At one point in my work, I had to closely engage with the manga and anime industry (in the entertainment field, it’s quite normal for different areas of the entertainment industry to overlap: many games and movies are based on anime, and vice versa). However, I could never say I was a fan of this genre (unlike my older daughters). In my childhood, we didn’t have many comics, let alone their Japanese form in the style of manga, and my exposure to anime was limited to a couple of animated films that were allowed on Soviet cinema screens. I vaguely remember two: Taro, the Dragon Boy (which I really liked as a kid) and, later on, Puss in Boots: Travels Around the World. But we didn’t even know back then that this was anime.
After a closer encounter with it, I decided at some point to study the subject in more depth. Some aspects seemed quite strange to me, as someone raised in a completely different culture. For instance, when we were preparing to launch World of Tanks in South Korea, our Korean office practically created all the training materials from scratch, and to me, these pages on the site looked wild — it was a huge scroll of content in the form of a manga-style comic. But that’s just how they’re accustomed to receiving information.
As I delved deeper into the topic, I learned many interesting facts that all anime fans know, but the average person probably hasn’t even heard of. For example, many well-known Western franchises either have Japanese roots or were simply “borrowed” from Japanese creators due to a rather unique approach to copyright at the time. Here are just a few prominent examples to give you an idea:
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