Old Japanese Anime

I have no knowledge of these old films and I enjoyed researching a bit for this topic. The very first anime was Imokawa Mukuzo Genkanban no Maki or The Story of the Concierge Mukuzo Imokawa. This anime was created in 1917 by a man named Ōten Shimokawa and is considered to be a lost film. After many tragic events concerning tsunami's and other natural causes, many older anime were destroyed.  There are only small footages of it actually existing and it was drawn out with chalk on a blackboard creating  movement through each shot like a flip book. This process is used with Celluloid cels to make stop motion films. Compared to our acetate films in today's day and age, celluloid was expensive and difficult to produce.

Since not much is known about these lost films let's switch gears and talk about some of the new day and age anime. A great example of an old anime in this era is Astro Boy created by Osamu Tezuka first as a manga in 1951 then produced the first anime series in 1963. There are many adaptations of this anime being as it was so popular. It is considered to be the first popular anime. This anime is unique in many ways being as it is the very first popular anime, it was also the first anime to have aired under 30 minutes thus creating the average episode length we know today, and even the first to be aired overseas.

Astro Boy is known as the god of manga with how popular it became. It started a whole era of inspiration for its fans which was a little more than 40% of Japan at the time. The anime adaptation ran for 193 episodes then was produced as an anime film and adapted by America creating their own film of it. Astro Boy is known as the embodiment of anime for obvious reasons.