Japanimation is a term that was once used in the West to describe what is now known as anime. It’s just a shortened version of the phrase “Japanese animation.” Japanimation dates back to just before the 1920s, when it first emerged in Japan, but it did not gain widespread popularity until the 1930s.
Around the turn of the century, animation became more widely available in the West, and these techniques eventually made their way to Japan, where the first Japanimation clip, a two-minute film about a samurai and his sword, was shown in 1917. During the 1930s, as film became more popular around the world, it remained a largely dormant industry in Japan. This was due in large part to the limitations of telling stories set in the West due to a scarcity of Western-looking actors.
Japanimation provided a clear solution, allowing films to be shot in any location, with any racial group, and even strange fantasy worlds and characters. With the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, Japanimation discovered new, cheaper, and more efficient techniques and continued to evolve. Momotaro’s Divine Sea Warriors, the first full-length Japanimation film, was released in 1944.
During the 1970s, Japanimation’s popularity grew even more in Japan, and new genres, particularly space opera, were explored. With the success of the Star Wars films, the space opera genre became even more popular, and sci-fi Japanimation grew in popularity during the 1980s. Several successful Japanimation films and television shows were also exported to the United States in the 1980s, where they were largely remade. Hayao Miyazaki produced what would prove to be a pivotal film, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, in 1984, allowing him to launch his own company, which would go on to produce some of the most popular Japanimation films of all time, many of which would be exported to the United States for wide distribution.
By the late 1980s, the Japanimation craze had fully engulfed the United States and other Western countries. In the United States, films like Akira and Vampire Hunter D became instant cult hits, paving the way for a wider acceptance of Japanimation and a growing fan base of die-hards who would import films directly from Japan. This trend continued into the 1990s, with seminal films such as Ghost in the Shell becoming commercial niche successes in the United States and influencing later Western franchises such as the Matrix films.
Although there are many different styles of art seen in Japanimation, they all follow a few key graphical styles that set them apart from the vast majority of Western animation. Many popular films and shows are based on comic books, and many of the stylings of Japanimation are derived from Japanese comic forms, manga. Some Western films, such as Kill Bill, have used Japanimation techniques for part or all of the film in recent years, and the visual style has become very popular in the West.