An anime convention is an event or gathering with a primary focus on anime, manga and Japanese culture. Commonly, anime conventions are multi-day events hosted at convention centers, hotels or college campuses. They feature a wide variety of activities and panels, with a larger number of attendees participating in cosplay than most other types of fan conventions. Anime conventions are also used as a vehicle for industry, in which studios, distributors, and publishers represent their anime related releases.

Anime conventions have a long and varied worldwide history. The original Comiket, mostly based on fan published manga called dōjinshi, started in 1975 with around 700 people in Tokyo. The Comiket of today see several hundred thousand people, showing the lasting popularity of the medium in its home country. Other Japanese anime conventions are arms of or heavily sponsored by certain studios or publishing companies and are used as platforms for new releases, such as Jump Festa.

Anime conventions of the west mostly spawned from similar science fiction and multigenre conventions of the 1980s which featured anime content by tandem. Though many popular shows from Japan had been broadcast by that time, the direct to video market had yet to reach any significant penetration in North America or Europe until the late 1980s. Anime conventions of the west take many cues from those conventions, such as use of a large hotel with a meeting space, spanning 2 days or more of a weekend, invited industry guests, costume dressup, dealers selling various goods, and many other similarities.