Browse Items (17 total)

Katsudō Shashin (1907) consists of a series of cartoon images on fifty frames of a celluloid strip and lasts three seconds at sixteen frames per second.The frames were not produced by photographing the images, but were impressed onto film using a…

In 1910s, animations were produced in Japan for the first time. There were short films lasting about 2-5 minutes, using the motifs from Japanese folk tales or hilarious cartoons at that time. It's acknowledged that the former cartoonist, Kouchi…

Kitayama Eiga Seisakujo (Kitayama Movie Factory) was the first true animation studio in Japan. It was founded by Seitaro Kitayama (1888-1945) in 1921. Kitayama was originally a painter and an entrepreneur who published art magazines. He applied the…

Masaoka found the new studio called Masaoka Cinematic Art Research Center which marked the transformation of anime. With adequate funding mostly from his family, he introduced sound technique and special-effects in filming, steering the industry from…

Momotaro: Sacred Sailors is the first Japanese feature-length (74min) animated film. It was directed by Mitsuyo Seo (1911-2010), who was commissioned to make a propaganda film for World War II by the Japanese Naval Ministry. Inspired by Disney's…

In 1956, Toei Doga (Toei Animation Studio) was established for the aim of producing animations following the mode of the Disney musical and fantasy genres, and became Japan’s 1st large-scale studio committed to producing animated films. The year…

The Astro Boy series were made by Osamu Tezuka, the father of anime and one of the most influential cartoonists in the 20th century. The popularity of Astro Boy as manga originally and later TV Series ignited the mass production of TV animations…

1984 witnessed the release of Miyazaki’s 1st feature Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, after the success of which Ghibli studio was founded, headed by the directors Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, and the producer Toshio Suzuki. The name Ghibli…

2004 witnessed the release of two bluckbusters: Howl’s Moving Castle and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, both of which were digitally made with heavy use of CGI. Miyazaki’s work is another adaptation from a best-selling British novel; Ghost in the…

Your Name is directed by Makoto Shinkai and is a surprisingly huge commercial success. Also being praised for its excellent animation and heart-warming story, the film becomes the fourth-highest-grossing film of all time in Japan, and Different…

Cutout animation is the type of stop-motion animation that uses flat characters, props and backgrounds cut from light materials like paper and fabric and pieced together for movements and performance. The oldest surviving animated feature film in the…

Digital animation means to create moving images via computers using both 2D and 3D graphics, and has largely influenced the production and aesthetics of both animation and live-action films. The introduction of digital media resulted in the use of…

In 1990s, Japan began incorporating computers into the animation process. The pioneering works such as Ghost in the Shell and Princess Mononoke melded cel animation with computer-generated images. By the late 1990s, many studios had begun drawing…

Every second of (animated) film contains 24 frames and needs 12-24 drawings. Animators working with "ones" means they have one exposure per frame and thus 24 drawings per second; working with "twos" means two exposures per frame and thus 12 drawings…

In 1927, the US released its first talkie film The Jazz Singer, which inspired Japanese film companies to add sound to their works as well. Among them the Shochiku company released Madame and the Courtesan in 1931 as the first Japanese live-action…

Cels first refered to the sheets of cellulose nitrate that were in wide use until the 1940s, in spite of their color tinge and flammability. Clear cellulose acetate became the nonflammable alternative afterwards. “The crucial aspects of cel…

Paprika is co-written and directed by Satoshi Kon, based on Yasutaka Tsutsui's 1993 novel of the same name, telling about a psychologist who uses a device called DC Mini that allows therapists to enter the dreams of their patients for cure. It's…