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

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

It is often published in the format of TV-series, less often - full-length pictures, and amazes with the variety of genres, plots, places and epochs in which the action takes place. This served as such a high popularity of the art in question.

The earliest style of anime has one characteristic feature - unnaturally huge and very detailed eyes of the characters, and later their size and shape began to point to the age and degree of naivety of its owner.

The history of Japanese animation

The anime story goes back to the beginning of the 20th century, when Japanese filmmakers started the first experiments in animation, taking as a basis Western techniques. Pioneers in this area were Simokawa Oten, Junichi Kochi and Saitoaro Chinam. Later, the method of application animation began to be used, and then the well-known Osamu Tezuka took up the job. He is rightfully considered the founder of modern anime.

This kind of art has a long way of development. Today, the styles of anime, its genres and views 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 it was said earlier, the "anime" style has many genres and types. They divide the audience of renting paintings according to age and other criteria.

There are only five such species:

• Kodomo - is intended for children under 12 years, mainly refers to fairy tales.
• Shounen - a category for teenagers under 18 years, designed for a male audience.
• Shojie - for girls under 18 years.
• Sainen - designed for adult men.
• Joe - is intended for girls after 18 years.

Also, the anime is divided in duration: OVA (created to be shown on video) - about 23-25 minutes, full-length - up to 120 minutes and a short, calculated for half an hour.

Genres and their description

Since the anime is a kind of cinematic art, it traces the richness of the stories and, as a consequence, genres. In most of them, they differ little from those already existing in the world cinema, but there are still a couple of exceptions.

• Anti-utopia - shows the society of a distant future, in a state of decline, often rotting from within under the onslaught of laws that suppress the person, 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 can lead a person to his current lifestyle.
• Bisenen tells of love between attractive young men, while it is just the platonic side of the relationship, physical intimacy does not take place in this genre.
• Maho-Shoedze depicts little girls endowed with magical powers.
• Furs - in this genre, the main characters are a robot or a different technique.

• Adventures in the anime style are based on fascinating stories and unusual places of action. They draw the brightness of the impressions and the energy of the plot into the painted world.
• A good example of sports genre will be the series "Free Style". Anime in this case focuses on different types of physical activity of a person, where special attention is paid to training and self-improvement process.
• Also there are Shojie-ay , which tells of love between the girls, and Shonen-ai - in fact, the same as bisenen.

Anime Styles

For the advent of Japanese animation is to thank the founder of Mushi Productions - Osamu Tezuka. It was he who was able to deduce a certain manner of rendering, starting from which, the artists developed other styles of anime. Features of the image of the heroes of his ribbons became canonical: huge detailed eyes, rounded head and simplified forms - all this is the work of Osamu.

Next comes his contemporary - Akira Matsumoto. His anime was always distinguished by the mystery and tragedy of the plot, as well as the drawing of female characters. They stand out even today, thanks to the unusual elongated shape of the eyes, a refined nose and a very small mouth.

You can not get past the legendary Hayao Miyazaki. Features of his work was not only a very deep, soul-engaging story, but also beautifully drawn backgrounds, creating a sense of a fairy tale. Miyazaki perfectly works with color and chiaroscuro, and his characters are easy to recognize by the round eyes, harmoniously located on the face.

This list of styles is not limited, but these can be considered the most basic. To find out more, you can look at the works of such people as Akira Toriyama, Takahashi Rumiko and Guo Nagai.

Interesting Facts

1. People in the style of anime often have unrealistic proportions, for example, in an adult male, depicted in this technique, the waist can be as thin as the heroine, despite the powerful physique.
2. The way to draw characters with huge eyes to convey a strong surprise was borrowed by Osamu Tezuka from Walt Disney, that the founder of the company Mushi Productions repeatedly confirmed.
3. The longest anime series has been going on for 47 years.
4. Despite the blurred line of differences between the features of the drawing in Japanese animation, the free style of anime as such does not exist. All its varieties are clearly tied to their creators.
5. The series "Sailor Moon" was shown on Russian television almost without censorship; The only amendment was a change in the recognition of the young man's love for another man, replaced by a more "chaste" version: "I love you as a father."

Spread the anime

Manga and anime have become part of the culture of Japan almost from the moment the television sets appeared. Today in the Land of the Rising Sun, more than 50 animated series and films are created annually, most of which are then translated into other languages and published in many countries of the world, including Russia.

Amateur pieces such as doujinshi, AMV (clip using a video series from a TV series or a feature-length film) and writing stories based on fandom are extremely common among fans of this art.

Such activity on the part of the fans leads to the fact that the genres and styles of the anime are expanding noticeably, and the large-scale events associated with it are happening more often and are gaining popularity.