Short answers, pulled from the story.
The earliest commercial Japanese animation dates to 1917. Animators Ōten Shimokawa, Seitarō Kitayama, and Jun'ichi Kōuchi are known as the "fathers of anime"; the oldest surviving film from this era is Kōuchi's Namakura Gatana. A claim also exists for Katsudō Shashin, made around 1907 by an unknown creator, as an even earlier work.
Osamu Tezuka adapted and simplified Disney animation techniques in the 1960s to reduce costs and limit frame counts, measures originally intended as temporary workarounds that became defining features of the medium. He directed Astro Boy from 1963 to 1966 and is credited with establishing large, expressive eyes as a central character design convention. Animators who trained at his Mushi Production studio went on to found major studios including Madhouse, Sunrise, and Studio Pierrot.
Spirited Away, a Studio Ghibli film directed by Hayao Miyazaki, won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy Awards in 2003. It grossed more than $355 million worldwide and was the highest-grossing anime film until it was surpassed by Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train in 2020.
Fansubs were unauthorized subtitled translations of anime, originally distributed on bootlegged VHS cassettes in the 1980s and freely shared online from the 1990s onward. Fansubbers operated under an informal code to stop distributing a title once an official licensed version appeared. The practice built grassroots demand that ultimately supported commercial licensing, and it declined sharply in the early 2010s with the rise of legal simulcast streaming.
The global anime market was valued at approximately $25.8 billion in 2022 and is projected to reach $62.7 billion by 2032, representing a compound annual growth rate of 9.4%. In 2023, the industry generated $19.8 billion in total global revenue, with $5.5 billion from streaming and $14.3 billion from merchandise. By 2019, overseas markets had become the largest revenue sector, accounting for 48% of Japan's anime industry value of $24 billion.
Jujutsu Kaisen holds the Guinness World Record for the most in-demand animated TV show, set in 2024 with a global demand rating 71.2 times higher than that of the average TV show. It also won the Global TV Demand Award for "Most In-Demand TV Series in the World 2023". The record was previously held by Attack on Titan, which in 2022 became the first non-English language series to be named the world's most in-demand TV show.