Solo Leveling is riding high with a groundbreaking set of results from the Crunchyroll Anime Awards 2025. Achieving seven awards in total, including the much-coveted ‘Anime of the Year’, it is indisputable that Solo Leveling is going above and beyond to produce something truly special. With this in mind, and with Solo Leveling’s ongoing and steadfast popularity, Crunchyroll has decided to build up an FYC campaign to include Solo Leveling in the next set of nominations for a Primetime Emmy.
It’s a bold move. Though the Emmys do give awards for animation, anime has, thus far, not been eligible to compete, as the competitor must be at least partially made by an American company. Luckily for Solo Leveling, the anime is made by a conglomeration of the talents of A-1 Pictures as well as Aniplex, and Crunchyroll has, therefore, decided to submit it for the Outstanding Animated Series Emmy this year as well as a few others.
Considering just how much Solo Leveling cooked at the Crunchyroll Anime Awards 2025, we’re thinking that should the series be accepted as a nominee, it will have that Emmy in the bag. If it does win, it will be able to stand next to the likes of Ronja the Robber’s Daughter as one of the only anime in history to be gifted such a prestigious award.
Solo Lobbying
Unfortunately, it’s not just about presenting an animation to the board and saying: ‘Look how cool this is’. For a break-in series like this, everyone needs to be on board with the campaign, and as Brian Eley, Vice President of Communications at Crunchyroll, said in an interview with IndieWire: ‘Our Japanese partners don’t like to do a lot of lobbying. They like the content to speak for itself.’ Eley went on to say that they were able to convince their partners to make a play for the Emmys because it’s just a new way to touch base with the fans.
We were able to really talk to the producers from Aniplex, from A-1 Pictures, and get them excited about the possibility, and really get them to realize that voters are really just fans who have a lot more weight.
For the FYC campaign, Crunchyroll made sure to fly out several creative producers, including Sota Furuhashi to represent Aniplex, Atsushi Kaneko for A-1 Pictures, and Crunchyroll’s own Kanako Takahashi. The producers were treated to a special screening on 30th April 2025 at the Television Academy and were able to further communicate with Solo Leveling’s audience through a Reddit AMA as well as a press junket. All of this just to show how seriously Crunchyroll is taking this nomination, and to show everyone just how brilliant a pioneering move it would be to crack into these subsections at the Emmy Awards, changing the face of entertainment the same way the manhwa adaptation has changed the face of anime itself.
What Makes Solo Leveling So Special?
So why is Solo Leveling the one to receive such hardcore backing from Crunchyroll for this Primetime Emmy? True, it’s an amazing anime with an excellent story, memorable characters, and top-tier animation, but there are other series that could make similar claims, aren’t there? When asked about it, Eley pointed out how fast the series has grown in popularity, the consistent engagement from the audience, and global appeal.
The show has more ratings and reviews than Shonen giants like One Piece, which has over a thousand episodes, and it inspired a lot of hype when the nominations for the Crunchyroll Anime Awards 2025 were announced. The fans are there, they just want to be given a voice to show their consistent appreciation of the series and Sung Jinwoo’s journey.
Above and Beyond
Atsushi Kaneko, A-1’s Creative Producer, did give some insight into why Solo Leveling stands apart and just how much work really goes into making it something incredible. It’s not just luck that has made Solo Leveling as big as it is. For a single anime episode, a typical production team will make 7’000 to 8’000 frames, then for the bigger action-heavy episodes, it can shift up to 10’000. For Solo Leveling’s episode 24, the team made over 17’000 frames, so of course, this is going to be in a class all of its own.
That’s so effing crazy. As an animation producer, that’s probably something I should have intervened and stopped. But I think the challenge and the kind of dynamic that we have as three companies, it almost empowered us to say, ‘You know what, let’s do this.’
If there was any kind of doubt that Solo Leveling might not deserve the awards that it is put up for, then perhaps these numbers and this attitude can show why it merits so much recognition and more. It might also shed a bit of light on why there might be such a long wait for Season 3. If the studios are re-setting the bar for what is typical in the animation industry like this, then what they’re able to produce in three times the production timeframe might be something legendary.
Not Just One Emmy
Alongside the campaign to be accepted as a nominee for the Outstanding Animated Series Emmy, Solo Leveling has also been put forward for several Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation Emmys, including the Character Animation Emmy for Yoshihiro Kanno and the Character Design Emmy for Tomoko Sudo.
If Solo Leveling wins the Best Anime Series award at the Astra Awards, alongside the Best Lead Voice Over Performance for Aleks Le, then this will already be one of the most decorated anime in the industry. How else could we possibly celebrate everything that Solo Leveling has given us and is still promising to give us in the future? And will the series be as hyped up if the studios don’t intend to release Season 3 until the Olympics in 2028?
