Defy Media Brings The ‘Honest Trailers’ Brand To The World Of Anime

For more than five years, Honest Trailers has served as YouTube gold for Defy Media, the company that owns and operates channels like Smosh and ScreenJunkies. Now, for the second time, the Emmy-nominated series is getting an expansion, this time to the world of anime.

As in the movie and video game versions of Honest Trailers, Honest Anime Trailers pokes fun of popular franchises by skewering questionable character development, world-building inconsistencies, half-baked plots, weird scenes, and several other topics in between. The first anime in Defy’s crosshairs is Naruto, the popular series about ninjas-in-training, which produced its fair share of mockable moments across its 720-episode run.

In launching its latest Honest Trailers spinoff, Defy Media is adopting a new distribution strategy for its prized franchise. This time, instead of using a free, ad-supported channel like ScreenJunkies or Smosh Games to distribute its epic-voiced videos, Defy is bringing Honest Anime Trailers

to ScreenJunkies Plus, the premium subscription-video service it launched back in 2015. Beyond the Naruto episode, watching Defy’s newest series will require a ScreenJunkies Plus account, which costs $4.99 per month.

Behind a paywall or not, Honest Anime Trailers will be a valuable series for Defy, because it will give the company another way to connect with popular anime franchises as they trend on social media. The heralded action series Attack On Titan, for example, will soon make its long-awaited return. Sure enough, Defy has noted that an honest take on that show is on the way.