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Understanding Anime..... The Beginnings

The field of televised Japanese animation, popularly known as “anime” (pronounced ah-nee-may, a word derived from the French term for animation), has always led a curious double life. While anime is often considered to be the quintessential expression of Japanese culture, its greatest documents are scandalously un-Japanese. Unlike the Japanese manga or comic strip, which is rooted in Japan’s centuries-old traditions of woodcut carvings and graphic prints, anime is the purest product of the multinational era.

Spawned in the 1960s by Japan’s postwar media boom, anime quickly became one of the most innovative sites of the multinational video culture. Early anime series such as Osamu Tezuka’s Tetsuwan Atomu [Astro Boy] (1963) derived much of their visual inspiration from the classic Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons, while scriptwriters drew deeply from the well of Western European and US science fiction narratives. By the early 1970s, anime had begun to develop its own unique array of forms, ranging from the teenage martial arts comedy to the human-piloted robot adventure or “mecha” tale. By the mid-1980s, anime had transformed a complex blend of Japan’s indigenous manga culture, US science-fiction and animation, European scriptwriting and theater, and the editing techniques of the Hong Kong martial arts films into a whole new art-form. Today, the anime culture has become one of the heavyweights of the global media industry.¹