evolution.

Changes in technology, important cultural events, economic shifts, innovative practitioners,

they all contribute to the this flowing timeline.

And styles can change drastically in just a few years, triggered by something as small

of a single series or movie.

There are really fascinating, clear patterns that emerge when you look into a medium in

chronological order.

Watching how these trends repeat and develop is something i'm really fascinated by.

Your favorite character design or animation cut will without a doubt have its roots in

shows from 30/40 years ago.

It's both important and extremely interesting to see how everything links together in one

giant web of influence.

Firstly we need to track that web all the way back to it's roots, with the birth of

animation in Japan.

The first wave of japanese animation came at the start of the 20th century.

During the early decades, a number of anime films were produced.

It's an interesting period to cover because there wasn't a whole lot of animation being

made in Japan, and the stuff that was being made was propaganda material commissioned

by the government.

Momotaro's Sea Eagles is a good example of this era.

Obviously black and white, very slow, simple movements with static painted backgrounds.

Lots of the animations in each scene are loops of the same 4-5 frames.

Movies like this were jam packed with political propaganda, pushing different idealisms from

the Japanese government.

Everything was directly correlated with the world war.

Hakujaden in 1958 is another good example, the film is almost completely flat in it's

dimensions, almost like a puppet show.

It really took a long time before there was enough creative control and resources for

the medium to start developing.

I mean the 30s, 40s and 50s moved at a snail's pace compared to the later decades.

The medium really struggled to find a stylistic identity.

But that definitely changed as we go into the 60s.

The 1960s was very much a stylistic kickstart for anime.

It saw the birth of the anime TV series.

Multiple, long running series started to appear every year, with that came opportunities for

directors and animators to really express their own styles, this started the speedy

stylistic evolution of anime.

Certain titles started to influence each other and distinct trends started to emerge as more

and more shows were made.

The early 60s is a period that would essentially shape the whole medium, what happened here

is very important.

A good starting point to observe this is Tezuka's Astro Boy in 1963, the catalyst for this anime

boom.

The characteristics of this show become a stylistic base point for almost everything

that follows.

One of the most important being the show's smart, simple design.

Allowing both rich emotional expression while maintaining a realistic style of animation.

Obviously Japanese production studios weren't yet operating at the same level as other animation

studios like Disney at the time so movement had to be used resourcefully.

Astro Boy's character design was very intelligent.

Movable joints like elbows and knees had almost no detail, leaving any complexity for static

aspects like his belt or his hair, this allowed Astro Boy to look interesting but also made

him very easy to animate.

Emotions were expressed through his hands and face, which leads onto another important

element used in the series, the eyes.

Astro Boy's eyes are very recognisable, because it's a style that's still very

popular today.

They're big and bold, allowing animators to express a lot of information using very

simple visuals.

Backgrounds were even more limited, they were expressive but lacked detail and never really

moved, sometimes block colours or gradients filled up the whole screen.

We see these characteristics continued and developed upon into the 60s with shows like

Tetsujin and Prince Planet.

As the decade progressed, a number of stylistic changes started to take place, mainly influenced

by the revolutionary introduction of colour.

Kimba The White Lion in 1965 is a great place to look, you can see here the stark improvements

from Astro Boy and Tetsujin, the core style is still very simple but the backgrounds for

example are far more detailed and sometimes even dynamic.

Colour allowed them to be so much more expressive with their backgrounds, using large scale

painted landscapes for settings.

Character design detail also improved, not only in details of elements like clothing

but allowing that detail to move with more fluidity.

Action saw a massive quality increase.

From the quick, scarcely animated scenes in Astro Boy and Tetsujin, Kimba had a bigger

focus on movement and scale.

This allowed them to add a lot more emotion and weight into their action scenes.

These slight improvements continued throughout the 60s, highlighted even more so in 1967's

Speed Racer.

By this time we're seeing animation that we're more used to seeing today.

1969's Dororo is very noteworthy.

Where the other series of the 60s were very much for a younger audience, Dororo targeted

a more mature audience with more dark, violent imagery.

Lot's of death and fighting that was absent from a lot of it's predecessors.

Dororo also took a heavy influence from cinema, classic samurai films from the 50s and 60s

being a clear influence.

This is possibly one of the most important aspects, using cinematic techniques to push

the medium in it's own stylistic direction.

Lighting, composition and more complex animation all played a part in molding anime of the

late 60s.

And this regularity in TV anime caused an increase in development, more progress was

made in this decade than was made during the first 30/40 years of the medium.

Production teams began to grow and larger creative risks were taken.

Experimental productions are usually the catalyst for innovation.

In 1971, Osamu Dezaki proved this with Ashita no Joe, possibly one of the most progressive

works in the medium so far.

It took the TV anime format that had been established and injected it with a cinematic

flare.

This could be a response to how prosperous and experimental the movie industry had become

in the 60s.

One of the most obvious changes is the huge leap in character detail and animation.

Compared to even 5 years ago, Dezaki's characters are far more detailed and utilize movement

more effectively.

This is mirrored in Lupin III the same year, at the time, these were some of the most detailed

characters the medium had seen, with some of the most expressive animation.

You'll notice also that these shows were aimed at a much older audience.

Were the likes of Astro Boy and Kimba were aimed as a younger teenage audience, Joe and

Lupin had a much older demographic.

What starts to develop in a really interesting way in the 70s in the animation of human elements,

we start to see it a lot in Joe and Lupin with their more realistic character designs

and detailed facial expressions but it's in the more subtle shows that this really

starts.

If you look at Heidi, Girl of the Alps from 1974, there's a huge focus on the animation

of things like facial expressions and body movement.

Unlike almost everything that i've mentioned so far, Heidi didn't have action to portray

strong emotions, so animation had to be focused in the small details.

There are a number of shows that echo this development like Nobody's Boy Remi and later,

Akagi No Anne, the amount of detail put into a single facial expression in this show was

spectacular, unlike really anything the medium had seen.

Animation was no longer a scarcely used tool for key scenes, it was now being utilised

in the intricacies of a show.

Background art is also something that grows very heavily in these shows, these backgrounds

were created with such skill but also a level of consistency, they blend with the animation

of the show and start to form incredibly immersive worlds.

Another important development that strived in different areas was the boom of Mech anime

in the 70s, or Giant Robot anime.

This is a really important development because it dominates the industry for about 20 years.

Some of the early titles such as Casshan or Grendizer in 1974 show the beginnings of this

trend.

Obviously they all develop from a lot of the sci-fi shows in the 60s but it's here where

they start to really create a specific identity.

Mechanical animation was something really unique to Anime, shows like Yamato and Tekkman

are prime examples of how japanese animators were making this their speciality.

It would become something that Japan would be known for worldwide.

Loads of complex, detailed mechanical animations started to appear.

So much so that the production of Space Battleship Yamato included a dedicated team for Mechanical

design: Studio Nue.

Leading us into one of the single most important titles for the medium, Mobile Suit Gundam

in 1979.

A show that would become the stylistic benchmark for the next decade of anime.

The legendary Kunio Okawara was behind the mechanical design for this series, possible

making the single most important set of designs the medium had seen so far.

It wasn't just the complexity of the mech designs that are important here, it's the

level to which they're animated, it's simple outstanding, and crazy to think that

just 15 years before Astro Boy was just beginning to incorporate what is now relatively basic

animation.

And this development in mechanical animation continues into the 80s where it becomes one

of the most important areas of the medium.

There's a huge wave of mech anime that come during the early 80s, and instantly you can

see how fast the medium is developing stylistically.

I want to start with Macross in 1982.

What's important to see here is the development of specific areas.

Dynamic, animated backgrounds for instance, this is something that really starts to develop

in the 80s.

Before, TV anime would have simple images or layered images, very rarely would the backgrounds

or environments move.

In Macross the line between foreground and background start to blur, and this becomes

one of the most important technical developments.

Also, how characters and objects are drawn change, Macross has that sketchy style animation

that you seen in Mobile Suit Gundam, this time, far more detailed and dynamic.

This is a big change from the bolder, more solid line work of previous TV anime, and

it opens up opportunities for more unique movement.

This causes really important details like hair movement and clothing detail, aspects

that were sorely missed until this point.

Macross really set the standard for TV mech anime, and you can see how that reflects into

other shows like Armoured Trooper Votoms, one of my personal favourites and Mospeada.

But it would be Gundam that once again pushed this area of the medium.

A few years later in 1985, Zeta Gundam was released, you can see instantly the improvements

in shading and line detail.

Also, the mechanical design has improved so much.

A year later in 1986 you can see this happening again in Gundam ZZ.

I think one of the most notable developments is the consistency of everything.

There's no longer a big quality gap between backgrounds and characters or one scene and

another, everything is as detailed as it needs to be and it all fits together really nicely.

As I was saying earlier, experimentation is usually the catalyst for development.

You can see how the experimental shows of the 80s mirror the developments of the decade.

Starting with Urusei Yatsura in 1981.

This is, i think, one of the very first shows that really start to resemble modern anime.

This, and a handful of other shows really became the standard for non-mech anime in

the 80s, and then kind of all anime after this decade.

The show's colourful aesthetic and exaggerated visual presence becomes a staple of japanese

animation.

Aspects like the character's hair and the bright backgrounds are all extremely important

developments.

Another big change in the 80s was the introduction of the OVA (productions that went straight

to video), allowing creators to bring to life projects that didn't quite fit the TV or Movie

template.

This started with Dallos in 1983, and you can see instantly how it differs from almost

everything else, it has it's own unique, maybe darker atmosphere and imagery.

And again with Angel's Egg in 1984, a really unique, visual style that really pushed the

kind of art-house aesthetic into the medium.

You can see influences from very specific areas like eastern european cinema here that

definitely hadn't had the chance to appear before.

These OVAs are definitely steps into the foundation of future styles.

This is around the time Studio Gainax were founded, one of the first modern anime studios.

They kind of revolutionised how a studio worked and pushed the boundaries of what a smaller

team could achieve, subsequently pushing their own style and influence, which you'll see

this in later years.

These OVAs also played a big part in the development of the cyberpunk look later in the decade,

before Akira came along, titles like Megazone 23 and Bubblegum Crisis kickstarted that whole

cyberpunk sub genre, elements that anime is renowned for like large futuristic cities

and neon imagery.

But before that we have a wave of movies that would really define a whole generation of

films to come, this is of course the birth of Studio Ghibli, a coming together of some

of the industry's most important individuals.