Note · Arts and culture
What is anime? Japanese animation and how it differs
Anime is animation made in Japan, for every age and in every genre. Where it came from, why it looks the way it does, and what shonen, shojo, seinen and josei really mean.
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Contents · 7 sections
Anime is animation made in Japan. In Japanese the word, short for animēshon, simply means any animation, including Disney's; outside Japan it means the Japanese kind. What is anime, then, beyond a place of origin? It is a medium, not a genre: series and films for children and adults, in romance, horror, sports, science fiction and much else, mostly adapted from Japanese comics, with a recognizable look shaped by tight budgets and television schedules.
In short
- Anime is defined by where it is made, not by its subject: there are anime for toddlers and anime for adults, in almost every genre.
- Its look comes partly from economy: fewer drawings per second, held frames and expressive stills, a style Osamu Tezuka's studio made standard on TV in 1963.
- Shonen, shojo, seinen and josei are audiences, by age and sex, taken from the magazines that first printed the stories, not kinds of story.
How is anime different from other cartoons?
The main difference is who it is for. In the United States and much of Europe, animation was long treated as something for children, with exceptions. In Japan, animated television grew up alongside comics, called manga, that were read by every age group, so animated drama for teenagers and adults became ordinary rather than unusual. A Japanese animated series about office life, grief or war is not a novelty there.
The second difference is how it is made and how it looks. Common traits include large, expressive eyes, simplified faces against detailed backgrounds, sharp color and line, dramatic still frames, and visual shorthand that regular viewers read instantly: a sweat drop for embarrassment, a cross-shaped vein for anger. None of these is a rule. The films of Studio Ghibli, the rough sketches of The Tale of the Princess Kaguya and the 3D-rendered fights of many recent series all count as anime, because the word follows the country of production.
Where did anime come from? A timeline
Japanese animation is more than a century old. These are the turning points.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1917 | The earliest commercial Japanese animated films appear, short comedies for cinemas; Namakura Gatana (The Dull Sword) is the oldest known to survive |
| 1930s–1945 | Studios make shorts, and in wartime the government uses animation for education and propaganda |
| 1958 | Toei Doga releases The Tale of the White Serpent, an early full-length color feature |
| 1963 | Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy begins on Fuji TV on 1 January: 193 black-and-white episodes of 24 minutes, made by his studio Mushi Production |
| 1970s | Space and robot sagas such as Space Battleship Yamato (1974) and Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) build a teenage and adult audience |
| 1980s | Japan's boom pays for ambitious films: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), Akira (1988); Studio Ghibli is founded in 1985 |
| 1990s | Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Ghost in the Shell and Pokémon spread anime abroad on TV and video |
| 2003 | Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away wins the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature |
| 2010s on | Legal streaming, with subtitles available days or hours after Japanese broadcast, replaces fan copies and makes overseas fans a large part of the audience |
The Astro Boy row is the hinge. Tezuka proved a weekly half-hour animated series could be made in Japan, and the shortcuts he used to make it affordable became the medium's style. Tezuka's official site calls it the first Japanese 30-minute animation series, with a peak TV rating of 40.7%.
Why does anime move the way it does?
Film runs at 24 frames a second. Full animation, as in classic Disney features, often draws a new picture for every frame or every second frame, so 12 to 24 drawings a second. Limited animation draws fewer and reuses more. Here is what that means for one TV episode:
- A 24-minute episode at 24 frames a second has 24 × 60 × 24 = 34,560 frames.
- One new drawing per frame ("on ones") would mean 34,560 drawings.
- One new drawing every two frames ("on twos") halves that to 17,280.
- One drawing every three frames ("on threes"), common for ordinary movement in TV anime, cuts it to 11,520.
- Hold a drawing still while only a mouth moves, slide a single painting across the camera for a pan, or reuse a sequence from an earlier episode, and the count drops much further.
Tezuka's team, working weekly with a small and inexperienced staff, leaned on all of these. What began as saving money became a language. Anime spends its drawings where they matter, on a burst of fast action or a single detailed frame held for effect, and lets the rest stay still. Fewer drawings is not the same as lower quality: it is a different trade between motion, detail and time.
A common mistake is to think limited animation is Japanese. American television studios such as Hanna-Barbera used it heavily in the same years for the same reason, cost. What is particular to anime is how far it turned those limits into a deliberate style.
Where do anime stories come from?
Most anime begin as something else. The usual path runs from a manga serialized weekly or monthly in a magazine, to a collected book, to an anime when the story has proved popular. In recent decades light novels, which are short illustrated novels, and video games have become common sources too.
Many series are paid for by a production committee, a group of companies, often a publisher, a TV channel, a music label and a toy or video maker, who share the cost and the rights. Each partner earns from its own part: books, broadcasts, soundtracks and merchandise. That is one reason anime often feels like one piece of a larger story told across media, and why a series may end where the manga's sales needed it to.
What do shonen, shojo, seinen and josei mean?
These four words are often read as genres. They are audiences. They come from manga magazines, each aimed at readers of a certain age and sex, and an anime inherits the label of the magazine its story ran in.
| Label | Meaning | Who it is aimed at | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shōnen | "Boys" | Boys and teenagers | Dragon Ball, One Piece, Naruto |
| Shōjo | "Girls" | Girls and teenagers | Sailor Moon, Fruits Basket |
| Seinen | "Young men" | Adult men | Ghost in the Shell, Berserk, Vinland Saga |
| Josei | "Women" | Adult women | Chihayafuru, Nodame Cantabile |
Within any one label you'll find every genre. One Piece is a pirate adventure and Haikyu is about school volleyball, yet both are shonen. Shonen stories often follow a hero who trains, fails and grows, a shape close to the hero's journey, but that is a habit of the audience, not the definition. Plenty of girls read shonen and plenty of men watch shojo; the labels describe the market, not the viewer. A fifth label, kodomo, means children's, as in Doraemon.
Is anime art?
Anime has long been argued over by critics the way comics and film once were: popular, commercial, made fast, and so easy to dismiss. Its best work, from Akira to Ghibli's films, now sits in museum shows and film-school classes, which says something about how the line between craft and art keeps moving.
Its look is also among the most copied styles in the world, by people and now by software. In March 2025, after ChatGPT gained a new image generator, a wave of pictures in the style of Studio Ghibli spread across social media, which reopened the argument over whether generative AI trained on artists' work without asking should be allowed to imitate them. The wave brought back a remark from a 2016 documentary in which Miyazaki, shown a demonstration of animation made with artificial intelligence, called it "an insult to life itself."
Check yourself
- Without looking back: why is anime called a medium rather than a genre?
- How did the cost of making Astro Boy weekly end up shaping how anime looks?
- What does it mean that shonen is an audience, not a genre, and how would you show it with two examples?
Sources
- Anime — Wikipedia
- Astro Boy, the 1963 TV series — Tezuka Productions, Tezuka Osamu Official
- Japanese Animated Film Classics — National Film Archive of Japan
- The 75th Academy Awards, 2003 — Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
- Limited animation — Wikipedia
- Hayao Miyazaki — Wikipedia