Alright, let’s roll this back to the very start—think of it like the grandparent of anime. The earliest commercial Japanese anime didn’t just appear out of nowhere; it started in the 1910s–1920s.

The first recognized commercial anime is usually credited to “Namakura Gatana” (“The Dull Sword”), made in 1917 by Jun’ichi Kōuchi. It was a tiny silent short, about 4 minutes long, basically a funny little story about a samurai with a dull sword. Super simple animation, but it was sold to theaters, which makes it “commercial.”

Before that, Japan had some experimental animations, but they were mostly private or made for research. Once filmmakers realized they could sell short animated films to theaters, the commercial anime industry was technically born.

From there, the style and techniques slowly evolved over the decades, leading to the bigger, more polished works of the 1930s and 1940s, and eventually Tezuka in the 1960s who basically gave anime the look we know today.