Anime

Anime is a Japanese shortening of the English word animation, written in katakana as アニメ, and inside Japan it means exactly that and nothing more. A Disney feature is anime. A bank's advertising mascot is anime. The narrower sense, animation made in Japan or drawn to look like it, is a distinction the export market invented and then enforced much harder than the source country ever did.

Studios in Japan were animating from the 1910s, but the shape most people picture starts with Osamu Tezuka and Astro Boy in 1963, the first weekly animated series on Japanese television. Tezuka met an impossible schedule by holding cels, reusing walk cycles and cutting to still frames with a camera pan across them. Budget shortcuts became a grammar, and the grammar outlived the budget.

The word travelled with the tapes. Akira reached Western cinemas in 1988 and 1989, Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon took the afternoon slots, Pokemon took everything else, and Spirited Away won the Academy Award for animated feature in 2003. By the streaming era Netflix and Crunchyroll were commissioning series in Tokyo directly, which makes the geographic definition of the word steadily harder to defend.