Anime Quiz
The name Ghibli comes from far outside Japan, like a surprising amount of anime history.
An anime quiz with answers about the medium itself: its pioneers, studios, jargon and the way shows are made and broadcast. It asks nothing about plot twists, so there are no spoilers for any series.
Did you know?
- The family comedy 'Sazae-san' has been broadcast in Japan every week since 1969 and is recognised by Guinness World Records as the longest-running animated television series. It was also the last major series still painted on cels, only switching fully to digital production in 2013.
- Osamu Tezuka, often called the god of manga, trained as a doctor and held a medical degree, though he never practised. He drew an estimated 150,000 pages in his lifetime, and the large, expressive eyes associated with anime owe much to his love of early American cartoons.
- Many series are set in real, carefully drawn places, and fans travel to find them, a habit known in Japan as a pilgrimage to sacred sites. Small towns that appear in popular shows have recorded sharp rises in visitors, and some now print maps for anime tourists.
How anime became a global art form
In Japanese, the word anime is simply a shortened form of 'animation' and covers cartoons from any country. Elsewhere it has come to mean animation made in Japan. The oldest surviving Japanese animated films date from 1917. The modern industry took shape after Toei's animation studio was founded in 1956 with the aim of making colour features, the first of which, 'The Tale of the White Serpent', appeared in 1958.
From manga to screen
Most anime series are adaptations. Many begin as manga, comics serialised chapter by chapter in thick weekly or monthly magazines, while others come from novels or games. The labels shonen, shojo, seinen and josei do not describe genres; they name the readership a magazine is aimed at, from boys and girls to adult men and women. A series is usually paid for by a production committee, a group of companies such as a publisher, a broadcaster and a music label that share the cost and the risk.
How an episode is made
Production starts with a script and a storyboard that fixes every shot. Key animators draw the most important poses of a movement, and in-between animators add the drawings that connect them. Backgrounds are painted separately. Until the late 1990s each frame was painted by hand on a transparent sheet; today drawings are scanned or made digitally and coloured by computer. Fans use the word sakuga for scenes where the movement is especially rich and carefully drawn.
Reaching the world
Japanese series were sold abroad from the 1960s, usually dubbed and often re-edited so heavily that viewers did not know where they came from. That changed in the late 1980s and 1990s, when films and series began to be marketed openly as Japanese. Home video, fan clubs that swapped tapes with home-made subtitles, and later online streaming, which can release an episode worldwide within hours of its Tokyo broadcast, turned a domestic industry into a global one.