Impressive Chart Tracks Anime’s Genres Over The Years

Anime has grown exponentially with each year as the popularity of various series and interest in the medium has grown overall. With technology allowing for more and more entries to be made, one brave Redditor decided to map out the different anime genres and how many examples of each came out every year since 1963. It’s amazing to see the number of anime increase from 19 in 1963 to over 850 in present day. What may be more surprising is which genres have been the most popular during any specific year.

Reddit User Medokady created this impressive changing graph that takes a look at the increasing and decreasing anime categories over the decades:

In the early years of anime, the genres of “Action”, “Adventure”, “Kids” and “Sci-Fi” were wrestling for the most series released each year, but with such a small number released, it was only a handful that managed to push any given genre over the edge. As time marched forward, not only were new anime created but entirely new genres sprung up. Obviously, you didn’t see many anime in the genres of say “Dementia” or “Hentai” spring up in the 60s but with over 850 anime series coming to life now, there can be dozens of genres in the medium.

One of the most interesting things to note with these charts is the overall power of the “comedy” genre. It’s surprising to see just how many installments of anime are created specifically for comedy, though pigeonholing any one series may prove to be a tad difficult. Let’s take Dragon Ball for example. The Akira Toriyama series is primarily seen as being a part of the “action genre” thanks in part to its numerous fight scenes featuring Son Goku and the other Z Fighters.

However, the series encompasses a lot of comedy and definitely has a sci-fi angle as aliens and Gods abounds in the world of Saiyans, so who’s to say? It’s interesting to see how animation can be used specifically to bring comedies to life by emphasizing different expressions or being able to place characters into situations that would be otherwise impossible in live action series.

Technology allows for a great many things in this day and age, and the expansion of our entertainment can certainly be counted as one of those. While anime growing could be attributed to the ease of their creation thanks to tech, we wonder much of an impact things like the internet, allowing for a much wider audience to easily access these shows that would have otherwise gone unnoticed in the past, makes.

We can tell you, growing up as anime fans ourselves, we do not miss the days of having to spend obscene amounts of money to buy a VHS tape with four episodes of a series on it.

What’s your favorite genre of anime? What’s the most surprising information that you learned from this chart? Let us know in the comments or feel free to hit me up directly on Twitter @EVComedy to talk all things comics and anime.