engine, developing it together with Koei Tecmo, so it now supports the Arabic language.
“Some terminologies from Chinese history were translated into Arabic for the first time. They were very happy. Financially, we did an amazing job, and we’re now in the middle of negotiations with several Japanese game companies to publish their games.”
Bukhary suggests the Manga Productions model is a gamechanger for games companies trying to enter the MENA market.
“A lot of Japanese companies, even companies from Europe did not deal directly with the region. They tried to use other regions to deal indirectly, which caused miscommunication and extra costs,” he says. “Working directly with Manga Productions, means more profits, more sustainability, better communication and of course more revenues, which is a good success model that we can share with the world.”
Looking ahead, Bukhary’s goals are to further grow the animation sector in Saudi Arabia and wider MENA region across all platforms, and broaden the breadth of storytelling.
“Arab IP doesn’t mean only looking at ourselves in the past. I was asked once at a symposium, ‘If you were doing an anime character, which historical character would you use?’ My answer was I will never use any historical character. I’ll focus on the future and go to the imagination.”
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