Anime, like manga (Japanese comics), is extremely popular in Japan and well known throughout the world.

Both hand-drawn and computer animated anime exist. It is used in television series, films, video, video games, commercials, and internet-based releases, and represents most, if not all, genres of fiction.

History

main: History of anime

image:Momotaro's Divine Sea Warriors-screeny.JPG

Anime began at the start of the 20th century, when Japanese filmmakers experimented with the animation techniques also pioneered in France, Germany, the United States, and Russia. The oldest known anime in existence was screened in 1917 - a two minute clip of a samurai trying to test a new sword on his target, only to suffer defeat.

By the 1930s, animation became an alternative format of storytelling to the underdeveloped live-action industry in Japan. Unlike in the United States, the live-action industry in Japan remained a small market and suffered from budgeting, location, and casting restrictions. The lack of Western-looking actors, for example, made it next to impossible to shoot films set in Europe, America, or fantasy worlds that do not naturally involve Japan. Animation allowed artists to create any characters and settings.

The success of Disney's 1937 feature film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs influenced Japanese animators. In the 1960s, Osamu Tezuka adapted and simplified many Disney animation techniques to reduce costs and number of frames in the production. He intended this as a temporary measure to allow him to produce material on a tight schedule with inexperienced animation staff.

The 1970s saw a surge of growth in the popularity of manga—which were often later animated—especially those of Osamu Tezuka, who has been called a "legend" and the "god of manga". His work and that of other pioneers in the field, inspired characteristics and genres that are fundamental elements of anime today. The giant robot genre (known as "Mecha" outside Japan), for instance, took shape under Tezuka, developed into the Super Robot genre under Go Nagai and others, and was revolutionized at the end of the decade by Yoshiyuki Tomino who developed the Real Robot genre. Robot anime like the Gundam and Macross series became instant classics in the 1980s, and the robot genre of anime is still one of the most common in Japan and worldwide today. In the 1980s, anime became more accepted in the mainstream in Japan (although less than manga), and experienced a boom in production. Following a few successful adaptations of anime in overseas markets in the 1980s, anime gained increased acceptance in those markets in the 1990s and even more in the 2000s.

Terminology

Japanese write the English term "animation" in katakana as アニメーション (animēshon, ), and the term anime (アニメ) emerged in the 1970s as an abbreviation, though someWho: date=May 2009 state that the word derives from the French phrase dessin animé. Both the original and abbreviated forms are valid and interchangeable in Japanese, but the shorter form is more commonly used.