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Today a friend of mine proclaimed that around 70% of the world's cartoon animation entertainment consists of anime. So according to his statement, for every 3 non anime animation series, at least 7 anime series should exist.

After looking through his proclaimed source wikipedia I could only find out that about 70% of DVD sales are made by anime, which sounds reasonable, but does not back up his 3 to 7 cartoon to anime series ratio at all.

Now I know that anime is well-known, even around the world. But claiming that around 2/3 of all cartoon animation series is anime sounds a bit of an overkill to me.

This however made me wonder, what is the ratio of non anime cartoon series to cartoon series, or how much do anime series (roughly) make up of animation entertainment series overall?

Although the first few animes were already observed as far back as 1907, anime really launched around 1960 after/during Astro Boy, and as new series are made just about everyday for both anime and non-anime alike, I would propose a time limit of 1960 till 2015.

TL;DR What is the ratio of anime series versus non anime series?

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Dimitri mx
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  • You want to know if anime makes up animation from the beginning of the existence of moving pictures up to now? Considering old Warner Bros. and Disney characters are still remembered today, I highly doubt the history of animation is made up of mostly anime. – Hydromast Apr 06 '16 at 21:37
  • are movies counted? what about seasons? there are also franchises. DBZ/Macross in anime, loony toons and various dysney characters. What about cross overs? – ton.yeung Apr 06 '16 at 22:11
  • @ton.yeung Series, multiple seasons = 1 series. Alternative universes = a unique serie as well. Ova's and movies can be disregarded – Dimitri mx Apr 06 '16 at 22:13
  • k, that should be all anyone needs for an answer. btw, i think that's a bad unit. I would have gone with hours aired on tv as the basis, since you're skewing towards non anime by quite a bit. (how many long running non animes can you think of?) – ton.yeung Apr 06 '16 at 22:17

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Counting by "number of series" is rather silly. It has its uses (e.g. it can help answer the question "does Japan produce a wider variety of animated television shows than the rest of the world?"), but it is not a particularly good metric for answering the question "does Japan produce more animated television shows than the rest of the world?".

Anyway, I deem this claim implausible. IMDB lists 1937 TV series tagged with "Animation" from the US from 1960-2015. It lists 2265 TV series with the same search terms from Japan. We get another 557 titles from France; 171 from Germany; and so forth.

While IMDB is probably systematically biased in favor of having more complete data on US shows than Japanese shows, and also does some weird things like listing "Kimba the White Lion" as a US show, I do not think that the numbers we're looking at support the claim that Japan produces 70% of the world's animation by series count. (I would agree that Japan probably does produce at least a plurality of the world's animation by series count, but series count is a lousy metric, so.)

Incidentally, there's also a very nice whitepaper by the MLIT that I happened upon that doesn't answer this exact question but otherwise has very nice data about the anime industry.

senshin
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  • furthermore, what about shows that were produced in multiple countries? i know the children shows Die Biene Maja (Maja the Honey Bee) which is a japanese-german coproduction, giving it the style of an anime. is it an anime then? or is it a normal cartoon from germany? – Armin Apr 07 '16 at 07:04
  • Very interesting paper, all though a bit hard to read with my limited Japanese. – Dimitri mx Apr 07 '16 at 18:48