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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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anime#Industry) 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](https://anime.stackexchange.com/a/3409/1458), 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?


CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-04-06T21:19:44.513
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2016-04-06T23:17:28.047
2017-04-13T12:54:49.117
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question
anime-production anime-history
By number of series, how much of the animation industry is made up by anime?


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](http://www.imdb.com/search/title?countries=us&genres=animation&release_date=1960-01-01,2015-12-31&title_type=tv_series).
It lists [2265 TV series with the same search terms from
Japan](http://www.imdb.com/search/title?countries=jp&genres=animation&release_date=1960-01-01,2015-12-31&title_type=tv_series).
We get another [557 titles from
France](http://www.imdb.com/search/title?countries=fr&genres=animation&release_date=1960-01-01,2015-12-31&title_type=tv_series);
[171 from
Germany](http://www.imdb.com/search/title?countries=de&genres=animation&release_date=1960-01-01,2015-12-31&title_type=tv_series);
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"](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058817/) 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](http://www.mlit.go.jp/kokudokeikaku/souhatu/h18seika/01anime/01_sousei_09honpen3.pdf)
that I happened upon that doesn't answer this exact question but otherwise has
very nice data about the anime industry.


CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-04-06T23:08:24.840
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2016-04-06T23:08:24.840
1908
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answer