AstroBoy, created by Osamu Tezuka, was influential in establishing the conventions of anime by telling the story of a boy robot who longs to be human. Tezuka started the first anime studio dedicated to television, pioneering the anime industry worldwide. He instituted cost-saving measures like reusing animation cells to accommodate Japan's post-war economy. Anime provided a cheap way for Japan to depict historical and futuristic stories. By the late 1960s, several new studios had emerged producing manga adaptations for TV. International interest in anime rose substantially in the 1980s, leading to partnerships between Japanese and Western studios. This success of anime on television and in direct-to-video releases helped establish Japan's animation industry as

1. Television
AstroBoy,
the boy robot longed to be human – that set standard for what we know today as anime.
Tezuka, the godfather of Japanese animation, started the anime studio dedicated to television, becoming a pioneer in the industry
worldwide. Economy was a big force in his studio – he dropped the frame rate from that
of cinematic anime, his painted cells were cleaned and re-used to minimise costs, and he instituted
conventions that are commonplace today. Anime offered an impoverished post-war Japan a cheap way to represent
historical and futuristic, even contemporary, situations without expensive sets and backlots. By the late 1960s several
new anime studios had followed his example, pumping out adaptations of all sorts of popular manga for the small screen.
It was with the appearance in the west of series like Macross, Battle of the Planets and Speed Racer that anime entered what considered to be its golden age in the 1980s. International interest was keen, to the point that US companies commissioned series like
Transformers from the Toei Studio, and western adaptions, so that three different series – Macross, Southern
Cross and Mospaeda – combined to become Robotech to the roundeye. On Australian telly, anime was championed
by the children’s market: Saturday morning TV and weekday afternoons on the ABC in the 1980s gave us Tezuka’s
Astroboy and Kimba The White Lion, Battle of the Planets (G-Force), Ulysses 31 and Transformers among others.
On the back of this success, a new market emerged with new technology: Original Anime Videos (OAV/OVA).
These direct-to-video releases sat between cinematic and TV anime, extending and elaborating on existing
series, often in strange and disjointed ways. Like an unrolling scroll with a distant definite end, they continued
the long story arcs of favourite characters. The OVA market has produced a huge fan-based industry of serialised
videos, fan fiction and conventions along lines more commonly associated with Star Trek fandom. It is in large
part due to overseas interest in anime that the animation industry in Japan has become the largest in the world.
Animania