ABEMA has picked the first three winners of Project PRISMation, its open call for independent animators. Each of the three will get production funding for a short original anime pilot, with release planned for next year or later.
The selected works are OXY-HEAVEN by Waboku, Amneka by orange, and Kandy-Killers for Hire by Dominique Garrow, who works under the name koilccc.
The call ran from May to August. ABEMA is not stopping at the pilot either: the company says it will support each work through development, Japanese and English voice casting, sound and music arrangement, translation, promotion and commercial development.
The three pilots
OXY-HEAVEN is a steampunk fantasy ensemble piece. It is set in Eden, a colossal ship-nation booming on postwar reconstruction, where a former doctor runs a cafe called OXY HEAVEN and mends wounded people with coffee and a healthy amount of meddling.
Waboku is an animation artist and illustrator known for a directorial style built on decadent, atmospheric worlds and sharp timing. His music video work includes Eve's "As You Like It" and ZUTOMAYO's "Byoushin wo Kamu."
Amneka is a fantasy comedy set in a small school far from anywhere, where six students and one teacher live together. The title character, a young girl, tries to live peacefully with her colourful classmates while a secret she does not know about begins to unsettle their everyday life.
orange is a newer filmmaker who grew up on short animation and describes an interest in the small ideas and hard-to-forget sensations of ordinary days.
Kandy-Killers for Hire is the loudest of the three. In a neon city where murder has become a commercial industry, Kandie runs a scrappy assassination startup. When the corporate conglomerate ASASU pushes her business toward bankruptcy, she pulls in her friends Poppy and Gumi for a desperate, blood-soaked marketing campaign.
Garrow is a freelance illustrator from the United States working in the VTuber space, with a stated interest in the cute, the creepy and the crazy. She began production work as a fourth-year high school student.
How the project works
The name is a portmanteau of prism and animation, and the pitch is a space where different talents converge. In practice it is ABEMA funding short pilots from individuals and small teams who mostly built their skills on web animation, then giving those pilots a distribution path.
The project has already shipped four. "Poppin-Play Kitchen" went up on January 16 and has passed 2.5 million views. "Gluttomy" by Vietnam-based creator rapitus followed on January 23, and "The Horrors' Horror Home" from creator Uguisu Kobo, director Rushio Moriyama and writer Yūya Matsuzaki arrived on January 30.
A second round was announced on September 19. Miou Hiruma's "The Chatty Jewel and the Phantom Thieves," Yū Satō's "SALON de MONDE" and Fantasy Restaurant Kani's "LAMPMOSS COFFEE" are all scheduled for release this month.
Why this is worth watching
The anime industry has a staffing problem that nobody has solved, and it is not only about how many people can draw in-between frames. It is about how few routes exist for someone with a distinctive visual idea to get from a personal short to a funded production. Most of the people who make striking work online never touch a TV series.
Money has not fixed that on its own. The global anime market reached a record 4.45 trillion yen in 2025, and the bottleneck is still people and time rather than capital.
Project PRISMation is small. Three pilots a year will not change an industry. But the structure is different from a competition: the prize is a finished, dubbed, translated pilot rather than a development deal or a meeting, and the creators keep working in their own styles instead of being folded into an existing studio pipeline. ABEMA also committed to English voice casting up front, which is the step most Japanese short-form projects skip.
If one of these three turns into a series, the model becomes repeatable. That is the part worth tracking, more than any single pilot.
The previous pilots and the new selections are listed on the Project PRISMation site, and ABEMA has been announcing each round through its own channels.
Source: Anime News Network
Featured image: The three selected Project PRISMation works, OXY-HEAVEN, Amneka and Kandy-Killers for Hire, via Anime News Network.
