The History of Anime

Sha’Quana Kelly

Anime was first created in Japan. The website Infoplease stated, “The series was first broadcast in Japan in 1963. Anime, pronounced “ani-may,” refers to animation originating in Japan.” Anime is broadcasted worldwide; it has a variety of genres like romance, comedy, horror, action, fantasy, adventure and more. A majority of anime are based off of manga and video games. After shows or movies, there is sometimes a game produced as well. There is also OVA that are part of the show like extra clips. Ova stands for “Original Video Animation.” With that, there are also shows with short episodes or clips to them that are connected to either manga, games, etc. Manga is an extension of Japanese style art comic books and graphic novels, aimed for different ages with different genres. If an anime series or show is finished, there would probably be a manga still going forward for it for example Naruto, One Piece, Dragon Ball Z, and My Hero Academia.

There are different ways to read these books. With Eastern countries, such as Japan,  the reader would read manga from the back of the book right to left instead of  like Western countries would read traditionally start in the front of the book left to right.

Watching Anime comes along with making cool new friends who many can talk to about the different shows and how they relate to it. This community of active anime watchers have a term called a weeaboo, which means someone who watches a lot of anime and reads a bunch of manga. Cosplay and anime cons are recently trending all over. This type of entertainment is now available to watch on Hulu, Netflix, Crunchyroll, Funimation and adult swim. Some anime’s start off in Sub which is in Japanese, but there are subtitles for different languages and Dub is English with/without subtitles for different languages.

This style of media is increasingly becoming more and more popular throughout the world.