Theme: Anime

Anime refers to Animation produced in Japan. Anime has a number of distinctive differences from regular mainstream animation. It deals with subject matter in often more complex ways than the formulas of US animation, which is largely perceived as being for children.

Anime can be recognised by distinctive features. One of these is the design of the characters, which often (although not always) come with oversized eyes that can take up half their face. Other features can include wild and colourful hair or elongated bodies that can be three-quarters legs.

Anime can be pitched to young girls (shoujo) or young boys (shonin). There is also a body of anime that has often perverse sexual content (hentai). Plots covers fantasy subjects, talking animals, animal transformation and epic fantasy, or science-fiction themes like Cyberpunk, space opera, superhero and power-suit fantasies.

One distinctive genre to emerge from anime was that of the giant robot genre of 1960s tv, concerning giant human-powered robots and Mecha. This led to the Transformers fad of the 1980s, an anime tv series designed as a spinoff of the toy line.

Anime had been produced since the 1910s, gained popularity in the 1960s and 70s primarily on tv. The breakthrough film was Akira (1988), which created a cult for anime in the West. This had led to a fandom that has its own conventions and fans who cosplays as characters. Anime fandom has grown to the extent that there is now a far larger audience for anime outside of Japan than among native Japanese audiences.

From the 1990s onwards, there have been a number of live-action film adaptations of anime, made both by Japanese and Hollywood filmmakers. These are covered under Animation in Live-Action.