Canon Got Its Camera Placed in One of the World’s Most Popular Anime

This past weekend, the latest episode of the anime “My Dress-Up Darling” aired, and it featured a nearly five-minute-long segment where a Canon camera was front and center. It might be one of Canon’s most brilliant marketing plays in recent memory.

“My Dress-Up Darling” is a “slice of life” and “drama” anime that is based on an extremely popular manga by the same name. It follows a growing romance between Wakana Gojo, who is a skilled costumer, and Marin Kitagawa, a cosplayer. Before the first season of the show aired in 2022, the manga had a circulation of 3.5 million copies. By February of that year — just one month after the anime started airing — that jumped to 5 million: 1.5 million copies sold in just a month and a half.

The series exploded in popularity from there and by May 2024, the manga had more than 11 million copies in circulation. Season 2 started airing in July 2025.

It should go without saying, then, that “My Dress-Up Darling” is one of the most popular anime and manga series in the world, and not just within its “slice of life” segment. While exact viewership numbers are difficult to find given the show’s global distribution, it’s popularity on Crunchyroll shows it as the number one anime in its category and the seventh-most popular anime overall, behind heavy-hitters like Dan Da Dan, One Piece, and Kaiju No. 8. To put that in perspective, “My Dress-Up Darling” has around 197,900 reviews on Crunchyroll at a 4.9 star average while the next most popular shows in its category all hover under 10,000 total reviews and ratings between 4.4 and 4.8 stars.

In short, “My Dress-Up Darling” is incredibly popular and, by extension, influential. That’s what makes Canon’s appearance in last week’s episode such an incredibly valuable placement. The sequence, which lasts for about five minutes, shows a pretty typical series of events when it comes to a photographer who is used to only taking pictures with a smartphone and their immediate response to the higher quality of using a dedicated camera. The segment also takes time to note that the Canon camera, a Kiss M, is easy for the protagonist to use and he is able to quickly take much better photos nearly instantly.

It’s almost a perfect advertisement for Canon. Almost, because the choice of camera is a bit confusing. The Canon Kiss M, which is known as the EOS M50 in the United States, is no longer available new and is part of Canon’s M series mirrorless cameras, which were discontinued in 2023 and replaced with the R series. It is odd, therefore, that Canon chose to advertise this camera (from point of purchase to using it) when it’s not available anymore, even in Japan.

Very little has been published about the relationship between Canon and the anime’s publisher Square Enix, but there are some online who are asserting that the creator of the manga Shinichi Fukuda and the episode’s director Yusuke Yamamoto are both fans of the camera and Canon provided one to them as a reference for the episode. It is therefore possible that the camera selected wasn’t Canon’s call and that they were just happy to be included. Square Enix was also probably happy to take some sponsorship dollars for it as well, as it is unlikely Canon’s logo would be so perfectly recreated and shown without some money changing hands (this is speculation, of course).

Still, even if the exact camera model can’t be purchased, Canon’s brand awareness among anime fans likely skyrocketed. Similar to how Nikon chose to attend San Diego Comi-Con earlier this year, Canon’s choice to put its products in front of this large audience of people who enjoy cosplay is an incredibly smart move.

Image credits: Square Enix / Crunchyroll