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About AnimeWhere Anime Came From and Where It is GoingThe earliest Japanese animation, anime, was by individual film hobbyists inspired by American and European pioneer animators. In 1917, the first three Japanese cartoons were single-reeled between one to five minutes each. Animations of the 1920s ran from one-to-three reels and most were dramatizations of Oriental folk tales in traditional Japanese art styles. A noteworthy silent-era animator is Sanae Yamamoto whose 1924 The Mountain Where Old Women Are Abandoned seems to be the earliest anime title still extant. Most of the early animators worked in small home studios that came to be financed by Japanese theatrical companies which provided production money in exchange for distribution rights. During the 1930s, the original folk tales of anime began to give way to Western-style fast-paced humor. These gradually reflected the growing influence of Japanese militarism, such as Mituyo Seo's 1934 11-minute cartoon Private 2nd-Class Norakuro. After Japan went to war with China in 1937, the need to get productions approved by government censors resulted in a steady stream of militaristic propaganda cartoons. The Imperial military government decided Japan needed its first animated feature in 1943. Mituyo Seo was authorized to assemble a team of animators for the task. Their 74-minute Momotaro's Gods-Blessed Sea Warriors was a juvenile adventure that showed the Imperial Navy as brave anthropomorphic animal sailors. These sailors resolutely liberated Indonesia and Malaysia from the buffoonish foreign-devil, which was depicted with horns, Allied occupiers. It was released in April of 1945 barely before the war's end. After World War II, animation returned to the individual filmmakers but was hampered for the next decade by the slow recovery of the Japanese economy. Also Japanese amateur films were competing with the polished cartoons from American studios. The first Japanese full-color animation did not appear until 1955. It soon became clear that the future of Japanese animation lay in adopting the Western studio system. Attempts to create American-style studios began right after the war. The first real success did not come until Toei Animation Company organized in 1956. Japan's entry into professional animation came with the company's first theatrical feature, Panda and the Magic Serpent, released in October 1958. Toei's first few features followed the Disney formula very closely. The first six were distributed in America, usually a couple of years after they were first shown in Japan. Unfortunately, these films showed little success in the US and Japanese theatrical animation disappeared from America for the next two decades. Alakazam the Great then led to something unexpected. It was based upon a popular 1950s comic-book adaptation by Osamu Tezuka of the ancient Chinese Monkey King legend. Since the movie used his plot and visual style, Tezuka was consulted on its adaptation and became involved with its promotion. This caused him to switch his attention from comic books to animation. Tezuka was also impressed by the appearance in Japan of the first Hanna-Barbera television cartoons of the late 1950s. This led him to conclude that he could produce limited animation for the new TV market and he realized, from the popularity of his comic books, that there was a strong demand for modern, fast-paced fantasy. As a result, Tezuka organized Japan's first TV animation studio, Mushi Productions. Its first release was a weekly series based upon Astro Boy, which debuted on New Year's Day 1963. It was such an instant success that, by the end of 1963, there were three more television animation studios in production. By the end of the 1960s, the popularity of TV science-fiction action-adventure anime was so overwhelming that Toei began to alternate it with fairy-tale fare for its theatrical features. In Japan, television animation became more popular than ever. This was largely due to Tezuka’s influence. He had drawn in just about every medium available including: children’s picture books, romantic comic-book soap operas for women’s magazines, risqué humor for men’s magazines, and political cartoons for newspapers. Tezuka established that cartooning was an acceptable form of storytelling for any age group. This way of thought was in sharp contrast to the United States where the attitude became "Cartoons and comic books are only for children." Tezuka himself brought sophisticated adult animation to movie theaters with his 1969 art feature A Thousand and One Nights and the 1970 Cleopatra. By the 1970s, TV studios in Japan were churning out animated mystery dramas, older-teen sports-team soap operas and Western literary classics along with traditional juvenile fantasy adventures. Television anime was dominated by dozens of giant-robot adventure serials in the 1970s. There was a flood of toy-promotional fantasies that featured action-heroes for boys and "magical little girls" who could transform into older-teen heartthrobs for girls. Among the most influential of the giant-robot adventures was Toei's adaptation of comic-book artist Go Nagai's Mazinger Z, the first of the sagas about a gigantic flying mechanical warrior controlled by a teen human pilot to defend Earth against invading space monsters. This series combined the striking aspects of knights battling dragons with fighter pilots in aerial combat. Mazinger Z and Nagai's direct sequels Great Mazinger and UFO Robot Grandizer ran from 1972 through 1977. By the mid-1980s there had been over 40 different giant-robot anime series, covering virtually every channel and every animation studio in Japan. It was these shows that started the anime cult among American fans in the late 1970s. Futuristic outer-space adventures began in 1974 with Space Battleship Yamato. Following the importation of Star Wars from the US, Yamato was fortunately timed for the explosive popularity of space operas. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the hottest cartoonist in anime was Yamato's creator Leiji Matsumoto. By the mid-1980s, anime had been dominated by TV production for two decades. One development that changed this was the return to prominence of theatrical feature animation through the films of Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. In the early 1980s, Miyazaki began a science-fiction comic-book adventure for Animage, an animation-fan magazine from Tokuma, one of Japan's largest publishers. The 1984 Nausicaä was a smash success which resulted in Tokuma subsidizing a new animation studio. Studio Ghibli has released an average of a feature a year since then many of which have become Japan's top-grossing theatrical films, live-action or animated. The emergence of the home-video market was the second development that helped anime reach beyond the television set. Beginning in 1984, animation began to be produced especially for this market resulting in a Japanese-created English term OVA or OAV, Original Anime Video. OAV animation is usually higher in quality than TV animation and not as rich as theatrical animation. Video productions can run from a half-hour to two hours and from independent titles to serials of from 2 to 10 videos. OAVs are often better than either movies or television for stories which are too long for a standard theatrical release, but not long enough for a TV series. Some of its better examples have become so popular and acclaimed that they have led to their own anime TV series and theatrical films. These OAV titles are the main source for the anime being released in America today. Animation in Japan is considered to be in a creative doldrums today. Due to the sheer volume of the output over the past three decades, it is widely believed that all the good ideas have been exhausted. The current trend is for OAV remakes of anime favorites of 20 or 30 years ago, featuring a flashy 90s art slant and a more "sophisticated" story line. But many of the titles and concepts that are stale in Japan may still be fresh to American audiences, so it is believed that anime may still have an encouraging growth period in the US.
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