(Note: for convenience, where English-language titles have been established for Japanese films, they are used in this article even when they are not accurate translations. For example, the 1958 theatrical feature Hakuja Den, or The White Snake Enchantress, is referred to by its 1961 American title, Panda and the Magic Serpent.)

One of the earliest anime remakes: Astro Boy's Adventures were retold in a new, higher-quality, more melodramatic 52-episode serial in 1980-81. Courtesy of Fred Patten. © 1980, Tezuka Productions Co.

The earliest Japanese animation was by individual film hobbyists inspired by American and European pioneer animators. The first three Japanese cartoons were one-reelers of one to five minutes each, in 1917. Animation of the 1920s ran from one-to-three reels. A few were imitations of foreign cartoons, such as the Felix the Cat series, but most were dramatizations of Oriental folk tales in traditional Japanese art styles.

Notable silent-era animators include Oten Shimokawa, Junichi Kouchi, Seitaro Kitayama, Sanae Yamamoto (whose 1924 The Mountain Where Old Women Are Abandoned seems to be the earliest anime title still extant), Yasuji Murata, and the master of paper silhouette animation, Noboru Ofuji. Most of them worked in small home studios, though they came to be financed by Japanese theatrical companies which provided production money in exchange for distribution rights.

During the 1930s, folk tales began to give way to Western-style fast-paced humor. These gradually reflected the growing influence of Japanese militarism, such as Mituyo Seo's 1934 11-minute cartoon Private 2nd-Class Norakuro, an adaptation of Suihou Tagawa's popular newspaper comic strip about an unlucky dog soldier in a funny-animal army. After Japan went to war in China in 1937, the need to get productions approved by government censors resulted in a steady stream of militaristic propaganda cartoons. In 1943, the Imperial military government decided Japan needed its first animated feature. Mituyo Seo was authorized to assemble a team of animators for the task. Their 74-minute Momotaro's Gods-Blessed Sea Warriors was a juvenile adventure showing the Imperial Navy as brave, cute anthropomorphic animal sailors resolutely liberating Indonesia and Malaysia from the buffoonish foreign-devil (with horns) Allied occupiers--too late for even wishful dreaming, as it was barely released (in April 1945) before the war's end.

Japan's World War II battlewagon was restored and sent into space to defend Earth in Space Battleship Yamato (US title: Star Blazers). Courtesy of Fred Patten. © 1974, 1980, Yoshinobu Nishizaki

Animation returned to the individual filmmakers right after World War II. However, they were hampered for the next decade by the slow recovery of the Japanese economy. They also found their amateur films competing with the polished cartoons from American studios, which poured into Japan with the Occupation forces. The first Japanese full-color animation did not appear until 1955. It soon became clear that the future of Japanese animation lay in adopting the Western studio system. (However, independent anime artists have never disappeared. Thus, the first Japanese animator to achieve international name recognition was Yoji Kuri, whose art films of usually less than a minute each appeared in international film festivals throughout the 1960s and 70s.)