History of anime

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 15th of May 1912, a Paris-made animated film called Les Exploits de Feu Follet screened publicly in Japan. It was the first confirmed showing of a two-dimensional animated film in Japanese cinema, and almost nobody watching it could have guessed what that moment would eventually become. Within a century, anime would claim the world's highest-grossing film of an entire year, top the global music charts with a single theme song, and win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature twice over.

  The questions that moment raises are worth sitting with. How did a country that had no domestic animated film industry to speak of in 1912 build one that would eventually dwarf nearly every other national animation tradition? What forces shaped it? And why did it look so different from everything else the world was making? The answer involves wartime propaganda, the financial pressures of competing with Disney on a fraction of Disney's budget, the creative explosion that followed bankruptcy, and a single filmmaker named Osamu Tezuka who changed what animation was allowed to be.

• 2. Roots Before Film

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  Japan did not wait for the cinema to develop its appetite for projected moving images. In the nineteenth century, traveling performers staged utsushi-e shows, a Japanese form of the magic lantern show. Possibly inspired by European phantasmagoria performances, utsushi-e showmen built lightweight wooden projectors called furo that were small enough to hold in one hand, allowing several performers to move different projected figures at once.

  Long before that, other storytelling forms had laid visual groundwork for animation. Emakimono picture scrolls were common in the eleventh century; a narrator would unroll them from right to left while recounting legends, creating the effect of a moving panorama. Shadow play called kagee arrived from China during the Edo period. Paper theater known as kamishibai surged in popularity during the twelfth century and persisted in street performance until the nineteen thirties. The puppet tradition of bunraku theater and the visual density of ukiyo-e prints also fed into what Japanese animated characters would eventually look like. By the time French animated films started arriving in Tokyo theaters, Japan had already spent centuries thinking about how to make pictures seem alive.

• 3. The Founding Generation

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  Ōten Shimokawa was a political caricaturist working for the magazine Tokyo Puck when the company Tenkatsu hired him to make an animated film. Medical problems cut his output short; he managed only five films, including Imokawa Mukuzo Genkanban no Maki in 1917, before returning to cartooning.

  Jun'ichi Kōuchi came from a background in caricature and watercolour painting. He entered the cartoonist world in 1912 and was hired for animation by Kobayashi Shokai in 1916. His output ran to around fifteen films, and he is regarded as the most technically accomplished Japanese animator of the entire decade of the nineteen tens. The third founding figure, Seitaro Kitayama, worked independently rather than under corporate hire. He eventually launched his own studio, the Kitayama Eiga Seisakujo, which folded for lack of commercial success. He worked in chalkboard technique and later in paper animation, with and without pre-printed backgrounds.

  Most of what these three men made no longer exists. The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 destroyed the works of Kōuchi and Kitayama. What little survived from the era has surfaced in unusual ways: two films believed to be Kōuchi's Namakura Gatana and Kitayama's 1918 Urashima Taro were reportedly found together at an antique market in 2007, though scholars later concluded the Urashima Taro in question was most likely a different film with a similar story. As of October 2017, Kitayama's original Urashima Taro remains unaccounted for.

• 4. Competing Against Disney on a Shoestring

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  Prewar Japanese animators faced a structural problem that had nothing to do with talent. Foreign studios, Disney above all, had already recouped their production costs in their home markets and could sell prints to Japan below what it cost a domestic studio to break even. Japanese animators were pushed into small workshops with only a handful of staff, which made it nearly impossible to match the color, sound, and polish of imported product.

  One consequence was that Japanese animation stuck with cutout animation rather than cel animation well into the mid-nineteen thirties, simply because celluloid was too expensive. Cutout work was flatter and harder to animate in depth, but virtuosos like Yasuji Murata and Noburō Ōfuji pushed the technique in directions that surprised audiences. Kenzo Masaoka and Mitsuyo Seo took a different path, pushing to adopt the tools their foreign competitors were using. Masaoka created the first talkie anime, Chikara to Onna no Yo no Naka, released in 1933, and followed it with the first anime made entirely in cel animation, The Dance of the Chagamas, in 1934. Seo became the first to use a multiplane camera in anime, deploying it in Ari-chan in 1941.

  Sponsor money kept much of this experimentation alive. Government agencies funded educational films; companies funded promotional ones; and the military eventually funded propaganda. The Ministry of Education, known as the Monbusho, actively encouraged anime that carried educational value, since school regulations discouraged children from attending regular cinemas. Animation had found institutional backers long before it found a mass audience.

• 5. Wartime and Its Films

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  In the nineteen thirties, the Japanese government moved to enforce cultural nationalism, tightening censorship and pressing animators to produce work that promoted national identity. The Film Law of 1939 encouraged documentary and educational productions, and studios began merging under wartime reorganization into three larger companies. Major live-action studio Shochiku entered animation during this period.

  The military commissioned films depicting Japanese forces as quick and clever against enemy opponents. Mitsuyo Seo's Momotaro: Sacred Sailors, released in 1943, was one such production, focused on Japanese expansion in Asia. Two years later, in 1945, Seo made Momotaro: Umi no Shinpei, which holds the distinction of being the first anime feature film. Its release date, the 12th of April 1945, places it in the final weeks of the war.

  The same period produced Kenzo Masaoka's Kumo to Chūrippu, considered a masterwork of the era, made at Shochiku. The cultural machinery of wartime production, for all its constraints, pushed the industry to operate at a scale it had never attempted before. That scale would not survive the war's end intact, but it left behind a generation of animators who knew how to work on a feature-length canvas.

• 6. Tezuka and Television

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  Osamu Tezuka established Mushi Production in 1961, after his working arrangement with Toei Animation expired. The studio he built became the engine of Japanese television animation. Its first major landmark was Astro Boy, which premiered on Fuji TV on the 1st of January 1963. The series became the first anime shown widely to Western audiences, particularly in the United States, and American companies began acquiring rights to Japanese productions shortly after.

  Mushi Production also produced the first anime to broadcast in the United States, airing on NBC in 1963, though Tezuka himself complained publicly about the restrictions American television placed on his work. The studio followed Astro Boy with Kimba the White Lion in 1965, Princess Knight, and Goku no Daiboken. Meanwhile, Tezuka had already been experimenting with manga aimed at female readers, drawing shonen series like Rob no Kishi, which became Princess Knight, while also working to pioneer shoujo manga.

  The decade around Tezuka saw the form proliferate quickly. What is recorded as the first magical girl anime, Sally the Witch, began broadcasting in 1966. The original Speed Racer anime debuted in 1967 and traveled to the West. The long-running Sazae-san launched in 1969 and, as of 2014, had broadcast more than six thousand five hundred episodes, still holding an audience share of roughly twenty-five percent.

• 7. The Boom Years and Ghibli

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  Mushi Production's bankruptcy in the nineteen seventies, though eventually reversed, scattered its staff into new studios. Former employees founded Madhouse and Sunrise, and young animators were pushed into directing roles before they might otherwise have been ready. That injection of inexperienced talent turned out to be a creative accelerant.

  Isao Takahata's 1974 television series Heidi, Girl of the Alps was initially a hard sell to networks, which doubted children would engage with a realistic drama set in the Alps rather than a fantasy. Heidi proved them wrong. Its success across Japan and in many European countries gave Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki the standing to launch the literary-based World Masterpiece Theater series, and it set the stage for what came next. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, released on the 11th of March 1984, gave anime a new kind of prestige and opened funding for ambitious projects. It also gave Miyazaki and Takahata the credibility to form their own studio under the supervision of former Animage editor Toshio Suzuki. Studio Ghibli's first film was Castle in the Sky in 1986, and its Kiki's Delivery Service in 1989 became the top-grossing film of that year in Japan, earning more than forty million dollars at the box office.

  The subculture that grew around shows like Space Battleship Yamato and Mobile Suit Gundam generated magazines such as Animage and Newtype to serve its readers. From within that subculture, an amateur production group called Daicon Films eventually became Gainax, which went on to direct Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise in 1987, at the time the most expensive anime production ever. Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira, released on the 16th of July 1988, failed commercially in Japan but became a cult landmark internationally and drew a larger Western audience to the medium than any previous film had managed.

• 8. Global Reach

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  Spirited Away, directed by Hayao Miyazaki, won the Golden Bear at the 2002 Berlin International Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy Awards in 2003. It was the first non-American film to win that award and remains one of only two to have done so. Its worldwide box office reached two hundred and seventy-four million US dollars, making it the highest-grossing anime film until Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train surpassed it.

  That Demon Slayer film, released on the 16th of October 2020, became both the highest-grossing Japanese film ever and the world's highest-grossing film of 2020. It earned ten billion yen in just ten days, reaching the total that Spirited Away had needed twenty-five days to reach. In 2021, the anime adaptations of Jujutsu Kaisen, Demon Slayer, and Tokyo Revengers were among the ten most discussed television shows worldwide on what was then known as Twitter. In 2022, Attack on Titan became the first non-English-language series to be named the world's most in-demand TV show, a distinction previously held only by The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones.

  The music followed a similar arc. In 2023, the song Idol by YOASOBI, opening theme of the anime series Oshi no Ko, topped the Billboard Global 200 Excluding U.S. chart with forty-five point seven million streams and twenty-four thousand copies sold outside the United States. It was the first Japanese song and the first anime song to reach the top of the Billboard Global chart. The following year, Studio Ghibli's The Boy and the Heron won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, giving Hayao Miyazaki his second Oscar and making it the second non-English-language film to claim that award.