Anime-influenced animation

• 1. Introduction

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  Anime-influenced animation is a body of work that sits in a curious middle ground: non-Japanese productions that look, feel, or move like something made in Tokyo. When Rooster Teeth, a Texas-based company, released the web series RWBY in July 2013, the response caught almost everyone off guard. Critics and fans began calling it American anime. When it was later licensed for release in Japan, one publication ran the headline "American-made anime from Rooster Teeth gets licensed in Japan." The CEO of Rooster Teeth, Matt Hullum, described it as "the first time any American-made anime has been marketed to Japan." RWBY's creator Monty Oum put the underlying question plainly: "Some believe just like Scotch needs to be made in Scotland, an American company can't make anime because it's impossible at all. I think that's a narrow way of seeing it. Anime is an art form, and to say only one country can make this art is wrong."

  That question has shadowed Western animation for decades. What makes something anime? And what happens when studios thousands of miles from Japan start borrowing its visual grammar so thoroughly that audiences and critics can no longer tell the difference? The story of anime-influenced animation stretches from the late 1960s to the present, touching Christmas specials, superhero cartoons, video game adaptations, French co-productions, and Brazilian web series. It asks who owns a style, and what it means when that style travels.

• 2. Early Collaboration

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  One of the first noted attempts by an American company to make a visually anime-inspired series was The King Kong Show, produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It emerged from a direct partnership between Toei Animation in Japan and Videocraft in America, blending a Japanese kaiju theme with the art style of the Hanna-Barbera era in American TV animation. The collaboration was not a one-off experiment. Rankin/Bass Productions, the same company that partnered with Toei on The King Kong Show, went on to co-produce a long string of Christmas specials with Japanese animation studios, including Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in 1964, Santa Claus is Comin' to Town in 1970, The Year Without a Santa Claus in 1974, and a further run of holiday titles well into the 1980s. Many of those productions were created by Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass and featured traditional animation rather than the stop motion most often associated with the company.

  Toei Animation continued that collaborative pattern into the 1980s as an animation partner on the Transformers TV series and its associated theatrical film. Though the series was ultimately written in the United States, Toei handled several stages of the production process. Transformers carried clear influences from mecha anime in its story, themes, and visual language, and that same sensibility extended across a wide slate of titles that Toei co-produced with American studios in the same decade, from Dungeons and Dragons and Jem to Voltron and The Real Ghostbusters. Hanna-Barbera's earlier series Frankenstein Jr. had already been heavily influenced by the Gigantor anime series, even though its art style sat closer to other American productions of the period. The pipeline of outsourced production running between the United States and Japan was, by the 1980s, a standard feature of the American animation industry.

• 3. The Outsourcing Era

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  Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, American broadcasters began routinely sending production work to Japanese studios. Two companies in particular, TMS Entertainment and Sunrise, animated a substantial number of popular American television series during this period, including Inspector Gadget, The Real Ghostbusters, Mighty Orbots, Rainbow Brite, Tiny Toon Adventures, DuckTales, Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, Animaniacs, Batman: The Animated Series, and Superman: The Animated Series. Most of those productions were not visually or thematically reminiscent of Japanese anime; the outsourcing was an economic arrangement rather than a stylistic one.

  Not every outsourced production stayed visually neutral, however. TaleSpin, with its animation done at Walt Disney Animation Japan, drew inspiration from Hayao Miyazaki's 1989 manga Hikōtei Jidai. Godzilla: The Series, technically an adaptation of the American Godzilla film, incorporated a more directly anime-looking aesthetic throughout, and its version of Godzilla was redesigned to align more closely with his earlier Japanese appearance. Return to the Planet of the Apes was animated in a style that looked similar to the work of Toei Animation and Madhouse Studios. The outsourcing pipeline was opening a channel that carried visual influence back along with the production work, and the effects were not always legible to the audiences watching at home.

• 4. Glen Murakami and the Cyberpunk Turn

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  Glen Murakami became one of the most direct conduits between Japanese aesthetics and American superhero animation. He animated alongside Bruce Timm on Batman: The Animated Series and its sequel Batman: Beyond, and where Timm favored sharp-edged angular character design, Murakami layered in cyberpunk and science-fiction elements with what the source describes as a Japanese twist. American television producer Sam Register, who had already created anime-inspired works including Ben 10, Alien Force, Transformers Animated, and Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi, worked with Murakami to develop the Teen Titans television series in 2003. The creative chemistry between them produced what became known informally as "murakanime."

  In 2004, Murakami produced The Batman, which showed stronger anime influence than even Batman: Beyond. By 2013, Murakami's Teen Titans Go! pushed that influence further still, with animation and visuals heavily reminiscent of chibis, the stylized miniaturized character form common in Japanese animation. The progression was a clear arc: each project Murakami touched moved further toward the visual vocabulary of Japanese animation, and each time it found an audience. Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! became the first Jetix original show produced by Japanese artists using an anime concept, including a transformation sequence for the series' main protagonist, Chiro, a device borrowed directly from the conventions of Japanese genre animation.

• 5. Avatar and the Definition Problem

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  Avatar: The Last Airbender, along with its sequel series The Legend of Korra, forced a genuine public debate about whether a non-Japanese animation could carry the anime label. The series creators Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino confirmed their anime influences in a magazine interview, naming Hayao Miyazaki's work explicitly, including Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and My Neighbor Totoro, alongside inspiration drawn from Studio 4°C, Production I.G, Polygon Pictures, and Studio Ghibli.

  Voltron: Legendary Defender, a reboot produced entirely by American artists, followed a similar path. Lauren Montgomery and Joaquim Dos Santos, both known from Avatar and The Legend of Korra, served as showrunners, with Tim Hedrick as head writer. The Boondocks occupied the same contested territory. Its Japanese sword styles and visual aesthetics were partly the result of outsourcing production to Japanese and Korean artists, most notably Madhouse Studios, though Madhouse was never credited for its involvement. The web series RWBY later received a full Japanese anime adaptation in 2022 titled Ice Queendom, making it one of the first American projects to generate a genuine Japanese anime sequel. The Powerpuff Girls reached a similar milestone when its popularity in Japan led to the anime spin-off Powerpuff Girls Z, which debuted on the 1st of July 2006, loosely based on the original American series. Rick and Morty, after developing a substantial Japanese following, received an anime adaptation with five short films released from the 29th of March 2020, to the 12th of November 2021, and a full series that aired on Adult Swim starting from the 16th of August 2024, written and directed by Takashi Sano.

• 6. Disney, Pixar, and the Miyazaki Effect

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  Hayao Miyazaki's influence on major American animation studios was extensive and, at points, foundational. Glen Keane, who animated characters in Disney films including The Little Mermaid in 1989, Beauty and the Beast in 1991, Aladdin in 1992, and Tangled, described Miyazaki as a "huge influence" dating back to The Rescuers Down Under in 1990. Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, directors of Beauty and the Beast, Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1996, and Atlantis: The Lost Empire in 2001, were also fans of Miyazaki's work and cited his films as a significant influence on their own.

  Miyazaki's influence on Disney reaches back further still: The Great Mouse Detective in 1986 drew from Miyazaki's Lupin III film Castle of Cagliostro, made in 1979. Roger Allers, who worked on The Lion King, stated in an interview that he visited Japan before 1988, the year production began, and was deeply impressed by Doraemon, describing its influence on The Lion King directly. Fujiko Fujio, Doraemon's creator, later thanked Disney in 1995 for the praise. Pixar co-founder John Lasseter traced his engagement with Miyazaki's influence to his first viewing of Castle of Cagliostro. Pete Docter, director of Monsters, Inc. in 2001 and Up in 2009, also described Miyazaki as a specific influence. Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck cited Miyazaki's anime on Frozen in 2013, pointing to the sense of "epic adventure" alongside "the intimacy of funny quirky characters." Joel Crawford, directing Puss in Boots: The Last Wish in 2022, cited Akira from 1988 as a design influence, with the film using 2D animation to highlight the personal touch of hand-drawn animation found in traditional anime.

• 7. Video Games Crossing Over

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  The Pac-Man animated series, made in 1982 by Hanna-Barbera, holds a particular distinction: it was not only notably faithful to the source material from the Japanese video game franchise, it also stands as the first cartoon based on a video game and the first American cartoon derived from a Japanese franchise. The Pole Position series of 1984, produced by DIC Enterprises in association with Japanese studio MK Company, had its animation provided by Artmic, Mushi Production, and K.K. DIC Asia, with character designs by Filipino cartoonist Jesse Santos and mechanical designs by Artmic co-founder Shinji Aramaki.

  Later examples pushed the crossover further. The Netflix series Castlevania, created by Warren Ellis, and its sequel Castlevania: Nocturne, created by Clive Bradley, are American-made works animated in a heavily anime-influenced style. Arcane, created by Christian Linke and Alex Yee, drew similar comparisons. The G.I. Joe franchise carried anime influence across multiple iterations: G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero was outsourced to Toei Animation, G.I. Joe: Sigma 6 was animated by the Japanese studio Gonzo and produced by 4Kids Productions, and G.I. Joe: Resolute, produced by Titmouse Inc., was noted for animation extremely similar to Avatar: The Last Airbender and the work of Madhouse Studios. The Ark: The Animated Series, which premiered on Paramount+ on the 21st of March 2024, with 14 thirty-minute episodes, was produced as a hand-drawn 2D series partly to ensure it was not visually confused with the game's own CGI. Series creator Jeremy Stieglitz said in an interview published in early April 2024 that hand-drawn animation ages better, and that the show was "driven by characters rather than only action."

• 8. Global Reach

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  Outside the United States, anime-influenced animation has emerged from Brazil, France, Chile, Canada, Spain, and elsewhere. In Brazil, one of the earliest experiments came from the airline Varig in the 1960s, when the company aired TV commercials adapting the Japanese folk story of Urashima Taro with a visual style reminiscent of early Japanese animation. Brazil's Turma da Monica Jovem, based on the manga-styled comic created by Mauricio de Sousa, debuted on the 7th of November 2019. A Canadian animated short called Flutter, made in 2007, became the first work from a non-Asian nation to win the Open Entries Grand Prize at the Tokyo Anime Awards.

  In France, the producers of Code Lyoko stated explicitly in their introductory document that the series was "influenced by the poetry and the visual impact of Japanese animation." Blue Eye Samurai, set during the Edo period of Japan and heavily stylized to resemble a typical anime, is in fact a French-American co-production animated by the French studio Blue Spirit. Its creators drew inspiration from the character Zatoichi, the "Man with No Name," and the works of Akira Kurosawa, and expressly wanted the series to "look like a moving painting" with character design drawn from bunraku puppets. Chile's Nahuel and the Magic Book, released in 2020, cited Hayao Miyazaki's Future Boy Conan and the work of Studio Ghibli as direct influences, and became the first Latin American feature to win the Tokyo Anime Award for Award of Excellence the following year. The reach of Japanese animation's visual language, it turns out, is not measured in miles from Tokyo.