The Explosion Of Japanese Anime
By PD12

It is common belief that Japanese is a fairly recent thing. Infact, the truth is it has been around for many, many years.

Anime from Japan has a pretty ancient history. It began life through Japanese Manga (comics) which began to appear in the early 19th Century. The first ever manga was created by a Japanese artist named Hokusai. His manga, so named the Hokusai manga, embodied all of the ideology and crazy, sometimes complete fantasy ideas that we see in today's anime. To sum it up briefly, the Hokusai manga was a collection of sketches, somewhat organised into a book of sorts. As such, the drawing style was that of a sketch as apposed to the true style we see today.


Although the drawing style changed, the storylines didn't vary all that much - with most of the manga being based around mythical creatures, outer space and futuristic settings.

Manga 'unofficially' spawned in the early 1990's. In that decade the distribution of manga spread all over the western world, and was quickly snapped up by now 'big name' corporations like Bandai. This is just about when the 'explosion' happened. In 1993, the industry in America was worth a few thousand dollars. If we look at the same industry just 10 years later we see that instead of being worth a few thousand dollars, it is now worth just over 100 million.

I guess really the main reason behind such an incredible increase in revenue, was due to the acceptance of and manga in western society. I'm sure we've all heard of the Power Rangers at some point? Yes, this popular TV show owes its origins to anime, and it was hugely successful. This show in particular aired all over the world.

Although not really in a classic sense, Power Rangers clearly got its ideas from the farout storylines of and manga. If you want popular anime, take a look at Pokemon - Spawned from Japanime, worth quite a few billion dollars.

Besides Pokemon, there have been quite a few other traditional type anime's find their way into America's heart. Dragon Ball Z anyone? Thought so. How about Gundam or Hamtaro?

Anime's such as those are almost household

names right now - which just goes to show just how accepted Japanese is right now. Its hard to believe that it all began with one simple sketchbook.

By: PD12

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This information was provided by PD12, who regularly contributes at the Bondanime Blog for anime, manga, and japanimation.