Anime in Saudi Arabia, 2026: a generation finally exhales

Standing in the Riyadh Anime Expo hall last November, watching a dad in a thobe explain Captain Tsubasa to his nine-year-old — pointing out Tsubasa Ozora on a giant banner the way you would point out a family friend — I realized something quietly enormous. We grew up. The thing some of us hid from our families is now the thing those same people share with their kids on a Friday afternoon.

If you are Saudi, Khaleeji, North African, anywhere in the Arabic-speaking world and you are in your early thirties right now, you know exactly which generation I am talking about. The Spacetoon generation. The kids who came home from school in the early 2000s and watched Detective Conan, Captain Tsubasa, Hunter x Hunter, Slam Dunk, Grendizer reruns in pristine Arabic dub. The kids whose parents thought “cartoons” meant something for five-year-olds and could not understand why a fifteen-year-old was still watching.

That fifteen-year-old is now thirty-six and has a Crunchyroll Premium subscription with Arabic subtitles. Welcome to 2026.

What actually changed, not the official press-release version

Saudi Anime Expo started in 2019 and has run every year since. That is not new. What is new is the scale, and more importantly, the official posture. This is now a state-supported cultural event. The Ministry of Culture shows up. The Public Investment Fund is in the conversation through Savvy Games Group, which has been buying into anime-adjacent IP. Manga Productions, the Misk-backed studio founded in 2016, co-produced The Journey with Toei back in 2021 and has kept building — not at Toei or MAPPA scale, obviously, but the studio exists and ships work.

That is the headline. Here is the part you do not get from press releases. The cultural shift inside families is bigger than the institutional shift. I have aunts who used to make fun of me for reading manga in high school. Those same aunts now buy their kids Demon Slayer pyjamas from a mall in Jeddah without thinking twice about it. A normal Saudi mall in 2026 carries One Piece backpacks the way a normal Saudi mall in 2006 carried Spider-Man backpacks. The stigma did not get argued away. It got out-waited.

The two generations of Arab anime fans

There are really two distinct Arab anime audiences now, and they barely overlap.

Generation one — me, probably you if you are reading this — watched Spacetoon dubs. We have a complicated relationship with subbed anime because we grew up with iconic Arabic voice actors. We hear Tsubasa in Arabic in our heads, not Japanese. We know the Spacetoon opening songs by heart. When somebody on Twitter posts that Adnan and Lina theme, it physically hurts. We are nostalgic in a way the younger fans cannot quite access.

Generation two — the teens and early twenties — grew up with simulcasts. They watched Solo Leveling week to week with the rest of the world. They have opinions about A-1 Pictures’ production pipeline. They follow Mappa drama. They have never waited months for an Arabic dub of anything because Crunchyroll’s Arabic subtitle catalog covers what they want and Netflix MENA fills in the gaps. For them, anime is just media. It is not a coded thing they are reclaiming. It is what you do on a Tuesday night.

Spacetoon Go is still around, by the way. Still serving the under-twelve audience the way Spacetoon TV used to, plus some nostalgia content for adults who want to rewatch what they grew up on. That platform is doing important work that Crunchyroll is structurally unsuited to do — Arabic-dubbed content for children, age-curated. Both layers of the audience need to exist.

Vision 2030 and the awkward question

Here is where I have to be honest. Anime in Saudi Arabia is now a Vision 2030 vertical. The Public Investment Fund has positioned gaming and animation as strategic media, and that means the same hand that is building NEOM is also writing checks in the anime space. You can have feelings about that. I have feelings about that.

But also, sitting in that Expo hall and watching kids meet voice actors they grew up listening to, I am not going to pretend the cultural payoff is not real. The fact that there is now a place — an official, public, family-friendly place — where a Saudi anime fan can show up in a Naruto headband and not feel like a weirdo, that matters. The first time I cosplayed at a small fan gathering in 2014 I was genuinely nervous I might get in trouble. In 2026 you can cosplay at Boulevard Riyadh during Riyadh Season and nobody blinks.

The thing the official narrative leaves out, which is the truer story, is that none of this came from the top. The audience was already there. It had been there for thirty years, watching Grendizer on state TV in the seventies, Captain Tsubasa on Spacetoon in the nineties and 2000s, downloading fansubs in the 2010s when the official platforms were not serving us. The institutional embrace caught up with what was already a mass cultural reality.

What it feels like, right now

A few weeks ago I was at a cafe in Riyadh and three teenagers next to me were arguing — loudly, joyfully, in mixed Arabic and English — about whether Frieren is better than Solo Leveling. They did not lower their voices. The barista did not look over. The aunt at the next table did not glare. Twenty years ago that exact conversation would have happened in a whisper in someone’s bedroom with the door closed.

I do not know what the next decade of Arab anime fandom looks like. I do know what it does not look like. It does not look like hiding. It does not look like apologizing. It does not look like a single brave kid who is “into that Japanese stuff.” It looks like a dad explaining Captain Tsubasa to his nine-year-old at an Expo, and the nine-year-old already knowing.

We exhaled. Took us thirty years. Worth it.