Anime is a kind of Japanese animation intended for an adult audience, unlike most European animated films, with a characteristic rendering of characters and the world around them.
It is often published in the format of TV series, less often in full-length films, and is striking in the variety of genres, plots, places and eras in which the action takes place. This served as such a high popularity of the art in question.
The earliest anime style has one characteristic feature - unnaturally huge and very detailed eyes of the characters, and later their size and shape began to indicate the age and degree of naivety of its owner.
The story of the creation of Japanese animation
The history of anime goes back to the beginning of the 20th century, when Japanese directors started the first experiments in animation, taking Western techniques as a basis. The pioneers in this area were Shimokawa Oten, Junichi Koti and Seitaro Kitayama. Later, the method of application animation began to be used, and then the notorious Osamu Tezuka got down to business. He is rightfully considered the founder of modern anime.
This art form has come a long way. Today, anime styles, its genres and types have become much richer than almost a century ago. Now it has become a kind of cultural layer, revered by both children and adults.
Kinds
As mentioned earlier, the anime style has many genres and types. They divide the audience of rental films by age and other criteria.
There are only five such species:
- Kodomo - intended for children under 12 years old, mainly refers to fairy tales.
- Shonen is a category for teenagers under 18 years old, designed for a male audience.
- Shodze - for girls under 18 years old.
- Seinen - designed for adult men.
- Jo - intended for girls after 18 years.
Also, anime is divided by duration: OVA (created for display on video) - about 23-25 minutes, full-length - up to 120 minutes and short, designed for half an hour.
Genres and their description
Since anime is a kind of cinema art, it can be traced to a wealth of plots and, as a result, genres. For the most part, they differ little from those already existing in world cinema, but there are still a couple of exceptions.
- Anti-utopia - shows a society of the distant future, in a state of decline, often rotting from the inside under the onslaught of laws that suppress the individual, and the government as a whole. From the outside, such a world, however, may seem ideal to many. Such a genre often shows the tragic abuse of high technology, warns what a person’s current lifestyle can lead to.
- Bisyonen tells of love between attractive young men, while it is a question of the platonic side of the relationship, physical intimacy has no place in this genre.
- Maho-shojo portrays little girls endowed with magical powers.
- Furs - in this genre, the main characters are a robot or other equipment.
- Adventures in anime style are based on fascinating stories and unusual locales. They captivate the painted world with the brightness of impressions and the energy of the plot.
- A good example of a sports genre would be the series Free Style. The anime in this case focuses on various types of physical activity of a person, where special attention is paid to training and the process of self-improvement.
- There are also shoji-ai , which tells of love between girls, and shionen-ai - in fact, the same thing as bisen.
Anime styles
For the appearance of Japanese animation, you should thank the founder of Mushi Productions - Osama Tezuka. It was he who was able to derive a certain manner of rendering, starting from which, the artists developed other styles of anime. The features of the image of the heroes of his ribbons became canonical: huge detailed eyes, a rounded head and simplified shapes - all this is the work of Osamu.
Then follows his contemporary - Akira Matsumoto. His anime has always been distinguished by the mystery and tragedy of the plot, as well as the rendering of female characters. They stand out even today, thanks to the unusual elongated shape of the eyes, a sophisticated nose and a very small mouth.
You can not get around the legendary Hayao Miyazaki. The features of his work became not only a very deep, soul-catching plot, but also beautifully drawn backgrounds that create the feeling of a fairy tale. Miyazaki works great with color and chiaroscuro, and his characters are easily recognizable by his round eyes, harmoniously located on his face.
The list of styles is not limited to this, but the ones listed here can be considered the most basic. To find out more, you can take a look at the works of people like Akira Toriyama, Takahashi Rumiko and Go Nagai.
Interesting Facts
- People in the anime style often have unrealistic proportions, for example, for an adult man depicted in this technique, the waist can be as thin as that of the heroine, despite her powerful physique.
- The manner of painting huge eyes for the characters to convey strong surprise was borrowed by Osamu Tezuk from Walt Disney, which the founder of Mushi Productions has repeatedly confirmed.
- The longest anime series has been going on for 47 years.
- Despite the blurred line of differences between the features of drawing in Japanese animation, a free anime style does not exist as such. All its varieties are clearly attached to their creators.
- The Sailor Moon series was shown on Russian television with virtually no censorship; the only correction was a change in the declaration of love of a young man in love with another man, replaced by a more "chaste" version: "I love you as a father."
Anime spread
Manga and anime have become part of the culture of Japan almost since the advent of TVs. Today in the Land of the Rising Sun annually more than 50 animated series and films are created a year, most of which are then translated into other languages and published in many countries of the world, including Russia.
At present, among fans of this art, amateur works such as doujinshi, AMV (a clip using a video from a series or a feature film) and writing stories based on fandoms are extremely common.
Such activity on the part of fans leads to the fact that the genres and styles of anime are expanding markedly, and large-scale events associated with it occur more often and are gaining more and more popularity.