Where do anime and manga come from? Is there something quintessentially "Japanese" about them? Why are they so popular? In fact, like so many art forms of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, anime and manga have roots in several traditions. The word "anime" itself reflects this. Coined in the 1970s, "anime" is actually the Japanese shortening of the English word "animation," and both media reveal strong influences from Western comics and cartoons. At the same time, however, they also maintain significant connections with Japanese artistic traditions. Many commentators, both Western and Japanese, have talked about the strong "pictographic" tradition in Japanese culture. They have also pointed to emakimono — long, involved picture scrolls that tell a story as they are unrolled — to suggest that these are precursors of the visual narration of both anime and manga. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a printing culture had arisen in Japan that produced many popular books, works that told a story through both lively illustrations and the printed words above the pictures.

 

It is with Japan's opening to the West in the nineteenth century and the subsequent flood of Western culture in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that we see an important variety of outside influences. First British political comics and then American "funnies" stirred interest and admiration. The American panel style of narration, with its speech balloons and punch lines, were particularly influential. By the 1930s, however, Japanese artists had gone beyond one-off pieces to develop longer, more complex story lines that appeared in thick, cheaply printed books. The first Japanese animated film was produced in 1917, inspired by a French animation that had appeared a year earlier. Unlike in the West, cel animation was not used until the 1930s. Until then, Japanese animators preferred to use cut-out pictures called kiri-e, which were sometimes made from woodblock prints known as chiyogami. The content of both animation and manga in Japan, however, was similar to Western creations of that time, leaning towards the humorous or the fantastical, and often based on fairytales and folklore. Also similar to the West was the fact that the most successful animations were based on manga, the most famous being the comic book and subsequent cartoon series Norakuro (debuting in 1931), about a dog who joins a canine army and rises through the ranks. According to the creator of the series, the character was based on the American cartoon and comic character Felix the Cat, but Norakuro of course had a military dimension lacking in its American inspiration.

 

By the 1930s, as Japan advanced towards war in the Pacific, the government increasingly saw manga as a frivolous use of precious paper, and publishers were forced to discontinue printing. Animation, however, became a significant part of the war effort, as propaganda. The most famous of these were two fantasy animations based on the popular Japanese folkloric hero Momotarō. The first, Momotarō no Umiwashi (Momotarō's sea eagles, 1943), based on Japan's successful attack on Pearl Harbor, was, at 37 minutes, the longest Japanese animation of its time. Its enormous success spawned a sequel, Momotarō no umi shimpei (Momotarō's divine warriors of the sea). Chronicling Japan's takeover of Singapore, the animated film was released in 1945, and, although few people actually saw it, it is now considered a technical masterwork of animation for that period. Although the subject of both works was war, the characters are all cute animals — clearly influenced by Disney's fantasy iconography. Perhaps more traditionally Japanese aspects of the films can be observed in moments of intermixed beauty and violence, such as a dreamlike sequence in which dandelions drifting down onto a meadow transform into bombs.