Genres and styles of anime: history, description and interesting facts

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:43

Anime is a type of Japanese animation intended for an adult audience, unlike most European animated films, with a characteristic portrayal of characters and the world around them.

It is often published in the format of TV series, less often - full-length films, and strikes with a 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.

Early anime style has one characteristic feature - characters have unnaturally huge and highly detailed eyes, and later their size and shape began to indicate the age and degree of naivety of their owner.

History 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 field were Shimokawa Oten, Junichi Kochi and Seitaro Kitayama. Later, the application method began to be used.animation, and then the notorious Osamu Tezuka took over. He is rightfully considered the founder of modern anime.

This art form has come a long way. Today, anime styles, 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.

Views

As mentioned earlier, the "anime" style has many genres and types. They divide the audience of films that are going to be rented according to age and other criteria.

There are only five such species:

Kodomo - intended for children under 12 years old, mainly related to fairy tales.
Shonen - category for teenagers under 18, designed for a male audience.
Shojo - for girls under 18.
Seinen - Designed for grown men.
Jo - designed for girls over 18.

Anime is also divided by length: OVA (made to be shown on video) - about 23-25 minutes, full-length - up to 120 minutes and short-film, designed for half an hour.

Genres and their descriptions

Because anime is a kind of cinematic art, it has a richness 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.

Dystopia - shows a society of the distant future, in a state of decline, often rotting from the inside underthe 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. This genre often shows the tragic abuse of high technology, warns what a person can lead to his current lifestyle.
Bishonen tells about love between attractive young men, while it is about the platonic side of relationships, physical intimacy has no place in this genre.
Maho-shojo depicts little girls endowed with magical powers.
Mecha - in this genre, the main characters are a robot or other equipment.

Anime style adventures are based on captivating stories and unusual settings. They captivate into the painted world with the brightness of impressions and the energy of the plot.
A good example of a sports genre would be Free Style. The anime in this case focuses on various types of human physical activity, where special attention is paid to training and the process of self-improvement.
There are also shojo-ai, which tells about love between girls, and shonen-ai - in fact, the same as bishunen.

Anime Styles

Osamu Tezuka, the founder of Mushi Productions, is to be thanked for the emergence of Japanese animation. It was he who was able to bring out a certain style of drawing, starting from which, the artists developed other styles of anime. Features of the image of the heroes of his tapes have become canonical: hugedetailed eyes, a rounded head and simplified forms are all the work of Osamu.

Followed by 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 with their unusually elongated eyes, slender nose and very small mouth.

You can not get around the legendary Hayao Miyazaki. The features of his work are not only a very deep, soul-catching plot, but also beautifully drawn backgrounds that create the feeling of a fairy tale. Miyazaki does a great job with color and chiaroscuro, and his characters are easily recognizable by their round eyes, harmoniously placed on the face.

The list of styles is not limited to this, but the ones listed here can be considered the most basic. To learn more, take a look at the work of the likes of Akira Toriyama, Takahashi Rumiko, and Go Nagai.

Interesting facts

Anime people often have unrealistic proportions, for example, an adult male depicted in this technique can have a waist as thin as that of the heroine, despite a powerful physique.
The technique of drawing characters with huge eyes to convey intense surprise was borrowed by Osamu Tezuka from W alt Disney, which the founder of Mushi Productions has repeatedly confirmed.
The longest anime series has been running for 47 years.
Despite the blurry line between Japanese animation art features, there is no such thing as a loose anime style. All its varieties are clearly tied to theircreators.
The series "Sailor Moon" was shown on Russian television with virtually no censorship; the only edit was to change the young man's declaration of love to another man, replaced with a more "chaste" version: "I love you like a father."

Anime Distribution

Manga and anime have been part of Japan's culture almost since the advent of televisions. Today, more than 50 animated series and films are created annually in the Land of the Rising Sun, most of which are then translated into other languages and released in many countries around the world, including Russia.

Currently, amateur works such as doujinshi, AMV (a clip using video sequences from a series or a feature film) and writing stories based on fandoms are extremely common among fans of this art.

Such activity from fans leads to the fact that anime genres and styles expand noticeably, and large-scale events associated with it occur more often and gain more and more popularity.