Pharrell Gets Anime

Pharrell’s been showing up in anime spaces. After that animated-hat appearance in the Miku Hatsune video—”Last Night, Good Night (Re:Dialed)”—he’s now opposite a wistful manga girl in his It Girl video, both of them drifting through space. It’s the kind of thing that would’ve felt like you were in on a niche in-joke a few years ago. Now it’s just what he’s making.

The whole video leans into anime and manga aesthetics without apology—visual language, sensibility, all of it. It doesn’t read like he’s discovered anime. It reads like he actually gets it. He’s making what he wants to make.

What gets me is the openness of it. A few years back, liking anime or manga felt like something you kept separate from your mainstream taste, something you didn’t advertise. Now a major artist is just making videos about it and nobody’s pretending it’s weird. Because the truth—and I think most people know this—is that anime and manga are doing things Western studios won’t. The storytelling, the visual risk-taking, the willingness to leave things strange and unresolved. I’ve thought so for years. I think a lot of us have. We just weren’t supposed to say it out loud.