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I decided to start a thread giving awareness to how anime used to be like back in the 1930's and 1940's. After seeing these two videos, let's just say Anime has come a long way since then. And this time, I'm referring to very old anime made before Osamu Tezuka created Astroboy.

Here's a collection from various anime shorts made during the 1920's and 1930's.

Suteneko Tora-chan (Abandoned Cat Little Tora) (1947)

The first full length anime 1945

If it wasn't for the Japanese Language in it, I would have a hard time telling this was Japanese. I wonder where the style split was

Japanese animation began in the early 20th century, when Japanese filmmakers experimented with the animation techniques also pioneered in France, Germany, the United States and Russia. By the 1930s animation was well established in Japan as an alternative format to the live-action industry. The success of The Walt Disney Company's 1937 feature film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs profoundly influenced many Japanese animators. In the 1960s, manga artist and animator Osamu Tezuka adapted and simplified many Disney animation techniques to reduce costs and to limit the number of frames in productions. The 1970s saw a surge of growth in the popularity of manga, Japanese comic books and graphic novels, many of which were later animated.
The giant robot genre (known as "mecha" outside Japan), for instance, took shape under Tezuka, developed into the Super Robot genre under Go Nagai and others, and was revolutionized at the end of the decade by Yoshiyuki Tomino who developed the Real Robot genre. Robot anime like the Gundam and The Super Dimension Fortress Macross series became instant classics in the 1980s, and the robot genre of anime is still one of the most common in Japan and worldwide today.
Computers were integrated into the animation process in the 1990s, with works such as Ghost in the Shell and Princess Mononoke mixing cel animation with computer-generated images. Prior to the digital era, anime was produced with traditional animation methods using a pose to pose approach. The majority of mainstream anime uses fewer expressive key frames and more in-between animation. Japanese animation studios were pioneers of many limited animation techniques, and have given anime a distinct set of conventions. Unlike Disney animation, where the emphasis is on the movement, anime emphasizes the art quality and let limited animation techniques make up for the lack of time spent on movement. Such techniques are often used not only to meet deadlines but also as artistic devices.
The cinematic effects of anime differentiates itself from the stage plays found in American animation. Anime is cinematically shot as if by camera, including panning, zooming, distance and angle shots to more complex dynamic shots that would be difficult to produce in reality. In anime, the animation is produced before the voice acting, contrary to American animation which does the voice acting first; this can cause lip sync errors in the Japanese version.

TL;DR at first they tried to be like Disney then they surpassed Disney

Mole's Adventure (Mogura no Abanchūru) is the earliest surviving Japanese anime broadcast on television. Originally airing on July 14, 1958

Alakazam the Great 1960 was one of the earliest anime films to be released in the United States on July 26, 1961

I also heard Kimba The White Lion was the first anime to be shown in color on American TV.

In the 1960s, Astro Boy, Speed Racer and Kimba the White Lion were introduced in the U.S. All 3 were brought to the U.S. at the same time.

It was was broadcast on Fuji Television from 1965 to 1967 and was the first color animated television series created in Japan. First Television Series, not first color anime short nor was it first color feature film.

I feel like we could say the same thing about any style of animation. Just look at steam-boat Willie and compare him to modern day Micky.