Ergh... I didn;t wat to do this, but seriously, this is so far gone. Sanity died here a long time ago.
1: Read the title. This is not the "anime" thread. It is the "liking anime" thread. If someone is reminded of anime when watching something french then that is relevant.
2: The definition of "made in Japan" is false. English is a living language, it changes and adapts based upon use, and it has consistently demonstrated an inability to conform to "made in Japan". It is pretty obvious why too. It is a completely ridiculous definition. Send a studio to Japan and it makes anime. Send one away and it doesn't. No matter how exposed(or not) they are to the locality. Where does the line get drawn? Japanese script? Cast? Director? Vocals? Video? What if a student draws a ball in the corner of a book that appears to bounce if they flick through the pages quickly? Technically any time something is copied it is a new instance, so nothing that isn't actually watched within Japan wouldn't be anime and everything that was would be, on account of where the viewed instance was produced, wit the possible exception of analogue exports... Is "Let's Speak English" a manga?(I am guessing that we all agree no, and am assuming that the story behind the webcomic is honest) Are the English Dubs themselves from Ghibli films anime?(I expect that most people who have seen the films, if they then listen to the dubs without the visuals, will hear anime, and those who don't probably self-identify as weeb otaku. If you self-identify as an extremist minority in a field, then I suspect that you exclude yourself from representing general definitions concerning that field...)
The simple fact is that place of origin does have a correlation, but there is precisely zero direct or binding connection. It doesn't control nor maintain the content so it is stupid for defining or describing the content. It is a stupid definition, even by the heroic standards of stupidity that humans are willing to tolerate, so it completely fails to maintain any lasting traction as a definition. The term simply does not mean that.
3: The term is derived from a culture that came about from people discovering something new, something that was distinctly different from the other animations, and they fell in love, and needed a way to refer to this thing that they loved. "Anime" describes what people like, which makes the whole "elephant" definition sound good, but it isn't. The elephant definition is just for the lazy, stupid, or desperate. There is always a better definition, it is just difficult to find. "Anime" is basically defined by cultural factors. It is also vague, more a case of scoring points based upon how many anime features it has and attaining the rank of anime if it scores well enough. It is also highly varied. Some people require more points than others. The same thing will be scored more highly by one person than another... There is all manner of variance in the definition both between regions and individuals. I expect that most "casuals", people who just sort-of-like anime but don't bother focusing upon it as its own special unique thing, will consider Avatar to be anime. The artstyle is a big point, and there are a great many other points too. But the artstyle is lacking a lot as well, in many little ways, and the story, character, setting, background, an so many other elements all just don't have enough of the anime quirks for someone who specifically seeks it out to get their anime fix out of it. But this can happen to anything Japanese that succeeds in escaping its cultural influences will not be anime. Some people may very legitimately remove C.G.I. from anime, while others can very legitimately claim that it is. Much French animation actually has a lot of cultural similarities to Japanese, if one wants to combine the two then that can be perfectly legitimate to them. And there is obviously places with a lot of Japanese cultural influence relative to the cultures that use the term that can produce things that many of the consumers won't be able to tell the difference, which is plenty of reason to apply the term without reservation when one considers the context. I mean, the taxonomy here is to determine whether someone will enjoy something, that is how media is best categories, there is nothing like the biological taxonomy's interest in common ancestry...
Someone fell in love with anime because "that guy was so dreamy" and so their point system goes: Bishonen 20=> and a highly angular artstyle 30=> and exactly like my first Husbando 40, physically abusive malelead 10, emotionally abusive 10, Femalelead somehow(symbolism was involved) saves the world without ever doing anything 10, Oh wow so many sparkles!!! 10 and 50 points = anime...
Someone else may have higher* standards and require 80 points. They'll awards 5 points each for speed lines, repetitive running animations, casual depictions of multiple active religions coexisting, disregard of child or same-sex nudity, scary tiny old people cerebus syndrome, non episodic... But they have their own special tastes, so they grant 60 points to each of: Women sexually assault each other in communal baths, male lead's face falls into female lead's underwear, The entire female cast explicitly want the male lead's babies, and not in the sense of "sacrifice your firstborn", well, not "just" in the sense of sacrificing their firstborn...
Or we could list all the differences between Crayon Shin-chan and Dennis the Menace and most of them would probably be part of the anime culture... I do not actually want to know anything about Crayon Shin-chan(nor Dennice the Menace for that matter...) so...
Anything that accrues enough of what the individual views of as anime culture will be anime and it is very possible for non-Japanese products to qualify and for Japanese products to fail. The term was derived from Japanese imports, so there is a very high correlation there, but that doesn't change that a geological definition of media content is stupid. ...Unless that media content explicitly concerns geology, a documentary on mineral composition of aquifers would be very different to a documentary on flying island weight distributions, but that still has nothing to do with where the author happened to be residing at the time...
It is neither location(no direct relevance to the actual media) nor artstyle nor whatever other thing you think it needs(Waaaaay too much variation to tie this down) nor is it some arbitrary relic of shared consciousness that just is("it is an elephant" doesn't say enough about the media to actually be used for any purpose whatsoever, the name would be completely useless)... It is thousands of tiny little quirks, most of which you never even noticed and are far from universal, but if they hit a critical mass then then anime happens. And more than that, it is finding something culturally distinctive and being enchanted by it. So please understand that you are, in fact, ALL wrong, and should ALL feel bad about making a thing out of this, then go find camaraderie consoling one another against a shared affront. You should all be able to agree that I am insane and unqualified to comment, that my arguments and position are self-evidently false, and that I am generally unpleasant, so go have fun with that!
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Topic: I like anime, do you like anime? (Read 3137646 times)