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[Flying Dice]

And who is the arbiter of "true anime". It's clearly not the Japanese since they don't draw this distinction at all. it's not even a debate in Japan, it's all anime. You could draw everything Southpark style in Japan but with square heads, and they'd just accept it as another example of anime, just an odd one.

So the "arbiters of true anime" must be e.g. Americans. And fuck that. Fuck that with 17 sticks at once, it's the most idiotic concept ever that westerners are the "connoisseurs" who get to decide what is anime and what is not.

This is misleading because of how the loanword was used each time. "Anime" in the original context is borrowed from English "animation" and literally just means animation. "Anime" in the western context is borrowed from Japanese "anime" and means "animation from Japan".

If you're going to call everything anime in the west, stop being such a goddamn weeaboo and say "cartoons" or "animated". The loanword is only useful because it's a distinguishing factor. Also, the whole "bluh bluh anime is the visual style/wut if style change" thing is horseshit. Anime is the cultural context and ongoing body of work combined. Avatar isn't anime because it is a western production and is rooted in a western cultural milieu. One of the principal problems in translating anime for other regions is retuning the cultural references and wordplay. The same has been true for much of human history. It's why students have trouble with Chaucer, Shakespeare, Greek myths, &c. even when they have a plain modern English side-by-side translation.

There's certainly exchange between western and eastern animating, but that doesn't mean that Avatar is suddenly anime because it borrows some visual styling from one period of anime, or that Crayon Shin-Chan is western because it departs from some of the more blatant visual norms.

Fuck me, next we'll have people saying that Eminem isn't a rapper because he's white, or that M is an American film. Get it? They are superficial judgements that ignore the more meaningful underlying context.

[Reelya]

Cool, FD, but not sure why you're phrasing this as if you're arguing against me, when all of those things ... are basically the point I was making?

the "what if the style changed" point was to point out one of the basic flaws in any style-based definition.

Sure, it's wrong for a large number of reasons including ones you listed, but those aren't mutually exclusive with the reasons it is wrong that I listed. I went on to point out that it would be impossible to get people to even agree on what that style was, then once you have the definition agreed on, you have another round of bickering on whether the style rules apply to this show or that (like arguing over whether tropes apply to a show), and how "anime-like" is enough to "really" be anime. And after that you also have to account for stylistic changes that might occur in the future.

Your points were saying "anime is <thing>, so it can't be <other thing>", whereas my argument is that "No matter what it is, anime can't be <other thing> because the whole scheme would collapse by itself".

[IronyOwl]

So the "arbiters of true anime" must be e.g. Americans. And fuck that. Fuck that with 17 sticks at once, it's the most idiotic concept ever that westerners are the "connoisseurs" who get to decide what is anime and what is not.

This is absurd. Of course the arbiters of true anime would be Americans (or Brits, or whoever else wants to use it), it's their word. You don't write to the Japanese telling them Pantsu can't mean what they think it means because it's unthinkable that THE JAPANESE would decide the definitions of AN ENGLISH WORD, because it's not an English word. It's a Japanese word they acquired by ruthlessly stealing it for their own purposes, and so now means whatever they say it means.

But this is even worse, because you openly admit "anime" doesn't mean in English what it means in Japan in the first place, so... what, the meaning of the loan word has to be crystallized in its first incarnation and can henceforth never change? The word must reference all things from its country of origin? What possible "Americans don't get to decide this, Japanese get to decide this!" reasoning can you apply to stealing a stolen word for animation?

There's also the scale of the argument to consider. Ok we have "anime is the Japanese stuff" vs "anime is a style". There's also Occam's Razor. The chosen definition should be the one that makes sense, and can be agreed on by the most number of people.

The "country of origin" definition works for 99.9% of cases. There are the occassional questionable ones, e.g. joint productions, but generally if it was produced in Japan with a Japanese dub on release, we can use that as a working, objective definition of anime.

"Makes sense" includes "is useful," which is why nobody (except you, and then only as a counterpoint) is arguing to just call everything anime. It's even more objective than figuring out country of origin, but it doesn't do anything. It's nonfunctional.

Similarly, country of origin is objective but useless except as it implies the subjective stuff. If I say "JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is an anime" to mean "JoJo's Bizarre Adventure was made in Japan," you've essentially gained zero information from that fact unless you start assuming things anyway. If I say "Avatar: The Last Airbender is an anime" to mean "Avatar: The Last Airbender features large-eyed children saving the world with kung fu," we can quarrel a lot over the definition, but information is being exchanged.

Cool, FD, but not sure why you're phrasing this as if you're arguing against me, when all of those things ... are basically the point I was making?

He's disagreeing with you. Your argument is that anime must mean animation from Japan or all animation everywhere, because there would be disagreement over anything but the former and the latter is the meaning of the original word in Japanese. His argument is that there is a strong cultural vibe that colors and defines anime.

Both result in the same general vicinity of "anime is cartoons from Japan, you weeb," but they do so from radically different paths. An American team going over to Japan to make a cartoon would produce "anime" by your definition because there's nothing else it could be, but "cartoons" by FD's definition because the cultural stuff surrounding it is entirely American. Similarly, a Japanese team coming over to America would produce cartoons by your definition and anime by FD's, because geography vs culture.

[Reelya]

Not sure, I'd say merely mentioning that JoJo is a Japanese cartoon does convey the same amount of information as labeling it as an anime. It's conveying the same amount of cultural information.

So the "arbiters of true anime" must be e.g. Americans. And fuck that. Fuck that with 17 sticks at once, it's the most idiotic concept ever that westerners are the "connoisseurs" who get to decide what is anime and what is not.

This is absurd. Of course the arbiters of true anime would be Americans (or Brits, or whoever else wants to use it), it's their word.

I meant it would be idiotic if they start labeling half the cartoons in Japan as "not anime". I was pointing out that it's the only truly consistent outcome if you start drawing lines in the sand regarding story and content as your anime definition. Not all, and perhaps not even most Japanese cartoons would probably fit some narrow definition concocted with the purpose of including only certain American cartoons but excluding most others.

And yes it's "their word" but nobody is actually going to be able to agree on this are they? So it's going to be some arbitrary per-person definition. Endless arguing. A word that cannot have an agree-on definition is pretty useless. When I say Americans will be "arbiters of true anime", I mean each individual American will all have an opinion on which shows are "true anime" and which are not. None of them will agree on a definition.

[Solifuge]

This screenshot is a pretty salient point, RE: what qualifies as Anime in or outside Japan.

Speaking of which, I caught wind that there is some kind of Furi Kuri sequel in the works? I'm interested, but also worried. Would I like it as much if I saw it again today, or is this just youthful nostalgia making it seem so weird and cool at the time?

In the new season of FLCL, many years have passed since Naota and Haruhara Haruko shared their adventure together. Meanwhile, the war between the two entities known as Medical Mechanica and Fraternity rages across the galaxy. Enter Hidomi, a young teenaged girl who believes there is nothing amazing to expect from her average life, until one day when a new teacher named Haruko arrives at her school. Soon enough, Medical Mechanica is attacking her town and Hidomi discovers a secret within her that could save everyone, a secret that only Haruko can unlock.

This makes it sound derivative and kinda like generic anime fare? But, to be fair, I wouldn't know how to sum of FLCL and not do that? 00's punk aesthetics, memey Non-Sequiturs everywhere, and dissatisfied teenage ennui? All strung together by weird shit, over the top action, and Japanese Rock? I mean, that describes nothing of it either, but at least what sorta stuff appealed at the time?

[Neonivek]

Also I don't know why people don't use the term "Anime-Styled"... Avatar is an anime-styled cartoon.

Which then again... the biggest problem with the term "Anime" as a style is it is becoming more and more and more and more and more and more meaningless every single day as we adopt more of their stylistic choices.

There is a lot of cross pollination (as there should be, but "anime" kind of creates an all or nothing scenario) between the mediums. In fact even some of the most famous animes were inspired by western shows and ideas (more evident early on than it is today)

In fact is Batman the animated Series... A Anime? No? Well did you watch Big O? Same japanese company, same style.

So it Batman the animated series is... an anime (which it would have to be by definition because Big O is an anime)... Then Justice League is an anime.

Then of course as people pointed out. At that point we must also decide what anime isn't anime anymore. Aim For the Ace? Legend of Galactic Heroes?

---

My problem with declaring certain cartoons as anime... is mostly how infectious it is.

A lot of shows are adopting ideas from animes and using it for themselves. Yet they are anime for the slightest usage...

Nevermind that Animes actually have more to them then crazy hairdos and ways of using emotions.

---

The second problem is whenever someone says they want to watch an anime... They rarely mean "I want to watch Amazing Spies!"

It is an imposition on the definition that no one who actually needs the term... Actually means.

[Reelya]

Agreed, Anime-Styled is clear and avoids the issues.

EDIT: Also where I think FD was over-reacting was to my "country of origin" point. FD was basically saying "anime is much more than just country of origin".

Well sure, but Occam's Razor, country of origin fits well enough almost all the time so we don't have to think about it harder. Sure there's much more to anime than just coming from a specific location, but all those details aren't going to change whether any specific piece of work is an anime or is not.

Anime has all the things FD says are vital to understanding anime as a medium. But let's assume it didn't. Imagine if tomorrow every single anime creator in Japan suddenly started producing work which lacked all the qualities FD says anime has. Would it be anime or not? If it's still anime, despite being totally different, then what justification would there be for that? It goes back to country of origin. Country of origin trumps all the "cultural" stuff in determining the is/is-not question.

[Neonivek]

Yeah that is the oddest thing about the "Anime as style" argument...

Everything from Japan is anime... usually automatically (Mostly because the style is "Like Japanese Animation"... As in... it is "anime-styled")

It literally only exists to make Western media anime.

---

I mean for example... Avatar the Last Airbender is usually the first one to be called an anime... but... The way it tells it story and characterizes its characters... isn't the same way an anime would (Kitara is practically Anti-anime)

So what does it have? Ohh right! Strong continuity and a anime-styled animation.

---

Wait a minute... if the "Anime is a style" is STILL the exact definition of "Anime-styled"... and the "Anime by location" is its own definition.

Why do we need a "anime as style"?

[Flying Dice]

Agreed, Anime-Styled is clear and avoids the issues.

EDIT: Also where I think FD was over-reacting was to my "country of origin" point. FD was basically saying "anime is much more than just country of origin".

Well sure, but Occam's Razor, country of origin fits well enough almost all the time so we don't have to think about it harder. Sure there's much more to anime than just coming from a specific location, but all those details aren't going to change whether any specific piece of work is an anime or is not.

Anime has all the things FD says are vital to understanding anime as a medium. But let's assume it didn't. Imagine if tomorrow every single anime creator in Japan suddenly started producing work which lacked all the qualities FD says anime has. Would it be anime or not? If it's still anime, despite being totally different, then what justification would there be for that? It goes back to country of origin. Country of origin trumps all the "cultural" stuff in determining the is/is-not question.

That's not how culture works. You don't just turn off your cultural filters, because they constitute the fundamental assumptions and norms of your worldview. You're still approaching this from the perspective of trivial things, little individual stylistic elements. Country of origin is the cultural stuff, in the sense of the country/region of origin of the artist(s). Where a work is produced means fuck-all. Where the people who produced that work were raised is everything.

Imagine if tomorrow every single anime creator in Japan suddenly started producing work which lacked all the qualities FD says anime has.

Where did I start listing off qualities? I literally just said that works are informed by the culture of the artists that create them. Even when an artist deliberately produces something at odds with the normal styles of that medium in their culture, they are still operating within the assumptions of their culture. The "lack" is entirely artificial and only exists in the minds of people whose cultural assumptions are shaped such that they perceive that set of characteristics as lacking something normal.

Like, take the explosion of musical genres in the late '70s-early '90s. Punk, grunge, metal, post-rock, hip-hop, disco, &c. were all radically different from classic rock and often from each other, but they were all products of the same musical culture, and shared a lot of the same underlying characteristics inherited from earlier forms.

If you want a more direct example that's also simpler and easier to comprehend, take food. Cooking some pasta with a tomato-based sauce doesn't mean that it's Italian food, because it lacks the cultural assumptions and norms which define proper Italian cuisine. But, ultimately, cooking food has a relatively limited set of assumptions and behaviors associated with it, which is why someone willing to put the effort into studying a culture's approach to food (and with a good helping of talent) can often replicate it despite not being born into it.

For artistic endeavors which draw deeply on a great many aspects of a culture, it's much harder. Which is why the only definition that matters is a culture-based one. It doesn't go one way, either. If a Japanese studio made a show with the same artistic style as King of the Hill, it still wouldn't be an American cartoon, because it would lack all of the underlying cultural knowledge, assumptions, memes, &c. that made KotH brilliant. And you'd have a damn hard time translating King of the Hill for a non-American audience, even in other anglophone countries.

That's where we get into fun stuff. Because say that that same studio made a show like King of the Hill, in the same visual style, but set it near Osaka and immersed it in Japanese culture using stereotypes about Japanese hicks, it would be a cross-cultural equivalency (and would be anime in the western sense of the word). But for the most part you don't even see that level of detail, it's literally just superficial stuff like "OMG they draw their eyes like anime eyes, it's totes anime!"

[Reelya]

I'm not sure why you're getting so heated, because this is fairly tangential to any point i'm making. I'm not disputing whether all that's important, it just doesn't actually change the decision "is X anime or not". Those points are correct, but tangential to the question.

Does a single example "flip" from anime to not anime or vice versa because of the points you made? Actually I don't think so. So they might all be well and nice to consider when discussing the roots of anime, but they're not relevant if your only goal is a binary classifier of  anime/not-anime. The simplest possible rule suffices.

e.g. say you were determining a rule: "how do we tell a human from a chimp?" well, you can in fact come up with the simplest test possible, e.g. DNA, and someone could strongly object: "but there's so much more to being a human than DNA, there's culture and language, how can you dismiss all of that and boil it down to DNA strands?"  Well, we can in fact ignore all of that because we can define "human" however we want, and as long as those definitions line up they don't have to be the same.

You yourself said the word "anime" can mean whatever you like, you said "it's their word, it means what they want it to mean".

I'm using it to mean "cartoons made in Japan" (made for Japanese audiences more specifically). You're free to use it with your own layers of meaning. If the two definitions line up (i.e. by examples) then neither can be said to be right or wrong, they're both valid usages. My objection to the "style" definition was in fact that nobody would be able to agree on which show is which, hence it wouldn't be a viable definition.

[Max™]

I mean, if anything, Avatar would be aeni: MOI Animation is based in South Korea after all, though this would also mean a huge chunk of modern DC and Marvel animated shows plus The Boondocks and Black Dynamite should arguably count too, right?

Remember when 'japanimation' was a thing people said?

[Flying Dice]

That's the thing, though. Boondocks is fundamentally American in every way that matters. Using a shallow definition is the thing that leaves room for fools to say that it isn't because of some trivial stylistic stuff.


--
I dunno why you think I'm upset. I'm outlining why "made in Japan" isn't an adequate identifier, even if it functions as one in most cases. And you keep claiming I said things which I didn't say, which is mildly irritating.

It's the difference between a description being correct incidentally versus being correct because it is well structured. The "country of production" argument is weak particularly because it's vulnerable to being challenged on the same superficial grounds it uses, namely, "where it was made doesn't matter if it doesn't have anything in common with other stuff from there!" and the corollary that suggests that something which superficially resembles anime is anime, and all you can really respond with from the geographic-origin standpoint is 'nuh uh'.

That's why you're framing it in terms of personal definitions: because when you use shitty definitions there's no solid ground to root them in, so they might as well be individualized. A cultural definition is stronger because it's founded on the fundamental structure of a thing rather than the skin of it, so there's no wiggle room for idiots to say "buh buh I think it should be this" with any grounding.

It's not just about whether it fits the necessary traits of the group being described, but also how well it holds up when compared with other definitions.

[Neonivek]

I dunno why you think I'm upset. I'm outlining why "made in Japan" isn't an adequate identifier

Except it kind of works... I mean unless you take "Made in Japan" to mean every time a particular program is animated over there (which... absolutely no one uses as a definition).

It is solid.

Boondocks is fundamentally American in every way that matters

Madbull is a show about American themes and issues by American characters. It lacks typical Anime stereotypes and trappings associated with the medium.

It must be a Western Cartoon!

[Cruxador]

I meant it would be idiotic if they start labeling half the cartoons in Japan as "not anime". I was pointing out that it's the only truly consistent outcome if you start drawing lines in the sand regarding story and content as your anime definition. Not all, and perhaps not even most Japanese cartoons would probably fit some narrow definition concocted with the purpose of including only certain American cartoons but excluding most others.

I get where you're coming from, but how many people do you really reckon would think of Doraemon or Crayon shin-chan or Bono Bono or any of the other kid's shows as "anime" really?

Also I don't know why people don't use the term "Anime-Styled"... Avatar is an anime-styled cartoon.

Well grammatically speaking, it would be "Anime-style" since it's not like someone took a pre-existing cartoon and then did up its hair using anime. But I think the main reason is just that it doesn't roll off the tongue well.

[Jopax]

Righto, I need help finding a certain anime. I stumbled upon it a couple months back, not sure where it was mentioned or in what context, could've been here. Something about a modern destroyer ship getting back in time to ww2. Can't remember the name or anything aside from that, but the premise sounded interesting and I'd like to give it a go now.

Anyone know what the hell I'm talking about?