What is the history behind anime? Serious question

Unironically this, japanese women love the big gaijin cock

>Gundam
>adult
It started out as (and still largely is) a kid's show.

What makes western production not heading the same way?

Hollywood.

Japanese spirit*
Don't lump the Japanese with chinks and gooks

Japan is a much more stable country, and has much better prospects for long term prosperity than America does my dude.

budget constrains

youtube.com/watch?v=_t1H1TI7ykM
Everything looks "smooth" because they had the money to have several frames of anmation per second.

ignore the shittty music and watch the first 30 seconds
youtube.com/watch?v=W4O3bust5uU
Japan had come up with ways to convey action and speed, and so you get this video. Instead of drawing over a hundred new frames of anmation for the samurai(and the people getting slashed) they just drew a few frames of the samurai moving around and some slash effects. Now this isn't a fair comparison as the donald duck cartoon was a theatrical short they would show before movies but the idea is the same. Add several decades of using this techniques and you get stuff like
youtube.com/watch?v=jVicjMTIPk0

Keep in mind that a lot of this scenes are still using similar techniques of giving the illusion of movement and speed while actually just imitating camera shake, sword close ups, quick flashes etc.

From a narrative standpoint. During the 40s or 50s, cant remember. There was a big push for comics to stop portraying violence and sexual content and that bred the notion that comics are for kids and only super hero stuff. Now a lot of people focus on the idea that japan was making comics for mature people but really the big difference was that japanese manga is more auteur driven, same artist does the story so its his creative vision. And so you get stuff like DB which was a retelling of A Journey to the West.

I am living a lot of holes but really it comes down to restriction breeds creativity

>muh yamato damashii XD

Dragon Ball is wuxia on steroids.

I wouldn't necessarily say that, there's a genocide every 2nd episode in the UC

nice post user

>with western animation looking like pic related it’s no wonder everyone is not into it

>muh Jap exceptionalism
Fuck off neckbeard weeb. *unsheathes guandao*

There's actually a pretty good book on anime as a medium by anime historian Fred Patten, who has been a studier of the genre since the 1970s. It's called Watching Anime, Reading Manga: 25 Years of Essays and Reviews

Terrific videos, thanks.

Some interesting observations here

johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2010/01/first-anime-i-was-aware-of.html

BTW The whole 'power up' concept from anime has it's roots in Pop-Eye. The hero is about to lose but than suddenly he gets a huge power up and can punch mountains in half. The Japanese thought it was the coolest shit ever and started doing it seriously.

A world without anime is literally not a world worth living in

>Why does Japan make such distinct cartoons compared to the rest of the world?
They don't. Fucking brainlet.

Its not distinct, its just higher quality.
this mostly comes from people passionate about their art and working hard to achieve recognition. Something that hardly exists in western art currently.

Wow. This is one of the dumbest things I've read in all my history browsing Veeky Forums. Just wow, man.

>Its not distinct, its just higher quality
It's not.
>this mostly comes from people passionate about their art and working hard to achieve recognition. Something that hardly exists in western art currently
Not true.

They are a pagan, animistic culture fully industrialized and first world. A total anomaly.

Don't forget that it was, outside the US, France and the UK the most important film producer on the planet. You could make a case for Italy or USSR in that era but honestly even in film the unique mindset and cultural trappings specific to Japan is what drew audiences. Welles did vodoo Macbeth as a statement, Kurosawa did Throne of Blood because that's what a Japanese filmmaker would do: move Shakespeare to Japan. The legacy of the Japanese visual arts is that they made Japan a thing outside its limited sphere of influence. Even after all these years and after they've permeated a good chunk of the global collective memory they still have something unique and inventive to say. OPM is a play on anime tropes and people ate it up because we know anime so well at this point we get the joke. There's something to be said about something that you know where it came from by looking at a single frame without context or prior knowledge.

>Why does Japan make such distinct cartoons compared to the rest of the world?
It stated out the same, yet it evolves in different direction
The west focus on innovation, both technical and ideological wise, so it moves on from old Disney medievalism to 3D animation with lighthearted stories
Japan focus on refinement and perfection, so it refines what old Disney had and elevated it, both in term of animation and stories, so the animation become more detailed and the stories more complicated, though still loosely based on Disney old Disney tropes of beautiful characters combined with Japanese characteristics
And then there;s also the different emotional psyche between the west (which is the model for the rest of the world for animation) and Japan, modern western psyche is more casual and nihilistic, while Japan is more solemn and idealistic, this reflect in Japanese over obsession with cute ''Kawaii'' stuffs for example
In conclusion, the Japanese ideal and outlook make it special, you can also see this difference in video games and movies for instance, where Japanese games settings usually looks much more ''cheerful'' compared to western games

I would recommend Robert Petersen's "Comics,Manga and Graphic Novels - a History of Graphic Narratives". Very fun book.

Gonna look for it, thanks user.

>an aesthetic tradition which favored striking visuals and an audience with a high degree of willful suspension of disbelief (see: kabuki)

>a post-war population of cartoonists affected by the shock of losing a war and getting nuked.

>post war exposure to western animation techniques and shorthand, particularly those pioneered by Walt Disney

>a schedule 3 times as dense as their westenr counterparts, forcing mangeka to use an “assembly line” style of generating printed strips while inventing stylizations which would allow them to achieve a very high volume output.

>a ravenous consumer culture dominated by men and women of all ages with insanely competitive markets.

>a culture which does not taboo the stylization of mature themes such as violence and sexuality.

>does
did*

Money and the idea that animation is still for children. Whether you believe that thought is being held by corporations or society is up to you.

To be a bit more fair to the US, there have been a lot of strides in recent years to move past adult animation as simply a sitcom-only format. (ie: Samurai Jack's 5th season and Bojack are probably the most prominent examples, though the latter is only partial.) The main problem outside of ghetto-ization comes from the fact that the most successful cartoons that were aimed at adults were sitcoms, the Flintstones and the Simpsons being the most obvious examples, and everyone saw how much of a juggernaut the latter was and copied the surface aspects to death. Now that anime has more or less become normalized in the west and the immediate success of the Simpsons is in the rearview mirror, a lot more cartoons are incorporating elements of continuity and over-arching plots that don't revolve around vague or inconsequential things more often. Whether or not it's all good for everything is up to debate, since while shows like Gravity Falls and early Adventure Time benefited from the myth building and the over-arching plot, some shows either haven't gotten used to the idea of continuity and try to jam together the status quo with some form of investment, or over-invest and either go nowhere with it like later AT/Regular Show, or completely off the fucking rails like the last season of South Park.

Also, it's not like adult animation not made for comedy's sake hasn't been tried here. BTAS used to air in primetime in the 90's and WB tried a serious mini-series around the mid 90's.

I think that the west has actually benefitted greatly from the Japanese influence, but it's obvious that money is still making the decisions, tho it does in Japan too, which is why we get so much garbage from there too.

Artist should do art, it's obnoxious that businessmen meddle on the creation process if they really have nothing to add, and this is very common in the West since ever.

Japan was constantly going through hard times, so there were many strong men, thats why they could make good anime.

Literally billions of people die in the first episode