Some people wake up from a dream and forget about it by lunchtime. Karley Spray started an animation studio instead. “From day one I said, if I do nothing else, I will do this,” she says. “I made a promise to myself I would go all the way with it.”

Spray, 29, sunk her life savings into building the Houston-based Studio Kane, which launched in 2022. She wanted to be an animator when she graduated high school, and even briefly attended the Art Institute of Houston. However, she left and dedicated her life to training service dogs for people with disabilities, even developing a new technique for dogs to alert bystanders of a medical emergency. Her own dog, Kane, once used this technique to save her life. Now a retired “heart dog,” he is the namesake of both Spray’s studio and the misunderstood antagonist of her upcoming animation project, Outlier, a series to be released in 2025.

Spray wants to forge a new, more diverse path for animation. As a Korean-American, a Puerto Rican, and a disabled woman, she stands out in an industry often dominated by white men on this side of the Pacific.

“In anime, I find that they tend to stay safe, so I wanted to do some true representation,” says Spray. For example, the language the fae (fairy) characters speak in the series is inspired by Spanish, so there was a dedicated effort to cast Spanish speakers to voice those characters. The same was true for the elvish language, which is based on Korean.

Spray asked Outlier producer Larry Oblander, who’s based in California, to find people who fit that profile. “I will say that this industry being white male–dominated, it was difficult,” Spray adds. “We were having a hard time finding people at the indie level.”

The two began scouring the voice actor world for people to fill their cast, combing through 750 audition tapes for months. At first, they weren’t able to attract much attention, but Spray says their pay rates convinced actors that they were legit. “Actors have told us that they’re surprised that we could pay such high rates,” Spray says. “If we can do it, then there’s no excuse for big Hollywood not to.”

One thing Spray wasn’t counting on was the sheer amount of talent coming from her own city, including local voice actors. “I didn’t realize how big the anime scene was here in Houston,” she says. “I was pleasantly surprised at how many creatives are here.”

In fact, Houston was once the center of the entire anime English voice dubbing universe. ADV Films was started here in 1992 by two anime fans, back when the only way to watch anime was on expensive, imported VHS tapes. By the end of the century, ADV had ridden the wave of anime fever to become the number one supplier in the country.

John Swasey was there when it happened. The veteran voice actor and director has been working in the scene since 1997 and is now one of the top stars in the English-speaking anime world. He can be found on megahits like My Hero Academia and One Piece. He remembers how he went from asking “what is anime?” to it becoming his whole career.

“This little old company based in Houston was providing all these roles for actors,” he says. “At the peak, it was six studios working two shifts a day. You could be working from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. It was just like a factory. It was nonunion, so there were no residuals, but I was averaging $75 an hour, $600 a week. You could live on that!”

ADV was soon followed by Funimation in Dallas. By the mid-2000s, Texas was the place to be for anime production. Houston’s stature in the industry fell apart following the Japanese Sojitz Corporation’s partial acquisition of ADV. By 2010, the company had been liquidated, and much of the boomtown structure of anime production in Houston was gone.

According to Swasey, Houston only really began to reclaim its place once anime conventions became regular events. The pandemic halted some of that momentum, but now he sees the city as a great place to start a studio. “Think of it like a mushroom cloud,” he says. “It’s still blowing up.”

Just in time for Studio Kane to launch. Outlier, the company’s first project, is a hybrid of Western and Japanese animation centered on an exiled elfin prince named Lucian Lacer. In a kingdom built around magic, Lucian is ostracized for his lack of sorcerous ability. After disaster strikes his kingdom, Lucian’s own father marks him for death. Lucian flees, acquires a cadre of miscreants, and eventually works to clear his name.

Oblander fell in love with Spray’s vision for the show, and immediately asked to be a bigger part of the production. “Watching Karley was amazing,” he says. “Her tenacity made me realize that this was going to get done. What she’s got in this story is something everyone has dealt with. Self-betrayal and redemption. I can’t image anyone walking away without feeling something.”

The show’s first season will contain nine episodes and be released on YouTube, but the plan is for there to be at least four seasons. There will be a tie-in graphic novel released in 2024, as well as a Kickstarter for the animated series later in the year. Studio Kane plans to launch character trailers and other promotional materials at the Anime NYC event in August.

For now, Outlier has a small scale. At this point, what Spray is most looking for is to make an impact with the story.

“Money’s fine, but what makes it successful is that people are still talking about it for years,” she says. “When it makes such an impact, that’s what I call success.”