How Anime Changed Western Animation Forever

The generation of Western animators born between 1975 and 1990 grew up watching anime — through fansubs, through Toonami, through the theatrical releases of Miyazaki films, and through the imported series that filled children's television in the 1990s. When those animators came of age professionally and began producing their own work, the influence was visible and, increasingly, acknowledged. The idea that animation could sustain complex ongoing narratives with genuine character development, could address difficult emotional content, could be beautiful in ways that transcended entertainment — all of this came into Western animation through the anime that its practitioners had watched before they became practitioners.

"Avatar: The Last Airbender" (2005–2008), created by Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko for Nickelodeon, is the clearest case of productive Japanese animation influence on American production. The creators were explicit about their debt to Miyazaki and to the anime aesthetics they had grown up watching: the bending combat choreography draws directly on martial arts animation conventions developed in Japanese anime; the world-building reflects the attentiveness to non-Western cultures and spiritual systems that characterizes Miyazaki's work; the willingness to sustain a continuous narrative with real consequences across multiple seasons was unusual for American children's television and represented a direct importing of anime's serialized storytelling conventions.

"Teen Titans" (2003–2006) and later "Teen Titans Go!" established a visual style drawn explicitly from anime aesthetics — the simplified facial expressions, the super-deformed comedy reactions, the action choreography — in a way that many American viewers experienced as anime without realizing it was American production. The show's influence on a generation of American cartoon watchers who subsequently became anime fans is difficult to quantify but widely acknowledged in fan communities, where it is often cited as a gateway.

The streaming era has intensified the exchange. "Castlevania" (2017–2021), produced by Frederator Studios for Netflix, hired Japanese-trained animators and produced action sequences that were indistinguishable from Japanese anime in everything except their country of origin. "Arcane" (2021), based on the video game "League of Legends," used anime-influenced visual aesthetics while incorporating Western animation's character design conventions, producing a visual hybrid that attracted both anime and non-anime audiences. Both were produced by Western companies, primarily for Western audiences, and both would not have existed in their current form without a century of Japanese animation development.

The traffic moves in both directions. Japanese animation studios have borrowed from Western animation techniques and story structures since Tezuka's original engagement with Disney. What has changed in the past twenty years is the directness of the exchange: animators from Japan and Western countries work alongside each other on international co-productions, attend the same festivals, watch each other's work through the same streaming platforms, and influence each other in ways that make "Japanese animation" and "Western animation" increasingly inadequate as categorical distinctions.