Hello and welcome to my new series
"The History of Anime"
In this six episode series
I will be going through the history of anime
Documenting the most important and influential events in the development of Japanese Animation.
In this first episode I will be looking at where it all began
With the early 1900s.
This period is far from as glamorous as the decades that
followed, but just as important.
So, where did it all start?
Well, it's impossible to say exactly where as most of the animation from the time was destroyed or lost.
In a time where an animation would only have one copy released on film
It is very likely that that would have gotten damaged or lost.
Although we do have some records of early Japanese animation.
We can look back to 1907 as a good starting point with Katsudō Shashin
As of now this is the earliest piece of animation we have from Japan
It's a 3 second animation where a boy writes something on a wall and then turns to tip his hat.
Although technically this is an anime, it is only 3 seconds.
It was a whole decade later in 1917 that we would get a
solid piece of Japanese animation with Namakura Gatana.
It was still a very short animation, but it started to show
the Japanese style of anime technique.
The animation technique used in these was called cutter animation
This is where animators would cut out objects and move them around
It was much cheaper than the higher quality Cel animation other countries were using at the time
In 1923 there was a massive setback for Japanese animation
The great Kanto Earthquake
This destroyed a lot of the animations at the time
and pushed the industry back quite a bit.
So as animation was progressing throughout the world of the likes of Disney
Japan felt like they needed to catch up.
Many animators started using Cel animation
This gave the quality of their animations a massive boost.