Anime (アニメ, taken from half of the Japanese pronunciation of "animation", but typically pronounced /ˈænɪmeɪ/ or /ˈænɪmə/ in English) is animation in Japan and considered to be "Japanese animation" in the rest of the world. Anime dates from about 1917.
Anime, in addition to manga (Japanese comics), is extremely popular in Japan and well known throughout the world. Anime itself is considered a form of limited animation. Anime can be released either by television broadcast or released directly to video, in which case it is often called OVA or OAV (Original Animation Video).
Anime can be hand-drawn or computer animated. It is used in television series, films, video, video games, commercials, and internet-based releases, and represents most, if not all, genres of fiction.
History
the first feature-length anime film
Anime began at the start of the 20th century, when Japanese filmmakers experimented with the animation techniques that were being explored in France, Germany, the United States, and Russia. The oldest known anime in existence was screened in 1917 - a two minute clip of a samurai trying to test a new sword on his target, only to suffer defeat.
By the 1930s, animation became an alternative format of storytelling compared to the underdeveloped live-action industry in Japan. Unlike in the United States, the live-action industry in Japan remained a small market and suffered from budgeting, location, and casting restrictions. The lack of Western-looking actors, for example, made it next to impossible to shoot films set in Europe, America, or fantasy worlds that do not naturally involve Japan. Animation allowed artists to create any characters and settings.
The success of Disney's 1937 feature film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs influenced Japanese animators.
In the 60's, Osamu Tezuka adapted and simplified many Disney animation techniques to reduce the costs and number of frames in the production. This was intended to be a temporary measure to allow him to produce material on a tight schedule with an inexperienced animation staff.
During the 1970s, there was a surge of growth in the popularity of manga—which were often later animated—especially those of Osamu Tezuka, who has been called a "legend" and the "god of manga". His work and that of other pioneers in the field, inspired characteristics and genres that are fundamental elements of anime today. The giant robot genre (known as "Mecha" outside Japan), for instance, took shape under Tezuka, developed into the Super Robot genre under Go Nagai and others, and was revolutionized at the end of the decade by Yoshiyuki Tomino who developed the Real Robot genre. Robot anime like the Gundam and Macross series became instant classics in the 1980s, and the robot genre of anime is still one of the most common in Japan and worldwide today. In the 1980s, anime became more accepted in the mainstream in Japan (although less than manga), and experienced a boom in production. Following a few successful adaptations of anime in overseas markets in the 1980s, anime gained increased acceptance in those markets in the 1990s and even more in the 2000s.
TerminologyIn Japanese, the English term animation is written in katakana as
アニメーション (animēshon, pronounced
[ɑnimeːɕoɴ]and the term anime
(アニメ)emerged in the 1970s as an abbreviation, though some state that the abbreviated word is based on the French word dessin animé. Both the original and abbreviated forms are valid and interchangeable in Japanese, but the shorter form is more commonly used.
The pronunciation of anime in Japanese, ɑnime, differs significantly from the Standard English IPA:
/ˈænɪmeɪ/ which have different vowels and stress. (In Japanese each mora carries equal stress.) As with a few other Japanese words such as saké, Pokémon, and Kobo Abé, anime is sometimes spelled
animé in English (as in French), with an acute accent over the final e, to cue the reader that the letter is pronounced, not silent as would be expected in English. However, this accent does not appear in any commonly used system of romanized Japanese and is not in frequent enough use to be recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary.
Word usageIn Japan, the term does not specify an animation's nation of origin or style; instead, it is used as a blanket term to refer to all forms of animation from around the world. In English, dictionary sources define anime as "a Japanese style of motion-picture animation" or "a style of animation developed in Japan". Non-Japanese works that borrow stylization from anime is commonly referred to as "anime-influenced animation" but it is not unusual for a viewer who does not know the country of origin of such material to refer to it as simply "anime". Some works are co-productions with non-Japanese companies, such as most of the traditionally animated Rankin/Bass works, the Cartoon Network and Production I.G series IGPX or Ōban Star-Racers, which may or may not be considered anime by different viewers.In English, anime can be used as a common noun ("Do you watch anime?") or as a suppletive adjective ("The anime Guyver is different from the movie Guyver"). It may also be used as a mass noun, as in "How much anime have you collected?", though it is sometimes incorrectly pluralized as animes because of the Japanese language's lack of grammatical number.
SynonymsAnime is occasionally referred to as Japanimation, but this term has fallen into disuse. Japanimation saw the most usage during the 1970s and 1980s, but was supplanted by anime in the mid-1990s as the material became more widely known in English-speaking countries. In general, the term now only appears in nostalgic contexts. Although the term was coined outside Japan to refer to animation imported from Japan, it is now used primarily in Japan, to refer to domestic animation; since anime does not identify the country of origin in Japanese usage, Japanimation is used to distinguish Japanese work from that of the rest of the world.
In Japan, manga can additionally refer to both animation and comics (although the use of manga to refer to animation is mostly restricted to non-fans). Among English speakers, manga usually has the stricter meaning of "Japanese comics". An alternate explanation is that it is due to the prominence of Manga Entertainment, a distributor of anime to the US and UK markets. Because Manga Entertainment originated in the UK the use of the term is common outside of Japan.[citation needed] The term "animanga" has been used to collectively refer to anime and manga, though it is also a term used to describe comics produced from animation cels.
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