Experience a century of anime history in one gorgeous video celebrating art form’s 100th birthday

Even as anime continues to make mainstream inroads overseas, a lot of foreign fans don’t really get sucked into the world of Japanese animation until they’re in their teens or older, making the medium as a whole feel young and new to them. But anime actually has a very long history, stretching back much farther than even the “good old days” of the 1980s that some older Western fans like to wax poetic about.

Namakura Gatana, a silent short anime from 1917, is regarded as the oldest piece of Japanese animation with a surviving print, and using it as a starting point for the medium makes anime 100 years old. In celebration, the Association of Japanese Animations has released a 15-minute video that looks back on landmark Japanese animated works of the century since Namakura Gatana was released.