9 Famous Storylines That Hollywood Stole From Anime

Plagiarism or ignorance: if only the world was so black and white eh? If you believe the long-running joke that Hollywood is quickly running out of ideas on what to make their next film about, then forget about endless sequels, remakes and reboots... What about anime? The Japanese film industry has long held the misconception by the West that its animated films are all just for kids and weird adults, but the sad truth is that this misconception is what allows Hollywood to borrow liberally from Japan without many people noticing. None of the entries in this list go so far as to copy, word for word, shot for shot an original anime film, but some of them get pretty darn close. You don't need identical characters, settings and stories for a film to be a rip-off though. Who'd have thought that Christopher Nolan's supposed revolutionary film about being able to enter someone else's dreams had already been done years before in Paprika? Or what about James Cameron's much-lauded Avatar, a film about a foreign invasion of a peaceful, indigenous race and the subsequent destruction of their habitat? Yeah, Studio Ghibli did that one decades ago. There's a fine line to draw between outright copying and artistic inspiration, unfortunately, all of the entries in this list seem to teeter towards the latter of the two. Have a gander and see if you can't recognise the similarities between some of cinema's most loved films and the often overlooked industry that is anime - you'll probably find yourself surprised.