Cinema Of Japan

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The cinema of Japan (日本映画, Nihon eiga), also known domestically as hōga (邦画; "Japanese cinema"), began in the late 1890s. Japan has one of the oldest and largest film industries in the world; as of 2022, it was the fourth largest by number of feature films produced (634) and the third largest in terms of box office revenue ($1.5 billion).

During the 1950s, a period dubbed the "Golden Age of Japanese cinema", the jidaigeki films of Akira Kurosawa and the sci-fi films of Ishirō Honda and Eiji Tsuburaya gained Japanese cinema international praise and made these directors universally renowned and highly influential. Some Japanese films of this period are now considered some of the greatest of all time: in 2012, Yasujirō Ozu's film Tokyo Story (1953) was placed at No. 3 on Sight & Sound's 100 greatest films of all time and dethroned Citizen Kane (1941) atop the Sight & Sound directors' poll of the top 50 greatest films of all time, while Kurosawa's film Seven Samurai (1954) topped the BBC's 2018 survey of the 100 Greatest Foreign-Language Films. Japan has also won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film five times, more than any other Asian country.

Anime rose in popularity during the 1980s, with new animated films being released every summer and winter, often based upon popular anime television series. Mamoru Oshii released his landmark film Angel's Egg (1985) while Hayao Miyazaki adapted his own manga series Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind into a 1984 film of the same name, and Katsuhiro Otomo followed suit by adapting his own manga series Akira into a 1988 film of the same name. Anime continues to be massively popular around the world, especially the works of Studio Ghibli, which counts among its highest-grossing films Princess Mononoke (1997), Spirited Away (2001), Howl's Moving Castle (2004), Ponyo (2008), and The Boy and the Heron (2023). As of 2025, the top 14 highest-grossing Japanese films of all time are all anime, and the top 10 (four of which are by Studio Ghibli) were all released in the 21st century.

Although Japanese horror films have been around since the post-war era that began in 1945 and gained recognition with kaiju such as Godzilla (1954), the genre did not experience a popularity boom until the late 1990s, with films such as Ringu (1998), Kairo (2001), Dark Water (2002), Ju-On: The Grudge (2002), Yogen (2004), and One Missed Call (2004) garnering commercial success.

Japan's primary film studios are Toho, Toei, Shochiku, and Kadokawa, which are nicknamed the "Big Four" and are the only members of the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan (MPPAJ). The Japan Academy Film Prize, hosted annually by the Nippon Academy-shō Association, was created in 1978 and is considered to be the Japanese equivalent of the Academy Awards.