Anime started after the 1908 French film Fantasmagorie was screened in Japan in the spring of 1914. Inspired by the nascent form, several Japanese artists began working on their own animation projects. Though almost all of these early works were lost and/or destroyed in the chaos and devastation following the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake.
Some claim that “Moving Picture” (a. k. a. the ‘Matsumoto fragment’, discovered in 2005) is the first-ever anime, predating all of the stuff mentioned below, and some go so far as to call it the first-ever animation of any kind. It’s nothing but a few seconds of animation drawn directly on the film frames, nearly impossible to date accurately.
But we’re sure about Hekoten (Oten) Shimokawa. He’s mainly known for Imokawa Mukuzo Genkanban no Maki (The Doorman, or The Story of the Concierge), which was created in 1916 and first screened in 1917. The process is a mystery; some say Shimokawa drew on a chalkboard, some say on paper. But what we do know is that he wasn’t very happy with the results, and went back to manga after only a few months and a handful of short films.
A few other projects came out shortly afterwards, including Junichi Kouchi’s Hanawa Hekonai, Meito no Maki (Sword of Hanawa Hekonai) and Seitaro Kitayama’s The Monkey and the Crab and Momotaro. Kitayama may not have been the very first, but he certainly did more to broaden early anime’s horizons — including founding Kitayama Eiga, the first animation studio in Japan.
Zenjiro “Sanae” Yamamoto, called “The Founder of Modern Anime”, worked at this studio and produced a number of black and white silent animated films at his own company, Yamamoto Manga Productions. However, the film world was eagerly exploring the potential of “talkies” and color film in the mid-to-late 1920s, and Japanese animators strove to bring these new technologies to their increasingly sophisticated visuals.