Timeline of Anime by Dea Bankova

I started this project with the idea of expressing through visualisation the evolution of Japanese anime genres over time. Was sci-fi more popular in the 90s, were the 2000s truly the ‘golden age’ of anime, and if so, what genres were prevalent during that time?

This visualisations serves as a visual recommender engine and a visual record of anime in the last 5 decades. Each anime in the database is represented as a bubble, which is sized, positioned and coloured by attributes such as rating and popularity. Colour plays an important role, with the more serious genres represented with darker colours and the more fun ones with lighter colours. All of these design choices together allow for exploration of topics such as prevalence of more or less serious genres over time, popularity of certain genres, types of anime which have been highly rated, etc.

The design is playful and interactive and meant to draw in the reader to spend time exploring the visualisation. The intended audience is Japanese anime fans.