Anime - Story Themes

Story Themes

A wide variety of stories have been adapted into anime. They are sourced from Japanese history, classical literature, and even adult-oriented themes. While animation for children exists, most anime are intended for an older audience.

As early as Osamu Tezuka's Atom Boy (1963), a recurring motif in Japan is the doll with a soul originating from the Japanese old folk belief that a doll loved and care for can develop a soul. This fuzzy border between the human and the mechanical would be revisted again and again, appearing later also as cybernetic humans beginning with the 8 Man (1963) series and the robot where humans initially controlled robots via radio but later as pilots in their interior as in the giant robot subgenre. These shows presented technology as not inheirently good or evil, but instead as a tool that could be used towards such means. Gilles Poitras describes this as "appropriate" since the Japanese had seen the rebirth through technology of their own nation after the destruction at the hands of political and military power.

In the 1970s, Poitras describes that many series began drawing from great heroes and epic stories. Several works were based on the manga writer Leiji Matsumoto's tales of heroism, of courage, of humanity, and of suffering set in many a strange world. Narratives in the fantasy and supernatural genre drew especially from Shinto and Buddhist legends and practices and more recently from western influences, from sources such as Dungeons and Dragons.