Like the name Walt Disney, the word “anime” brings to mind not just an aesthetic but a distinctive storytelling ethos. My own first encounter with anime was at a middle-school sleepover in the mid-1990s, where I watched a bootleg VHS copy of the Japanese anime film “Akira.” It was mesmerizing.
Katsuhiro Otomo’s dystopian masterpiece was unlike anything my friends and I had experienced. The film held us in its thrall from the opening scene, in which Tokyo is silently swallowed up by a nuclear-scale blast that eventually gives birth to Neo-Tokyo, populated by biker gangs, mystics and powerful psychic beings who are the worst-kept secret of a crumbling military bureaucracy.
Everything about “Akira,” from its gamelan-inspired soundtrack to its unusually complex characters, seemed fresh and exciting — it was so new, in fact, that Americans had not yet agreed on what to call it: anime, Japanime or Japanimation. This inability to define the form did no harm to its countercultural appeal. By 1996, Roger Ebert had called anime “the fastest-growing underground cult in the movie world.”
Ebert was especially impressed by “Akira” and Mamoru Oshii’s “Ghost in the Shell,” whose imagery and themes — cyborg police officers, hacker terrorists and the nature of identity in a technologically advanced society — would inspire the filmmakers behind “The Matrix.” It’s now clear that the thrill of these early anime imports was tied to the way they anticipated the contemporary world, offering a glimpse of a more connected, paranoid and altogether less stable planet years before we got here.
“Ghost in the Shell” (1995).
But it wasn’t just the storytelling that was provocative. It was the animation itself: the strange sensation of watching the images crawl across my friend’s television screen in a way that felt distinct from American cartoons.
Anime’s style is largely inherited from the world of manga, a type of serialized comic published in magazine form. Many hit anime series and films have been adapted from the pages of Weekly Shōnen Jump, which, at its peak circulation in the ’90s, had over six million readers — many of them adolescent boys like those who appear doing martial arts on its iconic covers.
The economic model of magazines like Weekly Shōnen Jump led to many of anime’s distinctive storytelling techniques. When manga creators sell a concept for a new series to one of these magazines, they become responsible for writing and illustrating fresh pages every week, regardless of how much — or how little — of the story they have plotted out in advance. That means they often have to figure it out on the fly.
This sense of a storyteller working in real time is one of the unexpected joys of any long-running manga series. Twists and turns arise not only from the creators’ vision but also from their struggle against the ticking clock, which at times leads them to unexpected creative territory, like epic fight scenes that take up entire installments of the manga while they figure out where the plot goes next.
The explosive popularity of anime in the United States would have been unimaginable in the ’90s, when anime was limited to bootleg VHS tapes sold at head shops and record stores and a few small mail-order companies selling officially licensed anime, which had been overdubbed by English-speaking voice actors who often had little idea of what was going on in any given episode.
The Texas-based start-up Funimation, which was later absorbed by Crunchyroll, the largest global anime-only streaming service, distributed anime in the mid-1990s by working with poorly translated scripts and story summaries that were passed along by Toei Animation in Japan. “I got one that was less than two paragraphs long for a half-hour show,” Barry Watson, a former Funimation producer, told me. This presented a huge challenge in terms of generating dialogue that advanced the story, steered clear of errors and, crucially, matched the “mouth flaps” that voice actors use as the basis for counting the number of syllables they have to work with for any given line.
Ian James Corlett, an actor who was paid to write dialogue, described his first encounters with Japanese animation as utterly baffling.
As an added challenge, writers had to come up with inventive ways of placating the standards departments that policed American television broadcasts. “The Bible Belt is what you had to think of as your audience,” said the voice actor Terry Klassen, who also worked as a writer on some “Dragon Ball Z” scripts. “So anything that had to do with Eastern prayer or looking to the heavens or having different levels of spiritualism, you had to change that, take that all out and sort of make it a more nonreligious quest.” Sometimes this meant altering a character’s name — from Mr. Satan to Hercule, for example. But other times it meant rotoscoping — a technique for tracing over footage — to make changes as innocuous as transforming beer into orange juice.
In one now-infamous scene from “Dragon Ball Z,” the word “HELL” becomes a bizarre acronym, “HFIL,” meaning “Home for Infinite Losers,” on tank tops worn by a pair of ogres residing in the underworld.
Often the only edits required were to the dialogue, as in this frame from “Pokémon,” in which a Japanese snack of rice balls stuffed with pickled plums and kelp become jelly doughnuts.
But visuals were sometimes changed for reasons that are now hard to reconstruct.
In “Doraemon,” which stars an earless robotic cat from the 22nd century, a first-aid kit is replaced by a pizza.
And yet everyone involved in bringing anime to North American audiences recognized the importance of getting the story right, even if they didn’t always understand it themselves.
Two of the people who helped make that happen were Jason DeMarco and Sean Akins, creative directors at Cartoon Network, who were asked to find shows for a new block of after-school programming in 1996. (They called the block Toonami because it was a multihour “tsunami of cartoons.”) DeMarco and Akins tracked down imported anime VHS tapes at a video store catering to Japanese expatriates living in Atlanta, where Cartoon Network has its headquarters. “We would rent them and just watch them in Japanese,” DeMarco said, “just because we thought the animation and the design style was so cool.”
DeMarco told me that the creator Akira Toriyama’s “unparalleled” character design was a big part of what initially drew them to “Dragon Ball Z.” Loosely inspired by the classic Chinese novel “Journey to the West,” the series chronicles the adventures of a martial artist named Son Goku as he competes in tournaments while seeking seven “dragon balls” — seven orange crystalline orbs that can be brought together to summon an elemental dragon capable of granting one wish.
Before partnering with Cartoon Network, Funimation had shopped “Dragon Ball Z” to networks like ABC, which passed. “They said that the cartoons in the U.S. need to be like ‘Scooby-Doo,’ where every show has a beginning and end and you don’t need to worry about the next one,” said Daniel Cocanougher, a founder of Funimation. “This episodic-type stuff, it doesn’t work in the U.S.,” he recalled the network saying. “Dragon Ball Z” would end up being the first blockbuster anime series on American television.
Toonami picked up the first 56 episodes for a daily after-school broadcast that started in 1998. It was an immediate hit. “Within a year, we were the No. 1 show on Cartoon Network and helped take them from 40 million households to 80 million households,” Cocanougher told me. Just a few years after its debut on Toonami, he said, the series had helped make Funimation the fifth-largest distributor of VHS tapes and DVDs in the United States, just behind Columbia and Universal. “There was a generation of kids that got to see a cartoon that took its characters seriously, where people lived and died,” DeMarco told me. “There were real stakes, and people loved and had families, and it wasn’t just reset after every episode.”
The one-two punch of “Dragon Ball Z” and “Pokémon,” which also found success in America, served as a foundation for everything that followed. “Those two shows,” DeMarco said, “were like the Big Bang” for anime fandom in America. Both series ostensibly revolved around fighting tournaments and featured characters complex enough to persuade American schoolchildren to devote an unusual degree of attention and time to the world they inhabited. But it was the “Pokémon” series, in which young handlers collect and train magical creatures, that took things to the next level by kicking off a merchandising explosion to further immerse fans in the world of anime.
“Pokémon” became a hit on the WB network soon after “Dragon Ball Z,” and it would eventually become the highest-grossing media franchise in history, an ever-expanding universe of trading cards, toys, clothing and branded snacks.
Shows like “Dragon Ball Z” and “Pokémon” were largely aimed at children; different as they were from American cartoons, they were still cartoons. What got American adults interested in anime was the singular artistic vision of Hayao Miyazaki, who cultivated a large audience among cinaesthetes.
Just a few years before his movie “Spirited Away” won an Academy Award for best animated feature, in 2003, I saw his 1988 film “My Neighbor Totoro” at a small film festival in Minneapolis. Miyazaki’s work changed the way I looked at anime, and animation more broadly, in the same way David Lynch changed the way I looked at cinema; both filmmakers gave free rein to their subconscious and steadfastly refused to choose between style and substance. Winning the Oscar put Miyazaki in the same league as Walt Disney, earning anime the same kind of artistic credibility that Disney had garnered through films like “Bambi” and “Fantasia.”
Signs of anime’s influence on mainstream American pop culture came as early as 1999, when “South Park” parodied the Pokémon craze in an episode called “Chinpokomon.” (Five years later another “South Park” episode would parody “Dragon Ball Z.”) In the music world, meanwhile, an enduring connection between anime and hip-hop began to emerge as early as 2001, when RZA of the Wu Tang Clan rapped, “Sit in the sun six hours then I charge up like Goku,/Dragon Ball Z, imagine you’re raggin’ me.”
From this early stage on, Black Americans were overrepresented in anime fandom. Arthell Isom, whose D’ART Shtajio is Japan’s first Black-owned animation studio, shared his theory with me that Black Americans identified with anime protagonists who often come from the margins of society. Perhaps, he suggested, they were also so used to being absent from the media they consumed that they had an easier time watching and identifying with Asian protagonists than white audiences did.
A decade or so later, the generation of rappers who grew up watching Toonami after school seemed to take every opportunity to announce their anime fandom, from Lil Uzi Vert (“Throw up gang signs, Naruto”) to Megan Thee Stallion (“Got the moves like I’m Ryu/Yellow diamonds, Pikachu/When I switch my hair to blonde/I’m finna turn up like Goku”).
No aspect of pop culture has remained untouched: In the fashion world, the streetwear label Supreme marketed a line of clothing festooned with images from “Akira,” and in recent years a number of Olympians and professional athletes have modeled their victory poses on anime characters.
International revenues now represent more than half of the estimated $37 billion Japanese animation industry, and North America is the largest market outside Asia. The Americans watching the most are Gen Z, people in their teens and 20s for whom anime is synonymous with animation in the same way that Walt Disney once was for baby boomers. A recent survey of over 4,000 American adults showed that 42 percent of all Gen Z respondents watched anime every week, far higher than the 25 percent of Gen Z respondents who followed the N.F.L.
Like Champagne in France, something can be anime only if it is produced in Japan. But the boundaries of the genre have become blurrier as anime’s stylistic markers show up in the work of American and European animators, beginning as early as 2005 with Nickelodeon’s “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” which replicated the look and feel of anime but was made in the United States. More recently, American shows have been retrofitted into anime. The popular American cartoon series “Rick and Morty,” for example, shows few obvious anime influences, but its creators are such big fans that in 2024 they debuted a stand-alone series called “Rick and Morty: The Anime,” which was produced in Japan by a seasoned animator.
“Rick and Morty: The Anime” (2024).
The trend toward reworking Western intellectual property as anime is accelerating. When I visited Isom’s animation studio in Tokyo, he had recently finished work on a “Star Wars” anime for Lucasfilm. And in November, when I met Gianni Sirgy, a content creator who helps run a TikTok channel called TheAnimeMen, he told me that he had been hired to help promote a “Lord of the Rings” anime film produced by Warner Bros. Entertainment. This made me wonder: Now that anime is truly mainstream, will the form’s outsider appeal be sacrificed as part of a scheme to create yet another delivery system for the same intellectual property that Hollywood has been regurgitating for decades?
If anything is to save anime from becoming rootless and homogenized to the point of being indistinguishable from other mass-market animation, it is probably going to be the same structural forces that have made it so hard for Hollywood to figure out: For one thing, despite being relatively cheap to produce, anime requires expertise that is in short supply relative to the demand for new content. A number of animation studios closed in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, and as each generation of animators retires, there are fewer young recruits to replace them. It is, after all, an unforgiving industry. Young animators work long hours for little pay in Japan, typically making less than $13,000 per year, according to Bloomberg.
Intellectual property also works differently in Japan than in Hollywood. Most anime series are owned by the authors of the original manga, so they retain the rights to the characters, which makes it impossible for a company or a studio to leverage their creations into oblivion without their consent. The singular vision of the creator prevails, rather than the logic of the corporate boardroom; anime series tend to end when the creator walks away from the drawing table.
Above all, though, anime may be saved by its sheer madness. There is nothing especially marketable, after all, about a film like “My Neighbor Totoro,” in which a pair of children whose mother may or may not be dying follow anthropomorphic dust mites into a hidden world where they befriend a cat who is also a bus. The psycho-spiritual trauma of the mecha-versus-monsters epic “Neon Genesis Evangelion” can scarcely be described, much less audience-tested for the sake of nervous financial backers. Anime is the realm of the underdog and the weirdo, whose fantastically bizarre imaginations have created a medium defined by its difficulty. And if there’s one thing Hollywood doesn’t seem up for right now, it’s a challenge.
“Neon Genesis Evangelion” (1995).