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Concept
Mecha anime and manga
Summary
Mecha anime and manga, known in Japan as robot anime and robot manga, are anime and manga that feature robots (mecha) in battle. The genre is broken down into two subcategories; "super robot", featuring super-sized, implausible robots, and "real robot", where robots are governed by realistic physics and technological limitations.
Mecha series cover a wide variety of genres, from action to comedy to drama, and the genre has expanded into other media, such as video game adaptations. Mecha has also contributed to the popularity of scale model robots.
The 1940 short manga Electric Octopus featured a powered, piloted, mechanical octopus.
The 1943 Yokoyama Ryūichi's propaganda manga The Science Warrior Appears in New York featured a sword-wielding, steam-powered, giant humanoid mecha.
The first series in the mecha genre was Mitsuteru Yokoyama's 1956 manga Tetsujin 28-go (which was later animated in 1963 and also released abroad as Gigantor). Yokoyama was inspired to become a manga creator by Osamu Tezuka, and began serializing the manga in Shonen, an iconic boy's magazine, in 1956. In this series, the robot, which was made as a last-ditch effort to win World War II by the Japanese military, was remote-controlled by the protagonist Shotaro Kaneda, a twelve-year-old detective and "whiz kid". The story turned out to have immense mass appeal, and inspired generations of imitators.
In 1972, Go Nagai, another of Japan's greatest manga creators, defined the super robot genre with Mazinger Z, which was directly inspired by the former series. He had the revolutionary idea to create a mecha that people could control like a car, while waiting to cross a busy street. The concept became "explosively popular", making the manga and anime into a success. The series also was the genesis for different tropes of the genre, such as the idea of a robot as a "dynamic entity" that could join with other machines or humans to become unstoppable.
Official source
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