Anime

What is Anime?

Anime, an abbreviation for animation in Japanese, is animated images rooted in Japan. It also includes television animation series, films, OVA (original video animation) put on DVDs and Blu-ray Discs and a variety of other forms of animated works. Anime is also deeply concerned with Japanese comic books known as Manga since lots of modern anime are created based on them.

The number of new anime titles is increasing year after year partly because of diversification of the ways of making them. In addition to traditional hand-drawn animations, more digital anime used with computer graphics have been made recently.

A style of the modern anime has its origin in Japanese animations around the 1960s, when the first successful television anime series Astro Boy was produced by Osamu Tezuka, the Father of Manga. Since the 2000s, a large number of low-budget but high-quality anime series have aired especially during late night hours.

The rapid market growth in recent years has established the anime as part of composite art as well as literature, music and entertainment. Some renown anime directors including Hayao Miyazaki from Studio Ghibli and Makoto Shinkai have led the anime industry worldwide lately. The expanding Japanese pop culture are globally supported by the popularization of smartphones and tablets and diverse video streaming platforms.