Anime: How Japanese Animation Grew from Silent Shorts to a Global Force

What Does the Word Anime Mean?

The word anime is a Japanese shortening of animēshon, the Japanese pronunciation of the English word "animation". Interestingly, the word means slightly different things depending on where you are. In Japan, anime simply refers to any animated work, whether it is a Disney film, a Czech puppet cartoon or a Japanese television series. Outside Japan, and in English in particular, anime means animation produced in Japan.

Over time, the word has also come to describe a recognisable visual style: expressive faces, large eyes, colourful hair, dramatic speed lines and carefully painted backgrounds. Because of this, animated series made in other countries that borrow these features are often described as "anime-style", and many video games use the same look. Still, anime is not a single style or a single genre. It is a whole medium that includes comedies, sports stories, science fiction, historical dramas, mysteries and gentle stories about everyday life, made for every age group from toddlers to adults.

Before anime became the common term in Japan, people used other words. In the early twentieth century animated films were called senga eiga ("line-drawn films") or manga eiga ("cartoon films"), and studios also used the word dōga ("moving pictures"). The short word anime spread widely from the 1970s onward. In the 1980s, English-speaking fans sometimes used the term "Japanimation", but it has since fallen out of use.

The Early Years: From Silent Shorts to Feature Films

The pioneers of 1917

Japanese animation is more than a hundred years old. In 1917, several artists working independently released the first Japanese animated films shown in cinemas. Among them were Ōten Shimokawa, Seitarō Kitayama and Jun'ichi Kōuchi. These films were short, silent and usually in black and white. Kōuchi's Namakura Gatana (often translated as The Dull Sword), a comic story about a samurai who buys a useless blade, is the oldest Japanese animated film known to survive. A tiny filmstrip known as Katsudō Shashin, discovered in Kyoto in 2005, may be even older, but its exact date is uncertain.

Early animators experimented with many techniques. Some drew directly on paper or chalkboards, while others used cut-out paper figures that were moved slightly between each photograph. Celluloid sheets, or "cels", were expensive in Japan at the time, so cut-out animation remained popular for years.

Wartime and the first feature

During the 1930s and the Second World War, the Japanese government used animation for propaganda. The most famous result was Momotaro: Sacred Sailors (1945), directed by Mitsuyo Seo, which is considered the first feature-length Japanese animated film. Although it was made to support the war effort, its technical ambition showed that Japanese studios could produce long animated films.

Toei and the postwar boom

After the war, the company that became Toei Animation set out to create films that could compete with American studios. In 1958 it released Hakujaden (The Tale of the White Serpent), the first Japanese animated feature in colour. Many artists who later became famous, including Hayao Miyazaki, started their careers at Toei in the following years.

Osamu Tezuka and the Birth of TV Anime

The person most often credited with shaping modern anime is Osamu Tezuka, a hugely productive comic artist known in Japan as the "god of manga". Tezuka admired American cartoons by Walt Disney and the Fleischer brothers, and their influence can be seen in the large, round eyes of his characters. These eyes became one of the most recognisable features of anime and manga.

In 1963, Tezuka's studio Mushi Production turned his manga Tetsuwan Atom, known in English as Astro Boy, into a weekly television series. This was a huge challenge: a new episode of about half an hour had to be finished every week on a tight budget. To make it possible, Tezuka's team relied heavily on limited animation, a set of tricks that reduce the number of drawings. They reused sequences, kept bodies still while only mouths moved, held dramatic poses and used camera movements across a single picture. Astro Boy was a hit in Japan and was also broadcast in the United States, becoming one of the first anime series seen widely abroad.

The methods developed for Astro Boy shaped the industry for decades. Because anime could not afford the smooth, constant motion of big-budget American feature films, its creators focused on other strengths: striking compositions, emotional close-ups, long and complex storylines and bold use of still frames. What started as a budget solution became an artistic language of its own. In 1965, Mushi Production also made Kimba the White Lion (Jungle Emperor), the first anime television series in colour.

Giant Robots, Space Battleships and Studio Ghibli

New genres in the 1970s and 1980s

In the 1970s, anime began telling longer, more serious stories for older viewers. Space Battleship Yamato (1974) followed a crew on a desperate mission to save the Earth, and Mobile Suit Gundam (1979), created by Yoshiyuki Tomino, treated giant robots as realistic military machines rather than superheroes. Gundam launched the "real robot" style of mecha (robot) stories and remains one of Japan's biggest franchises, famous for its plastic model kits.

The 1980s brought the home video market, which allowed studios to release original video animations (OVAs) directly to viewers without going through television. In 1988, Katsuhiro Otomo's film Akira, set in a futuristic Tokyo, amazed audiences with its detailed, fluid animation and helped introduce anime to many viewers in Western countries.

Studio Ghibli

In 1985, the directors Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, together with producer Toshio Suzuki, founded Studio Ghibli. The studio became famous for hand-drawn films with rich natural landscapes, thoughtful young heroines and a deep respect for nature. Its best-known works include My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Kiki's Delivery Service (1989), Princess Mononoke (1997) and Spirited Away (2001). Spirited Away won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and, in 2003, the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Two decades later, Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron won the same award in 2024.

The 1990s and the Global Breakthrough

The 1990s turned anime into a worldwide phenomenon. Series such as Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon and, above all, Pokémon (first broadcast in Japan in 1997) were dubbed into many languages and shown on children's television channels around the world. Pokémon was especially powerful because the anime, the video games and the trading cards supported one another, a strategy now common in the industry.

At the same time, anime aimed at teenagers and adults gained critical attention. Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995), directed by Hideaki Anno, combined giant robots with deep psychological drama, while Mamoru Oshii's film Ghost in the Shell (1995) explored questions about technology and human identity that influenced later science fiction films in the West.

In the twenty-first century, streaming services made it possible to watch new episodes outside Japan within hours of their Japanese broadcast, often with subtitles in many languages. Makoto Shinkai's Your Name (2016) became a box-office success across Asia and beyond, and Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train (2020) overtook Spirited Away to become the highest-grossing film ever released in Japan.

How Anime Is Made

From source material to screen

Many anime series are adaptations. Most often they are based on manga (Japanese comics), but they also come from light novels (short illustrated novels for young readers), video games and visual novels. Original stories written directly for animation also exist and are often highly valued by fans.

Anime projects are commonly funded by a production committee, a group of companies such as publishers, music labels, toy makers, TV channels and video distributors. Each member invests money and in return earns income from its own area, for example selling the soundtrack, the books or the merchandise. This system spreads the financial risk but also means many people have a say in how a series is made.

The animation pipeline

A typical production moves through several stages:

1. Script and storyboard. The director and writers plan each episode, and the storyboard shows every shot as a series of sketches with notes on timing and camera movement.
2. Layouts and key animation. Key animators (genga) draw the most important poses of each movement, together with the layout that shows how characters fit into the background.
3. In-betweening. In-between animators (dōga) draw the frames that connect the key poses so that the motion looks smooth.
4. Colouring and backgrounds. The drawings are coloured, and background artists paint the scenery, which is often extremely detailed.
5. Compositing and sound. Characters, backgrounds and effects are combined and filmed, and then voice acting, music and sound effects are added.

For decades, the drawings were traced and painted by hand onto transparent cels. From the late 1990s onward, studios moved to digital colouring and compositing, although many key drawings are still made with pencil and paper or drawn by hand on tablets. The long-running family comedy Sazae-san was one of the last series to stop using cels, switching to digital production in 2013.

Film runs at 24 frames per second, but anime rarely uses 24 different drawings every second. Many scenes are animated "on threes", where one drawing is held for three frames, giving 8 drawings per second. Animators then save their effort for key moments such as fights, transformations or emotional scenes, which may be animated much more fully.

Genres and Audiences

Anime is often grouped by the audience it is mainly made for, using categories that come from manga magazines:

• Kodomo: for young children, such as Doraemon.
• Shōnen: aimed at teenage boys, usually full of action, friendship and rivalry, such as One Piece or Naruto.
• Shōjo: aimed at teenage girls, often focusing on relationships and feelings, such as Sailor Moon.
• Seinen and josei: aimed at adult men and adult women respectively, often with more complex themes.

These labels describe the target audience, not who is allowed to watch, and many shōnen series have huge numbers of female fans and vice versa. Anime is also divided into genres. Mecha stories feature giant robots, magical girl stories follow girls who transform to fight evil, slice of life shows focus on everyday school or work life, and isekai ("another world") stories send their heroes into a fantasy world, a genre that grew very popular in the 2010s.

Why Anime Matters

Anime is one of Japan's most important cultural exports. According to the Association of Japanese Animations, the total market connected to anime reached close to 3 trillion yen in 2022, and by then sales outside Japan made up around half of it. The Japanese government has promoted anime as part of its "Cool Japan" strategy to spread interest in Japanese culture.

The influence of anime goes far beyond television. It inspired many Western animators and film directors, shaped the art style of countless video games and helped spark a global interest in learning the Japanese language. Fans gather at large conventions, such as Anime Expo in Los Angeles, where many take part in cosplay, dressing up as their favourite characters. Theme songs, known as anison, are a music genre of their own, and their singers perform concerts for large audiences.

Lesser-Known Facts About Anime

• The longest-running animated TV series in the world is Sazae-san, which has been broadcast every week in Japan since 1969, according to Guinness World Records.
• Anime pilgrimages (seichi junrei, literally "visiting sacred places") are trips fans make to real towns, schools and shrines that appear in their favourite shows. Some small towns have welcomed many new visitors this way.
• A warning about flashing lights. In 1997, an episode of Pokémon contained rapidly flashing red and blue lights that made hundreds of viewers in Japan feel unwell, and some had seizures. After this, Japanese broadcasters adopted guidelines limiting flashing images, which is why some anime still show a message reminding children to watch in a bright room and sit away from the screen.
• International teamwork. Although anime is Japanese, many in-between drawings and colouring tasks have long been outsourced to studios in other countries, especially South Korea and China.
• Anime and manga grew up together. Many leading anime directors and studios began by adapting manga, and successful anime often boost sales of the original comics, so the two industries support each other.

From a few minutes of silent, hand-cut paper figures in 1917 to blockbuster films and series streamed on every continent, anime has shown how limits can become a source of creativity. Its mixture of imaginative worlds, memorable characters and careful artistry explains why audiences of all ages keep coming back to it.