How Did Anime Come to Be?

Well the work day has finally ended.  You kicked off your crocs (which everyone definitely wears to their professional job) and its time to finally finish binging that anime you’ve been thinking about since your boss brought up doing…blah…blah..blah…

That’s over now.  Time for some tig ole biddies and SWEET anime action.  But then, like me, curiosity strikes.  You ever wonder how this all started?  For me it was Dragon Ball Z…but that’s obviously not the start of anime. So what made this shizz so popular?  Where did it all begin?  Well lets find out.

What is the earliest recorded Date for anime?

 Now this one I never saw coming.  It’s freakin 1907! What the heck were they showing in 1907? I thought the best action then was watching a rock slowly chip away in a lake. But as it turns out, in 2005 someone discovered a fifty-frame drawing stenciled directly onto a strip of celluloid, known as “Katsudo Shashin” or “ Activity Photo” and it's dated to about that year. It was pretty much just a boy in a sailor suit drawing characters.

Okay okay.. so that’s not really what I was looking for.  How did ANIME, like..our kind of anime .. get started?

The anime that made it all possible

 So while the adaptation of todays anime was being developed in Japan all through the 1920’s, it wasn’t until 1960 that todays style really became popular.  You know, the Giant eye, large head and tig ole biddies style we all know and love.

The first anime to really “catch on” was Astro Boy, an anime about a little robot boy created by a mad scientist.  This one finally made it over to the west (MERICA!) and sparked a whole bunch of producers here to acquire different titles from Japan.  One of these titles, which you may recognize from cartoon network, was ‘Speed Racer’.  And yes, that was a Japanese Anime mom and dad so SUCK IT. 

George Lucas and Anime?

Over the next couple decades anime remained having a “relatively” low popularity in the west.  Especially competing with television, lot of Japanese animating companies we burning through money... and fast.

Remember that anime ‘Astro boy’ we talked about? Turns out the whole space thing was a hot button topic.  And which space odyssey got everyone’s knickers in a bunch?  That’s right, you guessed it.  STAR WARS BABY!!  Turns out Darth Vader is the real daddy of anime… in a way

And no, I’m not saying Star Wars was an anime.. its obviously not.  But what Star Wars did was gain HUGE popularity for space stuff.  And what were the most popular Anime’s in Japan about?  TIDDIES! Just kidding... also space (and robots).

This sudden increase in space interest allowed for a quick revival of the anime industry and sparked some of the most popular anime’s to this day.

The Anime That Lives On Through Today

So as it turns out, people love giant robots and butt kicking martial arts. Who would have guessed?  With anime’s like Mobile Suit Gundam, Dragon Ball and Pokémon starting to gain some real popularity in the West, one other event helped it to explode worldwide.

Since everyone was all hyped up still on Star Wars and space, Japan now had a better entry way to really get Anime on the map and into the West and the rest of the world on a larger scale.  The two we can thank for that are still popular today, for those of us who are truly cultured.

In 1995 Neon Genesis Evangelion was released and became WIDELY popular for its controversial violent and sexual scenes. It was so insanely popular that they made a feature film called “The End of Evangelion” grossing over $10 million dollars.

Then in 1998 Cowboy Bebop (one of my all-time favorites) also became an international success, riding on the coat tails of “space odyssey” and Bad-A** butt kicking violence.

By 1998 it was a wrap. Japan over 100 anime shows had aired on television, with many of the popular ones like Dragon Ball Z, Pokémon, Sailor Moon and One-Piece being largely popular in the U.S.  This continued into the 2000’s, and now we all finally get to live in a weeb world with all our favorite shows.  So, in a way, thank you Daddy Vader.

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