Topic summary
Sports anime
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Sports manga.
History
Animal Olympic Games, a 1928 animated short film directed by Yasuji Murata, is regarded by critics as the first sports anime. The film was inspired by the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam and was indicative of a western influence on sports that would come to shape the genre, as in the subsequent short animated films Our Baseball Game (1930) also directed by Murata and Baseball in the Forest (1934) directed by Siichi Harada.