The arrival of home video catapulted anime to its commercial and aesthetic apex, fanning outward from the island nation of Nippon to the far shores of North America and back, before again being revolutionized by the unprecedented accessibility of the world wide web throughout the nineties and early aughts. Television expanded the medium during the 1960s, birthing many of the essential genres and subgenres that we know today and forming the impetus for the anime industry’s inextricable relationship to advertising and merchandising from the 1970s onward. Anime has morphed through countless phases-from amateur efforts, to nationalist propaganda fodder, to niche cultural export turned eventual global phenomenon-each iteration conforming to the shape of the times in which it was produced.
From the five-minute shorts of Oten Shimokawa in 1917, to the feature-length animations produced during World War II, to the pioneering production cycles of Tezuka in the ’60s and the auteurist innovations of the likes of Miyazaki and many others towards the latter half of the last century. Anime, despite being one of the now-most ubiquitous cultural properties of the 21st century, is especially difficult to define, owed to over a century’s worth of the medium’s evolution and reinvention.
