Animé

is a hand-drawn and computer-generated animation originating from Japan. Outside Japan and in English, ''anime'' refers specifically to animation produced in Japan. However, , in Japan and in Japanese, describes all animated works, regardless of style or origin. Many works of animation with a similar style to Japanese animation are also produced outside Japan. Video games sometimes also feature themes and art styles that are sometimes labelled as anime.

The earliest commercial Japanese animation dates to 1917. A characteristic art style emerged in the 1960s with the works of cartoonist Osamu Tezuka and spread in the following decades, developing a large domestic audience. Anime is distributed theatrically, through television broadcasts, directly to home media, and over the Internet. In addition to original works, anime are often adaptations of Japanese comics (manga), light novels, or video games. It is classified into numerous genres targeting various broad and niche audiences.

Anime is a diverse medium with distinctive production methods that have adapted in response to emergent technologies. It combines graphic art, characterization, cinematography, and other forms of imaginative and individualistic techniques. Compared to Western animation, anime production generally focuses less on movement, and more on the detail of settings and use of "camera effects", such as panning, zooming, and angle shots. Diverse art styles are used, and character proportions and features can be quite varied, with a common characteristic feature being large and emotive eyes.

The anime industry consists of over 430 production companies, including major studios such as Studio Ghibli, Kyoto Animation, Sunrise, Bones, Ufotable, MAPPA, Wit Studio, CoMix Wave Films, Madhouse, Inc., TMS Entertainment, Pierrot, Production I.G, Nippon Animation and Toei Animation. Since the 1980s, the medium has also seen widespread international success with the rise of foreign dubbed, subtitled programming, and since the 2010s due to the rise of streaming services and a widening demographic embrace of anime culture, both within Japan and worldwide. Japanese animation accounted for 60% of the world's animated television shows.

Etymology

As a type of animation, anime is an art form that comprises many genres found in other mediums; it is sometimes mistakenly classified as a genre itself. In Japanese, the term ''anime'' is used to refer to all animated works, regardless of style or origin. English-language dictionaries typically define ''anime'' () as "a style of Japanese animation" or as "a style of animation originating in Japan". Other definitions are based on origin, making production in Japan a requisite for a work to be considered "anime".

The etymology of the term ''anime'' is disputed. The English word "animation" is written in Japanese ''katakana'' as () and as (, ) in its shortened form. Some sources claim that the term is derived from the French term for animation ("cartoon", literally 'animated drawing'), but others believe this to be a myth derived from the popularity of anime in France in the late 1970s and 1980s.

In English, ''anime''—when used as a common noun—normally functions as a mass noun. (For example: "Do you watch anime?" or "How much anime have you watched?") As with a few other Japanese words, such as '' saké'' and ''Pokémon'', English texts sometimes spell ''anime'' as ''animé'' (as in French), with an acute accent over the final ''e'', to cue the reader to pronounce the letter, not to leave it silent as English orthography may suggest. Prior to the widespread use of ''anime'', the term ''Japanimation'', a portmanteau of Japan and animation, was prevalent throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In the mid-1980s, the term ''anime'' began to supplant ''Japanimation''; in general, the latter term now only appears in period works where it is used to distinguish and identify Japanese animation.

History

Precursors

and shadow plays (''kage-e'') are considered precursors of Japanese animation. was common in the eleventh century. Traveling storytellers narrated legends and anecdotes while the was unrolled from the right to left in chronological order, as a moving panorama. ''Kage-e'' was popular during the Edo period and originated from the shadow plays of China. Magic lanterns from the Netherlands were also popular in the eighteenth century. The paper play called ''kamishibai'' surged in the twelfth century and remained popular in the street theater until the 1930s. Puppets of the Bunraku theater and ''ukiyo-e'' prints are considered ancestors of characters of most Japanese animation. Finally, manga were a heavy inspiration for anime. Cartoonists Kitzawa Rakuten and Okamoto Ippei used film elements in their strips.

Pioneers

Animation in Japan began in the early 20th century, when filmmakers started to experiment with techniques pioneered in France, Germany, the United States, and Russia. A claim for the earliest Japanese animation is ''Katsudō Shashin'' (), a private work by an unknown creator. In 1917, the first professional and publicly displayed works began to appear; animators such as Ōten Shimokawa, Seitarō Kitayama, and Jun'ichi Kōuchi (considered the "fathers of anime") produced numerous films, the oldest surviving of which is Kōuchi's ''Namakura Gatana''. Many early works were lost with the destruction of Shimokawa's warehouse in the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake.

By the mid-1930s, animation was well-established in Japan as an alternative format to the live-action industry. It suffered competition from foreign producers, such as Disney, and many animators, including Noburō Ōfuji and Yasuji Murata, continued to work with cheaper cutout animation rather than cel animation. Other creators, including Kenzō Masaoka and Mitsuyo Seo, nevertheless made great strides in technique, benefiting from the patronage of the government, which employed animators to produce educational shorts and propaganda. In 1940, the government dissolved several artists' organizations to form the The first talkie anime was ''Chikara to Onna no Yo no Naka'' (1933), a short film produced by Masaoka. The first feature-length anime film was '' Momotaro: Sacred Sailors'' (1945), produced by Seo with a sponsorship from the Imperial Japanese Navy. The 1950s saw a proliferation of short, animated advertisements created for television.

Modern era

In the 1960s, manga artist and animator Osamu Tezuka adapted and simplified Disney animation techniques to reduce costs and limit frame counts in his productions. Originally intended as temporary measures to allow him to produce material on a tight schedule with inexperienced staff, many of his limited animation practices came to define the medium's style. '' Three Tales'' (1960) was the first anime film broadcast on television; the first anime television series was ''Instant History'' (1961–64). An early and influential success was ''Astro Boy'' (1963–66), a television series directed by Tezuka based on his manga of the same name. Many animators at Tezuka's Mushi Production later established major anime studios (including Madhouse, Sunrise, and Pierrot).

The 1970s saw growth in the popularity of manga, many of which were later animated. Tezuka's work—and that of other pioneers in the field—inspired characteristics and genres that remain fundamental elements of anime today. The giant robot genre (also known as "mecha"), 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 series such as ''Gundam'' and ''Super Dimension Fortress Macross'' became instant classics in the 1980s, and the genre remained one of the most popular in the following decades. The bubble economy of the 1980s spurred a new era of high-budget and experimental anime films, including '' Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind'' (1984), '' Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise'' (1987), and '' Akira'' (1988).

''Neon Genesis Evangelion'' (1995), a television series produced by Gainax and directed by Hideaki Anno, began another era of experimental anime titles, such as ''Ghost in the Shell'' (1995) and ''Cowboy Bebop'' (1998). In the 1990s, anime also began attracting greater interest in Western countries; major international successes include ''Sailor Moon'' and ''Dragon Ball Z'', both of which were dubbed into more than a dozen languages worldwide. In 2003, ''Spirited Away feature film directed by Hayao Miyazaki, won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy Awards. It later became the highest-grossing anime film, earning more than $355 million. Since the 2000s, an increased number of anime works have been adaptations of light novels and visual novels; successful examples include ''The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya'' and ''Fate/stay night'' (both 2006). '' Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train'' became the highest-grossing Japanese film and one of the world's highest-grossing films of 2020. It also became the fastest grossing film in Japanese cinema, because in 10 days it made 10 billion yen ($95.3m; £72m). It beat the previous record of ''Spirited Away