Anime

Japanese anime is a big influence not only to the toys, comics, movies, and video games, but most importantly to children all over the world. This Japanese animation is distinct for its colorful images with different large-eyed characters interacting with one another in various settings based on interesting plots. Most of the storyline of anime are influenced by manga, or Japanese comics.

The very first famous anime series was Astroboy, which came out during the early 1960s. Ten years later, giant robots were introduced in the anime of the 1970s, Science Ninja Team Gatchaman and Mazinger Z. The Gundam franchise began in the 1980s and the anime industry grew not just in Japan but also overseas.

Released in Japan in 2001, the anime film was watched by around 23 million people and grossed about 30 billion yen amounting to approximately US $250 million. It beat Titanic and became the highest grossing movie in Japan. It won first prize in the Berlin Film Festival of 2002. The film was also the first anime production to receive an Oscar. It won the Oscar for the Best Animated Feature Film category during the 75th Annual Academy Awards in 2003. The film also received awards fro the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, the New York Film Critics Circle, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

Innocence: Ghost in the Shell, released in Japan on March 2004, with a $20 million US production cost, was one of the feature films in the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.

The most striking and shared feature of the characters in Japanese anime are their saucer-like, large eyes. Apparently, the reason why the characters have large eyes is that because the anime artists believe that this particular feature allows the characters to better show their emotions.