An "Is this anime?" sticky
- Lyrs
- Joined: Thu Aug 29, 2002 2:41 pm
- Location: Internet Donation: 5814 Posts
An "Is this anime?" sticky
Yeah, I know, we need more stickies; regardless, it seems like something to do.
- Lyrs
- Joined: Thu Aug 29, 2002 2:41 pm
- Location: Internet Donation: 5814 Posts
Not unless the admins/mods want to, and if they did, they have given their definition of anime. The thread would deal with odd productions or old material that the user may be unaware of its history (production). Perhaps link to an animedatabase. Yes, I know members can just use google and in a few clicks have an answer, but if there's a definite site for confirmation, that'll be all the more streamlined.
Or no sticky at all.
/+1
Or no sticky at all.
/+1
- AbsoluteDestiny
- Joined: Wed Aug 15, 2001 1:56 pm
- Location: Oxford, UK
- Contact:
- Lyrs
- Joined: Thu Aug 29, 2002 2:41 pm
- Location: Internet Donation: 5814 Posts
- Tsunami Jones
- is the best medicine.
- Joined: Mon Oct 06, 2003 8:31 pm
Is there anyway we could get the anime database a bit more accessible for everyone? Because it's a pain to have to go through the Favorite Anime List or the video part of when you enter a new AMV just to look for what is anime and what isn't.AbsoluteDestiny wrote:We already have a list of what is and isnt anime - it's called the video database where every entry gets classified
- rose4emily
- Joined: Fri Jan 23, 2004 1:36 am
- Location: Rochester, NY
- Contact:
The whole definition thing really is a good question.
As far as I'm concerned, animation is animation - and there's far more variation within both Japanese and American animation than there is between the genereic "look" associated with each.
This definition, however, would allow for Scooby Doo AMVs, should someone be posessed to make one.
Then there's the "If it comes from Japan, it's anime - and if it comes from anywhere else, it's not" definition. Unfortunately, this doesn't take into account the dynamic of stylistic exchange across borders, nor the fact that a lot of "Japanese" animation is partially outsourced to other Asian countries with less expensive animators, nor the fact that some of these other countries have started making their own popular animations, many of which share a lot of characteristics with Japanese animation. What about American series that, on one level or another, have some connection to the style and/or themes commonly associated with Japanese animation:
"Samauri Jack" doesn't bear much stylistic resemblance to any Japanese animation I can think of, but has a definate Japanese "flavor".
"Teen Titans", on the other hand, is an adaptation of a rather long-running set of DC Comics, which is one of the most "American" examples of pop art I can think of - but has character designs and visual motifs (SD art, sweatdrops, those backgrounds with all the sliding lines during action scenes....) that have clearly been heavily influenced by the conventions of low-budget action and comedy animation from Japan. What about stuff like:
"The Animatrix", which was an American/Japese collaboration of sorts.
"Interstella 5555" - which is English language, and set to a script and story by a pair of French musicans who happen to wear robot costumes?
"Jackie Chan Adventures", featuring Jackie Chan as vocal talent (talk about an unlikely crossover success for an kung-fu star) that has a Japanese "look", and is produced by the Japanese company Sony, but features:
...Starring talent from Hong Kong (though I've read that another voice actor stands in for Jackie for much of the dialogue now, as English isn't Jackie's native tounge).
...A story built around a family living in San Fransisco, who have origins in Hong Kong, and who often end up in every other part of the world you can imagine chasing after their archological work.
...A primarily American audience, and English-language original audio - but the show is also aired (and probably subbed or dubbed) in several other countries.
...And I don't have the slightest clue as to where the animation itself actually comes from.
A few decades ago a man named Tezuka Osamu directed a popular animation called "Astroboy" - which is often referred to as the first "Anime". The character designs' small mouths and, in particular, large eyes are attributed by Osamy to the influences of Western animation such as Disney's classic film (from a time when they were the best in the business) "Bambi". Osamu's character designs, especially the Disney-inspired large eyes, then influenced later anime - and formed a very recognizable prototype of the stylistic features pointed to as what makes anime characters look like anime characters (as opposed to American-style comics, most American animation, or live-action of any sort). These character designs, while not terribly specific in terms of ethnicity, also lead many American (and probably European) viewers to wonder why they tend to be so white and have such angular features. Not to mention the popularity of blonde and red hair (also blue hair - gotta have the blue hair - so maybe that one's a moot point).
Tezuka Osamu also produced a series in the 60's called "Kimba the White Lion". For those who are unaware of the significance of this, "Kimba" bore several very obvious similarities to a more recent film called "The Lion King" - produced by the same company that, a few decades earlier, decided to draw deer with (even by deer standards) unusually large, expressive eyes. Disney denied all allegations that they had ripped anything off from "Kimba the White Lion" (one of Disney's animators claimed the story was partially adapted from "Hamlet" - agreeing with a theory I held for a while about its origin). In the end, Osamu's wife (Osamu was deceased by the time all of this happened) said she wouldn't press Disney on the matter, citing the fact that Osamu himself borrowed so heavily off of earlier Disney works and saying he would be honored to know he had such an influence on the work of a studio he loved and respected.
So "the circle of life" seems to also be a circular exchange of creative ideas lifted across the national devide between America and Japan, between two creative entities largely credited as the origin of quality animation in both countries.
"The Lion King" also happens to be the last memorable Disney film that wasn't actually made by Pixar - an offshoot of Lucasfilm, which also happens to the the parent of major SFX house ILM. The Pixar films, unlike earlier films produced by Disney's animation studios, feature 3D art in a definitively "Pixar" style. Then Dreamworks gets in on the same 3D animation market - even being so bold as to paralell the primary themes of the Pixar films: "Toy Story" vs. "Small Soldiers", "A Bug's Life" vs. "Antz", "Finding Nemo" vs. "A Shark's Tale". They diverge a bit on Pixar's "Monster's Inc" vs. Dreamwork's "Shrek". Then Waner Brothers (remember them, they're the ones made us instantly associate Wagnerian opera with hunting "wabbits") jumps into the fray with "Ice Age" and "Polar Express". With the execption of "Polar express", these films all feature highly stylized characters very unlike the simple but relatively natural proportions used for most of Disney's classic main characters (which, as a side note, tended to be tall, thin, and very pale - and which all had angular chins, underpronounced noses, small mouths, and large eyes). In Japan, in the meanwhile, CG is used to create highly (albeit not perfectly) realistic character depictions in such productions as the FInal Fantasy films - targeting an audience accustomed to the highly (at least at times, if not always) stylized characters and scenery used in much of Japan's traditional 2D animation. There seems to be something of a stylistic reversal going on here.
Back to the "Animatrix" question: if Japanese animation based on a CG-heavy American film is Anime, what is an CG-heavy American film based on a Japanese animation? Live-action EVA is underway - so this question may (depending on whether the produecers actually manage to pull it off without watering it down for a more mainstream audience) come up again when someone wants to know whether they can sumbit their live-action Evangelion music video as an AMV. The live-action part would decide it for most people, but I've seen at least one live-action AMV-type project (by AbsoluteDestiny) that I think should be on the site. Unfortunately it's creator, who I think is sort of running the place now, seems to think otherwise - and does not list it on this site.
The CG matter bring in yet another complexity, I will add, to the "what is anime" question. Back to the "Anime is Japanese animation" definition: We already have the issue of "how Japanese does it have to be to be anime", which is already fuzzy for some works with a multination origin, influence, or target audience. Now add to it the issue of how "animated" does something have to be to be called "animation".
Most things are clear-cut cases - "Azumanga Daioh" is definately "animation", "The Seven Samauri" most definately is not.
Is "Sky Captain and the World of Tommow" animation? Almost everything onscreen other than the main actors is generated by computers, yet it's "look" predominately says "live-action". Then again, that's what those "Final Fantasy" people are going for, too.
Is "Kill Bill" a film that in any way qualifies as "animated"? It contains animation, but it also contains much that is not animation. It also contains some footage which has the appearence of live cinema, but is computer enhanced and/or computer generated. Is there a graded scale of "animatedness", or is it an on and off thing?
What about "The End of Evangelion" - a 87 minute film, with about 10 min. of live-action footage. Is it 89% anime and 11% not anime? That 11% is probably, in terms of space*time, about the same ratio as the live-action component of "Sky Captain". Numbers don't seem to match subjective impressions.
Then there's the old geek classic "Tron". A lot of people think of "Tron" as a primarily animated film. Yet it contains surprisingly little animation. The light-cycles, the MCP, the tanks - basically all the "game" elements were CG. The wire-frame architecture and matching uniforms were actually just a lot of black paint, black fabric, and some white stripes that were colored with optical filters in post-production. The world looks very "artificial" - more so than the settings of most anime - so the audience equates it to "CG" or "animation". Yet it's mostly people with funny clothes filmed in oddly decorated rooms. Perception can be deceiving.
So you could cut computers out of the mix by saying anime is "Hand-drawn 2D Japanese Animation". This would eliminate questions about how much CG it takes to make a film "animation", and clean up some of the perceptual inconsistencies, but create a new problem with non-photorealistic 2D and 3D CG. Eliminate computers, and out goes "FLCL", "Ghost in the Shell", "End of Evangelion", etc....
There are also huge stylistic departures in some Japanese animation that, like "anime-like" American animation, make definitions based on character designs ("Teen Titans" - American, "My Neighbors the Yamadas" - Japanese, Disney characters and "typical" anime characters share several defining design elements due to common ancestry...). Cultural elements (historical or popular) are also out ("Samauri Jack" - American, "Cowboy Bebop" - Japanese). Comedic conventions are now shared ("sweatdrops" in American shows, "Looney Tunes"-style sound effects in Japanese series). Thematic material covered in Japanese animation is broader than that covered by American animation, but there's a lot of overlap in the action and comedy sectors (and you should see some of the crazy stuff that comes out of the former U.S.S.R. - makes even Anno and Oshi look pretty normal, all things considered). Target audiences don't quite set the definitions, either (such as anime-derived films and series marketed primarily or entirely to [often pre-teen] American audiences). Maturity - though the point I most often see cited as the big difference between American and Japanese animation - doesn't completely follow country lines, either. Americans actually tend to be very biased about the maturity of Japanese animation thanks to the fact that most have seen only the dubbed Saturday-morning imports used to sell toys and video games, or else the atypically intelectual, violent, and/or sexual series that tend to revieve the most attention among college-aged fans. Theres a lot of material in-between that doesn't get much play here, because it doesn't really stand out from the similarly middle-of-the-road material that Disney films and television sitcom animation tends to be constituted of. I've actually seen a variety of sources that suggest that some of the anime series most popular among adult American fans barely broke even in Japanese theatres, or suffered poor ratings on Japanese television. "End of Evangelion", for example, grossed just over a quarter of what would be considered a "blockbuster" in Japan, at about $12 million (for comparison, "Crossroads" - the Briney Spears incarnation, not the Ralph Macchio/Steve Vai one, made $37 million in American theatres, $17 million in the first week, being the high-quality film it was
). Film budgets being what they are, I doubt is was produced for much less than that - and that any profits that were made were made through merchandise and the sales of DVDs - a large portion of which are purchased by Americans (an audience GAINAX claims they never even considered when making the film, responding to it's "unique" application of Judeo-Christian symbolism). We also have that nastly little question of where the lines between "animation", "CG effects", and "live action" are drawn.
---
So I think we're currently running off of a de-facto definition of:
"Anime" is animation that appears to be hand-drawn on two-dimensional cels and which was produced by a Japanese animation studio - though not necessarily written or drawn by Japanese filmmakers, marketed primarily to a Japanese audience, or originally voiced in Japanese. "Anime" may also be defined as including hyperrealistic 3D Computer Generated animation, but only in the capacity that it does not co-exist with live-action footage, and is associated with a corresponding popular video game developed in Japan and marketed internationally. Add three points if the work in question either makes you question the purpose of existance or desire cheap plastic toys.
---
Face it - we just like foreign stuff, because, in part, it is foreign. But the lines aren't so solid as one might initially think, and seem to be blurring from both sides as both fans and corporate interests have started to look once again to opposite sides of the Pacific for unfamiliar territory ripe for exploration and exploitation.
1606 - Shakespeare writes Macbeth
1954 - Kurosawa directs "The Seven Samauri"
1957 - Kurosawa directs "Throne of Blood"
1960 - Sturges directs "The Magnificent Seven"
Even in live action, here we have on director who made a Japanese adaptation of a English play, set in Scottland from the Elizebethan era, and a Japanese film, set in Japan's feudal past, that was adapted into a well-known western six years later. Good stories have a way of getting around.
Of course, I can also play this connections game across some other lines, as well:
1606 - Shakespeare writes Macbeth
1971 - Hugh Hefner produces an American rendition of Macbeth, directed by Roman Polanski.
1954 - "Fahrenheit 451", by Ray Bradbury, is published in three consecutive issues of Hefner's magazene.
2002 - Bradbury finished a book called "From the Dust Returned", consisting of short storied written over the course of more than 40 years. Some of the stories have illustrations produced by a man named Charles Addams.
1937 - Charles Addams pens the first of a set of cartoons that will eventually become "The Adams Family" in the New Yorker. These cartoons later inspire a popular sitcom.
1967 - Addams illustrates a collection of Mother Goose's nursery rhymes.
There we are: Shakespeare, soft porn, anti-censorship novels, gothic comedy, and Mother Goose - all interconnected through channels of publication and inspiration.
---
American kids wear, draw, and adorn their vehicles with foreign characters they don't understand, Engrish.com indicates that this isn't entirely an American phenominon. A lot of us like Anime, a lot of Japanese citizens enjoy high-budget Holywood films. Each is always influencing the other - tying the two together. No unambiguous distinction between "Anime" and "Not Anime" can be decided upon because none exits.
As far as I'm concerned, animation is animation - and there's far more variation within both Japanese and American animation than there is between the genereic "look" associated with each.
This definition, however, would allow for Scooby Doo AMVs, should someone be posessed to make one.
Then there's the "If it comes from Japan, it's anime - and if it comes from anywhere else, it's not" definition. Unfortunately, this doesn't take into account the dynamic of stylistic exchange across borders, nor the fact that a lot of "Japanese" animation is partially outsourced to other Asian countries with less expensive animators, nor the fact that some of these other countries have started making their own popular animations, many of which share a lot of characteristics with Japanese animation. What about American series that, on one level or another, have some connection to the style and/or themes commonly associated with Japanese animation:
"Samauri Jack" doesn't bear much stylistic resemblance to any Japanese animation I can think of, but has a definate Japanese "flavor".
"Teen Titans", on the other hand, is an adaptation of a rather long-running set of DC Comics, which is one of the most "American" examples of pop art I can think of - but has character designs and visual motifs (SD art, sweatdrops, those backgrounds with all the sliding lines during action scenes....) that have clearly been heavily influenced by the conventions of low-budget action and comedy animation from Japan. What about stuff like:
"The Animatrix", which was an American/Japese collaboration of sorts.
"Interstella 5555" - which is English language, and set to a script and story by a pair of French musicans who happen to wear robot costumes?
"Jackie Chan Adventures", featuring Jackie Chan as vocal talent (talk about an unlikely crossover success for an kung-fu star) that has a Japanese "look", and is produced by the Japanese company Sony, but features:
...Starring talent from Hong Kong (though I've read that another voice actor stands in for Jackie for much of the dialogue now, as English isn't Jackie's native tounge).
...A story built around a family living in San Fransisco, who have origins in Hong Kong, and who often end up in every other part of the world you can imagine chasing after their archological work.
...A primarily American audience, and English-language original audio - but the show is also aired (and probably subbed or dubbed) in several other countries.
...And I don't have the slightest clue as to where the animation itself actually comes from.
A few decades ago a man named Tezuka Osamu directed a popular animation called "Astroboy" - which is often referred to as the first "Anime". The character designs' small mouths and, in particular, large eyes are attributed by Osamy to the influences of Western animation such as Disney's classic film (from a time when they were the best in the business) "Bambi". Osamu's character designs, especially the Disney-inspired large eyes, then influenced later anime - and formed a very recognizable prototype of the stylistic features pointed to as what makes anime characters look like anime characters (as opposed to American-style comics, most American animation, or live-action of any sort). These character designs, while not terribly specific in terms of ethnicity, also lead many American (and probably European) viewers to wonder why they tend to be so white and have such angular features. Not to mention the popularity of blonde and red hair (also blue hair - gotta have the blue hair - so maybe that one's a moot point).
Tezuka Osamu also produced a series in the 60's called "Kimba the White Lion". For those who are unaware of the significance of this, "Kimba" bore several very obvious similarities to a more recent film called "The Lion King" - produced by the same company that, a few decades earlier, decided to draw deer with (even by deer standards) unusually large, expressive eyes. Disney denied all allegations that they had ripped anything off from "Kimba the White Lion" (one of Disney's animators claimed the story was partially adapted from "Hamlet" - agreeing with a theory I held for a while about its origin). In the end, Osamu's wife (Osamu was deceased by the time all of this happened) said she wouldn't press Disney on the matter, citing the fact that Osamu himself borrowed so heavily off of earlier Disney works and saying he would be honored to know he had such an influence on the work of a studio he loved and respected.
So "the circle of life" seems to also be a circular exchange of creative ideas lifted across the national devide between America and Japan, between two creative entities largely credited as the origin of quality animation in both countries.
"The Lion King" also happens to be the last memorable Disney film that wasn't actually made by Pixar - an offshoot of Lucasfilm, which also happens to the the parent of major SFX house ILM. The Pixar films, unlike earlier films produced by Disney's animation studios, feature 3D art in a definitively "Pixar" style. Then Dreamworks gets in on the same 3D animation market - even being so bold as to paralell the primary themes of the Pixar films: "Toy Story" vs. "Small Soldiers", "A Bug's Life" vs. "Antz", "Finding Nemo" vs. "A Shark's Tale". They diverge a bit on Pixar's "Monster's Inc" vs. Dreamwork's "Shrek". Then Waner Brothers (remember them, they're the ones made us instantly associate Wagnerian opera with hunting "wabbits") jumps into the fray with "Ice Age" and "Polar Express". With the execption of "Polar express", these films all feature highly stylized characters very unlike the simple but relatively natural proportions used for most of Disney's classic main characters (which, as a side note, tended to be tall, thin, and very pale - and which all had angular chins, underpronounced noses, small mouths, and large eyes). In Japan, in the meanwhile, CG is used to create highly (albeit not perfectly) realistic character depictions in such productions as the FInal Fantasy films - targeting an audience accustomed to the highly (at least at times, if not always) stylized characters and scenery used in much of Japan's traditional 2D animation. There seems to be something of a stylistic reversal going on here.
Back to the "Animatrix" question: if Japanese animation based on a CG-heavy American film is Anime, what is an CG-heavy American film based on a Japanese animation? Live-action EVA is underway - so this question may (depending on whether the produecers actually manage to pull it off without watering it down for a more mainstream audience) come up again when someone wants to know whether they can sumbit their live-action Evangelion music video as an AMV. The live-action part would decide it for most people, but I've seen at least one live-action AMV-type project (by AbsoluteDestiny) that I think should be on the site. Unfortunately it's creator, who I think is sort of running the place now, seems to think otherwise - and does not list it on this site.
The CG matter bring in yet another complexity, I will add, to the "what is anime" question. Back to the "Anime is Japanese animation" definition: We already have the issue of "how Japanese does it have to be to be anime", which is already fuzzy for some works with a multination origin, influence, or target audience. Now add to it the issue of how "animated" does something have to be to be called "animation".
Most things are clear-cut cases - "Azumanga Daioh" is definately "animation", "The Seven Samauri" most definately is not.
Is "Sky Captain and the World of Tommow" animation? Almost everything onscreen other than the main actors is generated by computers, yet it's "look" predominately says "live-action". Then again, that's what those "Final Fantasy" people are going for, too.
Is "Kill Bill" a film that in any way qualifies as "animated"? It contains animation, but it also contains much that is not animation. It also contains some footage which has the appearence of live cinema, but is computer enhanced and/or computer generated. Is there a graded scale of "animatedness", or is it an on and off thing?
What about "The End of Evangelion" - a 87 minute film, with about 10 min. of live-action footage. Is it 89% anime and 11% not anime? That 11% is probably, in terms of space*time, about the same ratio as the live-action component of "Sky Captain". Numbers don't seem to match subjective impressions.
Then there's the old geek classic "Tron". A lot of people think of "Tron" as a primarily animated film. Yet it contains surprisingly little animation. The light-cycles, the MCP, the tanks - basically all the "game" elements were CG. The wire-frame architecture and matching uniforms were actually just a lot of black paint, black fabric, and some white stripes that were colored with optical filters in post-production. The world looks very "artificial" - more so than the settings of most anime - so the audience equates it to "CG" or "animation". Yet it's mostly people with funny clothes filmed in oddly decorated rooms. Perception can be deceiving.
So you could cut computers out of the mix by saying anime is "Hand-drawn 2D Japanese Animation". This would eliminate questions about how much CG it takes to make a film "animation", and clean up some of the perceptual inconsistencies, but create a new problem with non-photorealistic 2D and 3D CG. Eliminate computers, and out goes "FLCL", "Ghost in the Shell", "End of Evangelion", etc....
There are also huge stylistic departures in some Japanese animation that, like "anime-like" American animation, make definitions based on character designs ("Teen Titans" - American, "My Neighbors the Yamadas" - Japanese, Disney characters and "typical" anime characters share several defining design elements due to common ancestry...). Cultural elements (historical or popular) are also out ("Samauri Jack" - American, "Cowboy Bebop" - Japanese). Comedic conventions are now shared ("sweatdrops" in American shows, "Looney Tunes"-style sound effects in Japanese series). Thematic material covered in Japanese animation is broader than that covered by American animation, but there's a lot of overlap in the action and comedy sectors (and you should see some of the crazy stuff that comes out of the former U.S.S.R. - makes even Anno and Oshi look pretty normal, all things considered). Target audiences don't quite set the definitions, either (such as anime-derived films and series marketed primarily or entirely to [often pre-teen] American audiences). Maturity - though the point I most often see cited as the big difference between American and Japanese animation - doesn't completely follow country lines, either. Americans actually tend to be very biased about the maturity of Japanese animation thanks to the fact that most have seen only the dubbed Saturday-morning imports used to sell toys and video games, or else the atypically intelectual, violent, and/or sexual series that tend to revieve the most attention among college-aged fans. Theres a lot of material in-between that doesn't get much play here, because it doesn't really stand out from the similarly middle-of-the-road material that Disney films and television sitcom animation tends to be constituted of. I've actually seen a variety of sources that suggest that some of the anime series most popular among adult American fans barely broke even in Japanese theatres, or suffered poor ratings on Japanese television. "End of Evangelion", for example, grossed just over a quarter of what would be considered a "blockbuster" in Japan, at about $12 million (for comparison, "Crossroads" - the Briney Spears incarnation, not the Ralph Macchio/Steve Vai one, made $37 million in American theatres, $17 million in the first week, being the high-quality film it was

---
So I think we're currently running off of a de-facto definition of:
"Anime" is animation that appears to be hand-drawn on two-dimensional cels and which was produced by a Japanese animation studio - though not necessarily written or drawn by Japanese filmmakers, marketed primarily to a Japanese audience, or originally voiced in Japanese. "Anime" may also be defined as including hyperrealistic 3D Computer Generated animation, but only in the capacity that it does not co-exist with live-action footage, and is associated with a corresponding popular video game developed in Japan and marketed internationally. Add three points if the work in question either makes you question the purpose of existance or desire cheap plastic toys.
---
Face it - we just like foreign stuff, because, in part, it is foreign. But the lines aren't so solid as one might initially think, and seem to be blurring from both sides as both fans and corporate interests have started to look once again to opposite sides of the Pacific for unfamiliar territory ripe for exploration and exploitation.
1606 - Shakespeare writes Macbeth
1954 - Kurosawa directs "The Seven Samauri"
1957 - Kurosawa directs "Throne of Blood"
1960 - Sturges directs "The Magnificent Seven"
Even in live action, here we have on director who made a Japanese adaptation of a English play, set in Scottland from the Elizebethan era, and a Japanese film, set in Japan's feudal past, that was adapted into a well-known western six years later. Good stories have a way of getting around.
Of course, I can also play this connections game across some other lines, as well:
1606 - Shakespeare writes Macbeth
1971 - Hugh Hefner produces an American rendition of Macbeth, directed by Roman Polanski.
1954 - "Fahrenheit 451", by Ray Bradbury, is published in three consecutive issues of Hefner's magazene.
2002 - Bradbury finished a book called "From the Dust Returned", consisting of short storied written over the course of more than 40 years. Some of the stories have illustrations produced by a man named Charles Addams.
1937 - Charles Addams pens the first of a set of cartoons that will eventually become "The Adams Family" in the New Yorker. These cartoons later inspire a popular sitcom.
1967 - Addams illustrates a collection of Mother Goose's nursery rhymes.
There we are: Shakespeare, soft porn, anti-censorship novels, gothic comedy, and Mother Goose - all interconnected through channels of publication and inspiration.
---
American kids wear, draw, and adorn their vehicles with foreign characters they don't understand, Engrish.com indicates that this isn't entirely an American phenominon. A lot of us like Anime, a lot of Japanese citizens enjoy high-budget Holywood films. Each is always influencing the other - tying the two together. No unambiguous distinction between "Anime" and "Not Anime" can be decided upon because none exits.
may seeds of dreams fall from my hands -
and by yours be pressed into the ground.
and by yours be pressed into the ground.
- dokool
- Sir Gaijin Smash
- Joined: Wed Jul 31, 2002 9:12 pm
- Location: Tokyo, Japan
- Contact:
rose4emily, much respect for actually taking the time to type all that out. You make some very good points (in fact, you make a lot of them), but at the same time you've made the issue far more clouded than it needs to be.
Here's a comparison not at all related to animation: In France, there is the Champagne region, which I believe falls across a couple provinces. They make Champagne. Y'know, the stuff you drink at parties, toast at celebrations, pour all over your teammates when you win the Super Bowl, etc.
Now, it's not like those farmers in that one region of France are the only people who know how to make champagne. You can buy the same thing from winemakers in the the US, New Zealand, etc, who make it using the same exact method.
The difference? If you buy a bottle from the US instead of from France, it's called sparkling wine. There's actually a committee in France that oversees champagne distribution, and they say that if you aren't in the region, you aren't making champagne. I think they were formed around 80 years ago (just from a quick E2 search).
Therefore, champagne made in Champagne is champagne, champagne made in the US is sparkling wine, animation that comes from Japan is called anime, and animation that may have been inspired by anime but wasn't produced in Japan isn't. Now leave the dead horse alone.
Here's a comparison not at all related to animation: In France, there is the Champagne region, which I believe falls across a couple provinces. They make Champagne. Y'know, the stuff you drink at parties, toast at celebrations, pour all over your teammates when you win the Super Bowl, etc.
Now, it's not like those farmers in that one region of France are the only people who know how to make champagne. You can buy the same thing from winemakers in the the US, New Zealand, etc, who make it using the same exact method.
The difference? If you buy a bottle from the US instead of from France, it's called sparkling wine. There's actually a committee in France that oversees champagne distribution, and they say that if you aren't in the region, you aren't making champagne. I think they were formed around 80 years ago (just from a quick E2 search).
Therefore, champagne made in Champagne is champagne, champagne made in the US is sparkling wine, animation that comes from Japan is called anime, and animation that may have been inspired by anime but wasn't produced in Japan isn't. Now leave the dead horse alone.
- rose4emily
- Joined: Fri Jan 23, 2004 1:36 am
- Location: Rochester, NY
- Contact:
- Scintilla
- (for EXTREME)
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2004 - Toshifumi Takizawa directs "<a href="http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclo ... 7">Samurai 7</a>", animated by Studio Gonzo, produced in high definition at a cost of $300K per episoderose4emily wrote:1606 - Shakespeare writes Macbeth
1954 - Kurosawa directs "The Seven Samauri"
1957 - Kurosawa directs "Throne of Blood"
1960 - Sturges directs "The Magnificent Seven"
1985 - Austrian rock singer Falco records "Rock Me Amadeus"!