Some of you are probably wondering why Japanese Animation gets its own section on this website. Well, since there's such mass amounts on information on it how can we not do Japanese Animation? It has such a great array of titles and people and its own history.

Dr. Tezuka is the man responsible for the style Japan has for its cartoons (i.e. big cute eyes and overly cute fictional animals). he's sometimes known as the "Walt Disney of Japan". It's also strange that he is the creator of this style because in his youth he'd copy images of Popeye, as said in an excerpt by him, saying, "My career as an animator began when at the age of 4 I copied a picture of Popeye. My house was full of comics when I was a schoolboy. Because we were able to obtain a projector and several films, I was able to see Mickey Mouse, Felix the Cat, Chaplin, and Oswald Rabbit at home. When in the third grade in primary school, I drew comics in my notebook, which was immediately taken away by the teacher. Later, however, he encouraged me with praise....."

Dr. Tezuka was heavily inspired by Max Fleischer cartoons of the period, where he had designs coming out of New York based upon round heads and large round expressive eyes.

Some of the earliest Japanese animations were inspired by foreign pioneers, and so they were imitated from popular shows such as the Felix the Cat series, although most were "dramatizations of Oriental folk tales in traditional Japanese art styles". At the time, the Japanese found that their amateur films were competing with top notch cartoons from American studios, while these days the market wants for Japanese animation. The first Japanese fully colored animation appeared in 1955, where it became apparent that the Japanese were adopting the Western studio system. The first Japanese animator to achieve international recognition was Yori Kuri, whose films were usually less than a minute and appeared in film festivals around the world in the 1960s and 1970s.

Digi Charat.

Tezuka was quite impressed by the first Hanna-Barbera cartoons that appeared in Japan in the late 1950s, so then he felt like he could produce limited animation for the new TV market. One of his earliests was Astro Boy, was about a robot boy who wanted to be a real boy (Pinocchio, anyone?), whcih aired in 1963. By the end of 1963, other animation studios decided to pitch in on the television industry, and around the end of the 1960s, popularity of science-fiction and action-adventure animations were so overwhelming that Toei Animation began to alternate it with fairy-tale fare for its theatrical features.

Television animation had become a lot more popular in Japan than it ever has in America, thanks to Dr. Tezuka. He also established the attitude that cartoons and comic books were suited for any age group, unlike how America is whereas America's opinion is that cartoons and comic books were only for kids. He then developed the style of having a much more mature theme in animated features, such as a little eroticism and the appearance of blood and murders.

Sonic the Hedgehog from Sonic CD.

Around the mid 1980s, Japanese Animation has been dominated by television for about two decades. There were two developments that affected this. Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata returned the prominence of theatrical feature animation, and the second development was due to the arrival of the home video market, which began around 1984. These days, Japanese Animation is extremely popular to the mass public, as there are crazy fans who want imports. These fans are fans because Japanese Animation doesn't always take a childish tone, but a mature tone did it want to.

Japanese Animation is definitely a modern frontier in animation because it introduced the world to a whole new aspect of how animation can be viewed. Such ideas as how animation can not only entertain children but older audiences as well.