Why like Anime?: The Allure of Drawing made into Film : Introduction to Anime

The practice of Japanese animation has come a long way from e-maki to woodblock prints and ukiyo-e, and then to manga and akahons, and finally to what we today know to be anime. E-makis or emakimonos are horizontal painted scrolls that were influenced by Chinese paintings and first appeared in Japan around the tenth century. These scrolls were considered by many experts to be the precursor for animation today, seeing as e-makis implement the use of real-life facial expressions, blocks of color as in celluloid (or cels), parallel movements, effects of zoom, and the linking of actions to the portrayal of characters, which are all in anime today. Woodblock prints are pictures created by carving the reverse picture onto a wooden block, applying ink to the finished block and pressing the paper onto the block which prints a picture onto said paper in a copying fashion. Ukiyo-es are woodblock prints that were called 'pictures of the floating world' and depicted beautiful landscapes, everyday life from the Edo period (1600-1868), and pictures of animals and flowers. The images in the ukiyo-es are bold and colorful which shows that the Japanese favor symbolism over realism. Mangas can quite simply be considered as just Japanese comics. The term 'manga' which translates to 'whimsical drawings' was first used by Hokusai to describe his 13 volumes of sketches. Mangas are very much similar to anime because mangas are pretty much detailed versions of anime storyboard that includes dialogue and narrative. Most TV animes are adaptions of mangas and most of the time the manga serves as the storyboard for said TV animes. The earliest form of animation in Japan was the Utsushi-e which was the Japanese adaption of magic lanterns, an early type of projector. Images are painted onto glass slides that produced basic moving pictures with the help of a mechanical slide. Then Western animation was introduced into Japanese culture around 1909. It was about 1929 when the Japanese finally started to implement the use of acetate cels in cel animation. And it was not until about 2000 that computer generated imaging was used in animation.