From Akira to Spirited Away to Your Name. The Japanese animation tradition that has, since the 1980s, been one of the most-influential currents in global cinema.
Anime — Japanese animation, both feature and television — is one of the most-influential film traditions of the past forty years. Its visual conventions, narrative structures, and thematic concerns have shaped global animation in ways that the American studio system has been progressively catching up to. Into the Spider-Verse and the 2020s wave of American animation that followed it are, in significant part, anime's American children.
The single most-recognised brand in international anime is Studio Ghibli, founded in 1985 by Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, and Toshio Suzuki. Ghibli's films include Spirited Away (2001), My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Princess Mononoke (1997), Grave of the Fireflies (1988, directed by Takahata), Howl's Moving Castle (2004), and The Boy and the Heron (2023). The studio has won two Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature.
Outside Ghibli, the most-internationally-influential anime films are the cyberpunk tradition led by Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira (1988) and Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell (1995). Both films pushed Japanese animation into adult-targeted dystopian science fiction at a level of visual ambition the American animation industry had not attempted. The Matrix (1999) cites Ghost in the Shell extensively; almost every subsequent cyberpunk visual property does.
The most-commercially-successful contemporary anime director is Makoto Shinkai. His Your Name (2016) grossed $358m worldwide and became, briefly, the highest-grossing anime film ever made. Shinkai's films work in a different register than Ghibli's — more melodramatic, more romantic, more focused on contemporary teenage protagonists. His subsequent work (Weathering with You, 2019; Suzume, 2022) has continued the commercial run.