The History of Anime: From Astro Boy to Global Phenomenon

The History of Anime: From Astro Boy to Global Phenomenon

By Yoshi | Japan Unveiled

I want to begin with a number that I find genuinely astonishing when I consider what it represents.

In 2023, the global anime market was valued at approximately 25 billion US dollars. That figure — generated by streaming rights, home video, merchandise, theatrical releases, licensing, and the various commercial forms that anime takes in the international market — represents a growth from approximately 2 billion dollars in 2002. The industry has grown by more than twelve times in twenty years.

More striking than the commercial figure is what it represents in human terms: hundreds of millions of people worldwide who watch Japanese animation regularly, who have learned about Japan through it, who have learned Japanese because of it, who have built significant portions of their social and cultural identities around it. An art form that was, in 1960, a domestic Japanese entertainment product sold to domestic Japanese children has become one of the defining media forms of the contemporary world.

How did this happen? The trajectory from a small studio in postwar Tokyo to a global medium consumed by hundreds of millions of people is one of the most extraordinary stories in the history of entertainment, and it is worth telling in full.

The Origins: Before Anime Was Anime

The story of Japanese animation begins before anime as a term or a category existed, in the specific circumstances of Japanese culture in the early twentieth century.

Japanese artists encountered Western animation — primarily the early works of Winsor McCay, Bray Studios, and later Disney — through imports and through the study of animators who traveled to learn the techniques. The first Japanese animated films — Saru-Kani Gassen (The Monkey-Crab Battle, 1917) and Namakura Gatana (The Dull Sword, 1917) — were produced in the same year, suggesting that multiple Japanese artists were independently exploring the same animation techniques simultaneously.

These early Japanese animations were short, technically simple, and produced for theatrical exhibition — the same context in which Western animation developed in the same period. They were Japanese in their visual style and subject matter but were exploring the same medium that Western animators were simultaneously exploring.

The development of Japanese animation through the 1920s and 1930s produced a small but growing industry, producing short theatrical features and, increasingly, propaganda content as Japan moved toward military conflict. The wartime animation period in Japan — which included feature-length animated propaganda films including Momotaro’s Sea Eagles (1943) and Momotaro: Sacred Sailors (1945), the latter being Japan’s first animated feature film — developed significant technical capability that would not be lost after the war’s end.

Osamu Tezuka and the Founding of the Modern Form

The modern history of anime begins with one person: Osamu Tezuka, whose influence on Japanese animation — and on Japanese popular culture more broadly — is so thoroughgoing that the phrase “God of Manga” that his fans applied to him understates his actual significance.

I have written a full article about Tezuka on this blog, and I will not repeat it in full here. The relevant points for the history of anime:

Tezuka founded Mushi Production in 1961 and produced Tetsuwan Atom (Astro Boy in the international release) for broadcast on Fuji Television beginning in January 1963 — the first weekly animated television series in Japan. The specific decisions that Tezuka made in producing this series established the economic and aesthetic model that the entire Japanese animation industry would follow for the next several decades.

The economic model: Tezuka produced the series at a cost significantly below what was economically sustainable by accepting a broadcast fee that did not cover production costs, in exchange for retaining all merchandise and licensing rights. The bet was that Astro Boy merchandise would generate sufficient revenue to make the series profitable overall. The bet was correct — Astro Boy merchandise was enormously successful — and this model (low broadcast fees, high merchandise revenue) became the standard structure of the anime industry.

The aesthetic model: Tezuka’s animation used limited animation techniques — fewer frames per second than the Disney standard, static backgrounds, repeated use of the same animated sequences — to dramatically reduce production costs while maintaining narrative and emotional engagement through strong character design and storytelling. This limited animation approach, derided by some as inferior to the full animation of Disney, was actually an innovation — a specific technique for producing emotionally compelling animation at a cost that made weekly television series economically possible.

The combination of the economic model and the aesthetic model established by Astro Boy defined Japanese animation in the television era and made possible the explosion of anime production that followed.

The 1960s and 1970s: Building the Genre Vocabulary

The decades following Astro Boy saw the rapid development of the genre vocabulary that contemporary anime inherits — the specific story types, character archetypes, and aesthetic conventions that make anime recognisable as a form.

Giant robot anime (mecha): Mazinger Z (1972), produced by Go Nagai’s Dynamic Productions and animated by Toei Animation, established the giant robot anime genre — a distinctively Japanese genre combining the spectacle of large-scale mechanical combat with the coming-of-age narrative of the young pilot who controls the robot. Mecha anime became one of the dominant genres of the 1970s and 1980s and produced, through the Gundam franchise beginning in 1979, some of the most commercially significant and most culturally influential anime in the form’s history.

Sports and competition anime: Ashita no Joe (1970), the boxing anime that became a cultural phenomenon and whose protagonist’s death produced genuine public mourning, established the template for the sports competition anime that remains one of the genre’s most consistently popular categories. The combination of physical competition, personal growth, and the specific emotional intensity of athletic rivalry proved as compelling in animated form as in live action.

Magical girl anime (mahou shojo): Mahōtsukai Sally (1966), the first magical girl anime, established a genre that would become one of the defining categories of anime for female audiences — a genre whose evolution from the relatively simple original toward the complex, deconstructive works of the contemporary era (Puella Magi Madoka Magica, 2011) is one of the more interesting trajectories in anime history.

Hayao Miyazaki and the Cinema of Wonder

The history of anime cannot be told without sustained attention to Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli — the director and the studio that produced some of the most universally beloved animated films in the history of any animation tradition.

I have written a dedicated article about Miyazaki on this blog. In the context of anime history, what matters is what Ghibli’s films proved: that anime, produced with sufficient craft and genuine artistic ambition, could achieve the level of cultural and critical recognition available to the best live-action cinema.

My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), Princess Mononoke (1997), Spirited Away (2001) — these films accumulated critical recognition, commercial success, and cultural significance that extended far beyond the anime audience and demonstrated to the international film community that Japanese animation was a form capable of the full range of human artistic expression.

Spirited Away won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2003 — the first non-English-language film to win the award — and remains one of the highest-grossing films in Japanese box office history. Its international recognition changed the conversation about anime in the international cultural mainstream in ways that no television anime had been able to.

The 1990s: The Anime Explosion and the International Discovery

The 1990s were the decade in which anime as an international cultural phenomenon became genuinely significant — driven by a combination of increased production quality, the development of specific works with international resonance, and the beginning of the internet-enabled fan community that would eventually transform the global anime market.

Dragon Ball Z: the sequel series to Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball began international broadcast in the early 1990s and produced, in many countries, the first large-scale encounter of non-Japanese audiences with anime. Dragon Ball Z’s specific combination of extended combat sequences, power escalation, and emotional character relationships proved extraordinarily compelling for young male audiences worldwide.

Sailor Moon: the Sailor Moon anime (1992) was the first anime to achieve significant international female audience engagement — demonstrating that anime was not only a genre for boys and establishing the magical girl genre in international consciousness.

Neon Genesis Evangelion: when Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion aired in 1995-1996, it was immediately recognised by the Japanese anime community as something new — a mecha anime that used the genre conventions of giant robots and apocalyptic combat to explore the interior psychological landscape of its protagonist with an intensity and a darkness that had no precedent in the form. Evangelion’s final two episodes — the notorious inward-looking psychological sequences that replaced the expected action climax — divided the audience dramatically and generated the theatrical film End of Evangelion (1997) that provided the conventional climax the television ending withheld. The impact of Evangelion on anime’s ambitions — its demonstration that animation could engage with psychological complexity, existential philosophy, and genuine emotional darkness — was lasting and significant.

Pokémon and the mainstream breakthrough: the Pokémon franchise — beginning with the Game Boy games in 1996 and the anime series in 1997 — achieved the first genuinely mass-market international breakthrough for a Japanese anime property, reaching children worldwide through a combination of the games, the anime, and the trading card game. Pokémon demonstrated that Japanese animation could achieve the kind of global mainstream commercial success previously available only to Hollywood properties.

The 2000s: The Decade of Diversification

The 2000s saw both the maturation of anime as an international cultural category and significant diversification of the forms it took.

The fansub era: the development of broadband internet access enabled the fansub community — the fan translators who subtitled anime episodes and distributed them online, making current Japanese anime available to international audiences weeks or months after their Japanese broadcast. This was technically piracy and was also the mechanism by which millions of international anime fans encountered the medium in its contemporary Japanese form for the first time. The fansub community built the international anime audience that the legal streaming services would eventually capture.

The slice-of-life revolution: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (2006), produced by Kyoto Animation, demonstrated that anime set in contemporary Japanese high school life — with no fighting, no magic, no giant robots — could generate international enthusiasm through character depth, production quality, and the specific pleasure of spending time in a well-realized fictional world.

The light novel adaptation wave: the accelerating adaptation of light novels — the Japanese pulp fiction category I have written about separately — into anime produced a specific type of story that dominated the 2000s anime landscape: the harem romantic comedy, the school-based fantasy, the supernatural romance.

The 2010s and Beyond: The Streaming Era

The 2010s transformed anime’s international reach through the development of legal streaming platforms — primarily Crunchyroll and subsequently Netflix — that made current Japanese anime available to international audiences simultaneously with its Japanese broadcast.

The simultaneous global availability of anime — the same episode available in Japan, the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia on the same day — created the conditions for anime to become, for the first time, a genuinely global cultural conversation. The week when a specific episode of Attack on Titan generated worldwide discussion was the week when anime achieved a new level of global cultural presence.

Attack on Titan (Shingeki no Kyojin, 2013): the series that most directly demonstrated anime’s capacity for the kind of large-scale dramatic impact previously available only to prestige live-action television.

Demon Slayer (Kimetsu no Yaiba, 2019): whose film Mugen Train became the highest-grossing film in Japanese cinema history.

Jujutsu Kaisen, Spy x Family, Chainsaw Man, Bocchi the Rock, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End — the contemporary anime landscape is producing extraordinary work at a pace that the industry has never matched, driven by the global revenue that international streaming has made available.

The trajectory from Tezuka’s Astro Boy to the global streaming era is one of the most remarkable cultural journeys in entertainment history. The form that began as children’s television programming in a small studio in postwar Tokyo is now a global medium with hundreds of millions of viewers and a creative output that includes some of the finest storytelling produced in any medium in the contemporary era.

— Yoshi 📺 Central Japan, 2026

Enjoyed this? You might also like: “Osamu Tezuka: The God of Manga Who Changed Everything” and “How Anime Changed the Way the World Sees Japan” — both available on Japan Unveiled.