Anime — the distinctive style of Japanese animation characterised by colourful artwork, cinematic cinematography and themes that range from the whimsical to the profoundly philosophical — has become one of the most globally influential art forms of the 21st century. With a market value exceeding $25 billion and fans on every continent, anime has evolved from black-and-white television cartoons into a medium capable of telling stories of extraordinary emotional and visual sophistication. This is its history.
Japanese animation did not begin with television. The first Japanese animated film was created in 1917 by Seitaro Kitayama — a two-minute short called Namakura Gatana (Blunt Sword) about a samurai who is repeatedly defeated in comic fights. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, small studios produced silent animated films that drew on traditional Japanese art forms like woodblock printing and kabuki theatre while also absorbing influences from American animators like Fleischer Studios and early Disney.
The first significant artistic statement in Japanese animation came in 1943 when Momotaro no Umiwashi (Momotaro's Sea Eagles) used the folkloric story of Momotaro — a Japanese folk hero born from a peach — as a framework for a wartime propaganda film featuring animal characters attacking Pearl Harbor. Its 1945 sequel Momotaro: Sacred Sailors was the first Japanese animated feature film and is notable for being simultaneously a piece of wartime propaganda and a genuinely accomplished piece of storytelling.
The person most responsible for creating what we now recognise as anime is Osamu Tezuka, a manga artist and animator who is often called the "God of Manga" and the "Father of Anime." Tezuka was profoundly influenced by Disney films — particularly Bambi and Fantasia — and by the expressive visual language of American comics. He combined these influences with Japanese storytelling traditions to create a distinctive visual style defined by large expressive eyes (an innovation he borrowed from Disney), dynamic motion lines and emotionally complex characters.
Tezuka's breakthrough came with Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atom), which began as a manga series in 1952 and became Japan's first major animated television series in January 1963. Astro Boy — about a robot boy with human emotions and extraordinary powers who fights for justice in a future world where humans and robots struggle for equality — introduced many of the thematic concerns that would come to define anime: the ethics of technology, the nature of humanity and the tension between individual identity and social obligation.
💡 Fun fact: To produce Astro Boy on a television budget, Tezuka invented the technique of "limited animation" — reusing background cells, animating only the parts of a character that needed to move and using still images with camera panning to suggest motion. This technique, while born of financial necessity, gave anime its distinctive visual rhythm and became an aesthetic choice that directors still use deliberately today.
The 1970s saw anime expand rapidly into new genres. Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) created the "real robot" genre — giant mechas (robotic suits) depicted not as fantasy superweapons but as military hardware with realistic limitations, maintenance requirements and psychological costs for their pilots. Gundam was the first anime to treat warfare with genuine moral complexity, exploring the trauma of soldiers and the futility of ideological conflict in ways that resonated deeply with Japanese audiences still processing the memory of World War Two.
The 1980s brought the international breakthrough. The Robotech franchise — an American adaptation of three separate Japanese anime series — introduced American audiences to the medium in 1985. Dragon Ball, which began as a manga in 1984 and became an anime series in 1986, created a formula — the young hero training, fighting and growing stronger through a series of increasingly powerful opponents — that has been imitated by every shounen action anime since.
In 1985, animator Hayao Miyazaki and director Isao Takahata founded Studio Ghibli, which would go on to create the most critically acclaimed body of work in animation history. Ghibli films like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, My Neighbour Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle are distinguished by their environmental themes, their complex female protagonists, their hand-drawn artistry and their refusal to condescend to young audiences.
Spirited Away (2001) remains the highest-grossing film in Japanese history and became the first non-English-language film to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2003. Roger Ebert described Miyazaki's films as among the greatest ever made — in any genre, for any audience, from any country.
Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) shattered the conventions of the mecha genre and of anime storytelling generally. Director Hideaki Anno used the framework of giant robots fighting alien monsters as a vehicle for an unflinching examination of depression, social anxiety, trauma, abandonment and the human need for connection. The series ended with two episodes that dispensed with animation entirely and consisted mostly of abstract imagery and psychological monologues exploring the inner lives of its characters.
Evangelion was controversial, divisive and enormously influential. It demonstrated that anime could function as serious artistic expression addressing adult psychological concerns — a legitimacy that opened the door for a generation of ambitious directors.
Naruto (2002), Bleach (2004) and One Piece (1999) — collectively known as the "Big Three" of their era — built massive global fanbases through years of serialised storytelling that gave audiences time to form deep emotional attachments to characters and their worlds. Each series ran for hundreds of episodes and sold tens of millions of manga volumes worldwide.
The streaming era transformed anime's global reach. Netflix, Crunchyroll and other platforms made anime instantly accessible to audiences worldwide and began commissioning original anime productions. Attack on Titan (2013), Demon Slayer (2019) and Jujutsu Kaisen (2020) each broke records for streaming viewership and introduced anime to audiences who had never previously engaged with the medium.
Demon Slayer: Mugen Train (2020) became the highest-grossing film ever released in Japan, surpassing Spirited Away's nineteen-year record. In 2021, it became the highest-grossing Japanese film of all time globally — evidence that anime had completed its journey from a children's television medium to one of the world's most commercially powerful entertainment forms.
The history of anime is the history of a medium discovering its own potential — beginning as imitation, developing its own vocabulary and eventually producing work so original and emotionally resonant that it changed how the world thinks about what animation can achieve.
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