Film and Media Studies

Anime has a far longer history than you might think; in fact, it was at the vanguard of Japan's furious attempts to modernize in the early 20th century. The oldest surviving example of Japanese animation, dating back to 1917, Namakura Gatana (Blunt Sword), was made with chalk, and is less than five minutes long. The uncertainty comes from the fact that most early Japanese films were dismantled after the reels were finished. What survived that practice was largely lost with the destruction of many film studios and theaters in the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, destroyed in the bombings of World War 2, or simply disintegrated over time. The nitrocellulose early films were printed on film which was extremely flimsy and incredibly flammable – not exactly a good recipe for preservation. As with much of Japan's cultural output in the first decades of the 20th Century, animation from this time shows artists trying to incorporate traditional stories and motifs in a new modern form.

The first Japanese animated film we know for certain was commercially released was Dekobo Shingacho - Meian no Shippai (Dekobo's New Picture Book - Failure of a Great Plan) in February of 1917 - but 1917 saw the release of nearly twenty short animated films in Japan (in the midst of World War 1) where animation was a new curiosity. Manga artists Oten Shimokawa and Junichi Kouchi, as well as painter Seitaro Kitayama were fascinated by this new medium. Hired by existing film studios and working with very small crews, these three men were responsible for the remarkable output that first year and have been nicknamed "the fathers of anime".

The films they made did not look like the anime being made today. The run times were exceedingly short, usually in the five-minute range, and they did not use transparent cels or color. The earliest films were made with chalk on a board, erasing and re-drawing the lines in-between camera takes. This technique was quickly succeeded by the slightly less labor-intensive process of using paper cutouts - essentially 2D stop-motion animation. The films were silent, but probably accompanied by live music and certainly accompanied by benshi, storytellers who stood by the screen and narrated the film for the audience.

But while the films looked different, the content would be familiar to anyone who watches anime today. They told funny stories about the Samurai, brought Japanese folk tales to life, and promoted the Japanese mail system. It's a line-up you could find in just about any year of the last decade.

The films of 1917 were made for existing film companies. In 1921, Kitayama left Nikkatsu (the company he had been working for), and founded the very first anime studio, Kitayama Eiga Seisakujo. Junichi Kouchi followed Kitayama's footsteps and founded his own animation studio, Sumikazu, in 1923. Neither studio survived the decade, unfortunately. It's difficult to make money with anime, and it was certainly made even more difficult with the Great Kanto Earthquake wiping out the Kitayama building so soon after establishment.

Despite difficulties with destroyed studios, low funding, and the laborious cut-out process, anime continued. In the 1930's, another pioneer rose to prominence: Kenzo Masaoka. He debuted the first anime with synced, pre-recorded voices (a "talkie") in 1933 after a year of production. Titled Chikara to Onna no Yo no Naka (Within the World of Power and Women), it was a rather salacious story about a man having an affair with his secretary after growing tired of his domineering wife. (Feminism was not a big concern in animation at the time.) Hot on its heels in 1934 came Masaoka's Chagama Ondo (The Dance of the Chagamas), the first anime made entirely with cels.

Animating with cels – characters and moving elements painted on transparent sheets of celluloid layered over each other and a background – was a vast improvement over chalk and paper cutouts, but it was a much bigger expense. Studios had to get more creative in finding sources of funding. Promotional videos made and paid for by the government flourished. As the military began gearing up for war, many animators turned their hands to propaganda. On the civilian side, educational films were made for children and advertising pieces were animated for commercial companies. All of these uses of anime continue today.

Propaganda proved particularly lucrative during World War II and the film studios grew larger with the additional funding. The first full-length anime film was Momotaro: Umi no Shinpei (Momotaro, Sacred Sailors), released in 1945. A propaganda film commissioned by the Japanese navy featuring anthropomorphic animals, its underlying message of hope for peace would move a young manga artist named Osamu Tezuka, as well as the japanese community, to tears.

After the war, we begin seeing names recognizable to even casual anime fans today. Japan Animated Films was founded in 1948, but you probably know them as Toei, the film company which bought Japan Animated Films in 1956 to create an animated division. They released Hakujaden (The Tale of the White Serpent) in 1958. With a run-time of 78 minutes, it was the first feature-length color anime film. It would come out in America three years later in 1961.

Hakujaden was not the first anime to cross the Pacific – film aficionados have been shipping each other reels since the beginning of the medium – but it emphasized that markets overseas could be lucrative sources of additional revenue. With its colorful characters and easily-replaced dialog, animation was especially easy to port across the seas. Depending on the hoped-for market, anime was and still is often deliberately set in places outside of Japan or otherwise downplays its national origin to make it more palatable to overseas audiences and wallets.

By the late 1950,s Osamu Tezuka had become a relatively popular manga artist – so popular, in fact, today he is now reverentially referred to as the"god of manga". In 1958, he began working with Toei to animate his series Boku no Son Goku (Son-Goku the Monkey King). During his time with Toei, Tezuka would prove to be a bit of a rabble-rouser, agitating for unionization. After his contract expired, he left to found his own studio, Mushi Production, a.k.a. Mushi Pro for short, and he took some of Toei's best animators with him. Included on that list was the first woman animator in Japan we know of, Kazuko Nakamura. She would later serve as the animation director for Ribon no Kishi (Princess Knight). Even if you haven't heard of Mushi Pro, if you've seen any anime at all, it's very likely you've seen the work of at least one animator who cut their teeth at the famous studio.

Prior to 1958, if you wanted to see animation, you had to go to a theater or have a wealthy friend with a projector and access to reels. Television changed that. The earliest animation to air on the fledgling medium was Mogura no Aventure (Mole's Adventure). It was in color, used paper cut-outs, and was nine minutes long. Two years later in 1960, an experimental animated anthology called Mittsu no Hanashi (Three Tales) was created and aired by NHK as a special. Comprised of three ten-minute segments telling fantasy tales, it would make the journey to the United States the next year, where it was the first anime to air on American television.

In 1961, the anime Otogi Manga Calendar began regularly airing on Japanese TV. Each episode explored "what happened on this day in history", sometimes supplementing its animation with historical photographs. The episodes were only three minutes long, but the series notched up an impressive 312 of them during its initial run.

In 1963, Tezuka and Mushi Pro debuted the very first anime TV series we would recognize as such, Tetsuwan Atom (Astro Boy). Based on one of Tezuka's most popular manga, the show starred a robot boy who lived with humans and regularly battled crime, aliens, and other robots. Anime had never been tried on TV in a half-hour time slot before, due to cost and deadline concerns. Tezuka used what is called "limited animation": techniques such as reducing the number of frames (images) per second of film, re-using cels, and putting different parts of a character, like the head or arms, on different layers of cels so that only the part of the body moving needed to be animated in each scene. He also saved time by using his original manga panels as storyboards, eliminating much of the need to write and layout individual episodes.

Tezuka left Mushi Pro in 1968 to found Tezuka Productions. Mushi Pro, facing budgetary difficulties and alone without its founder, closed in 1973. Several of its former animators founded studios of their own, to the point where for a while it seemed that the Venn diagram between studios founded in the 1970's and studios founded by Mushi Pro staffers was a neat circle. Two of these studios you might recognize: Madhouse and Sunrise, both founded in fall 1972.

In the years after Tezuka left and prior to closing, Mushi Pro had been contracted to produce animation for the film studio Zuiyo Eizo. In 1974, Zuiyo Eizo began producing animation itself, most notably Alps no Shojo Heidi (Heidi, Girl of the Alps).

The 1980's are considered the "golden age" of anime and saw a huge explosion of genres and interest. Many factors contributed to this, including the introduction of VHS and children who were inspired by Tetsuwan Atom twenty years ago, growing up and becoming nostalgic for their favorite shows.

Mamoru Oshii directed Urusei Yatsura in 1981 for Studio Pierrot, founded just two years later by former animators of Tatsunoko Pro and (you guessed it) Mushi Pro. The series based on Rumiko Takahashi's manga about a lecherous human, the playful alien he accidentally becomes engaged to, and their friends became a huge hit and introduced the now practically required practice of promoting pop songs via the show's opening and ending sequences.

The sports anime formula was codified in 1983 with Captain Tsubasa by Tsuchida Pro, a show about soccer, teamwork, and friendship. It inspired a generation of soccer players and manga writers and set the standard for anime sports moves of ever-increasing coolness and improbability.

VHS and other home recording/playing devices were coming onto the market in the early 1980's and anime was at the forefront. Urusei Yatsura was available on VHS in late 1983, and the OAV (original video animation, Japan's version of a straight-to-DVD movie) was invented in the same year. No one was much interested in the first OAV, Oshii's Moon Base Dallos, but it wouldn't take long before more popular titles began driving the market upwards.

Another technological first in 1983 was CGI (computer generated imagery). TMS's Golgo 13 used CGI in several scenes, most notably to show helicopters circling a skyscraper. It was the first significant use of CGI in an animated film not just in Japan, but anywhere.

The biggest news of 1984 was Kaze no Tani no Nausicaä (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind). Produced by Isao Takahata and directed and written by Hayao Miyazaki it was the first film of what would become the prestigious Studio Ghibli. That same year, Daicon Films was founded in 1984 by a group of university students, they changed their name the next year to Gainax.

In 1986, Toei animated Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball.

Since the mid-1930's, anime had been almost exclusively animated on cels. During the 1990's, CGI became increasingly commonplace as a supplemental technique. The ease with which computers could manipulate images even won over traditional-animation purist Miyazaki, who used CGI on 1997's Mononoke-Hime (Princess Mononoke) to animate demonic tendrils and a few other effects after his staff demonstrated how seamlessly they could blend the animation in.

The first completely computer animated anime, A.LI.CE., arrived in 1999. Being still relatively early CGI, it didn't look like "anime", and by this point in time the anime look we associate with the genre was very clearly defined. As more and more studios began making use of the new digital technology, most of them chose methods that blended well with hand-drawn cels. As computer processing capacity increased and prices went down, studios replaced cels altogether with digital ink and paint. In this method, after each frame is drawn it is scanned into a computer, then colored and composited digitally instead of being transferred to a cel and colored and composited by hand.

Being able to use a computer to quickly handle tedious work was, unsurprisingly, popular, and most studios had made the switch as soon as 2005. The last hold-out was Eiken with Sazae-san, the longest-running animated show in the world. If it ain't broke (and your graphics haven't evolved too much from your 1969 origins), why fix it? But even Sazae-san eventually bowed to modern convenience and made the digital switch in 2013.

Between increased global communication and Blu-ray regions putting Japan in the same region as North and South America, studios slowly have begun to tackle international releases themselves instead of relying on outside intermediaries. This has included creating their own online streaming sites, such as DAISUKI.net in 2013, and releasing Blu-rays simultaneously in Japan and North America, unfathomable just a decade ago.

Anime is recognized around the world as a reliable source of entertainment and art. Where early Japanese animators were inspired by the works of Disney, now Western shows likeAvatar: The Last Airbender and Samurai Jack are taking their cues from Japan.