[Kudryavka]

Originally Posted by DonQuigleone

I think the modern anime "industry" really started in the 60s, when Osamu Tezuka first started to make Anime working off how Disney did things. From there it wasn't long before they were making fairly good animation (like Kimba the White Lion in 1965), and by the 70s we have many of the standards that made Anime what it is (Space Battleship Yamato, Future Boy Conan...), so it wasn't long for Japan's anime industry to get going.

That said, what has probably kept Japanese anime going strong is really the Manga industry. No country has a comics industry of comparable size, and Anime can piggy back a lot of content off of that.
South Korea is the only one I think that has a chance of reaching Japan's "level" in the short term. It has the technical skills, and it has a fairly good Manhwa industry as well (though not as polished as Manga). The main weakness is that they haven't got the creative talent you see in the US or Japan, their movies and what not tend to be "fairly by the numbers". However, they're certainly ones to watch, and they can produce animation at the cost Japan can, and I don't think it's down to low Korean wages either.

The other weakness Korea has is that it doesn't have the robust "Otaku" market that Japan does. Their nerds are all playing Starcraft. And Korean fare mightn't go over well with Otaku, who often tend to towards being quite "nationalistic". So they're stuck trying to either sell to children, or the arthouse crowd, the former allows little creativity, the latter little money.

As for the rest they have a long way to go. China's the only one really, but their problem is the CCP. The only animation that would get approved is probably a retelling of the life of Mao (or wuxia of some kind).

One weakness that Korean and Chinese Manhwa/Animation have is that they're still a bit beholden to Japanese styles, and haven't done much that's very different. But who knows, maybe in the future...

Thats right, the first Japanese cartoons were appearing in the 1910s and 1920s. I meant thirty years from then until Tezuka.

And yeah maybe in the future their styles will evolve more into something more "Korean" off of the Japanese and American styles (since that's what most of their animators are working on now, stuff for Americans and Japanese). South Korea is definitely climbing up in the world, and unlike China doesn't have a billion people to worry about (or all that censorship ).