Japanimation

I'm not particularly attached to "anime" being the term of use, but people already associate the word with animation which adhere to an easily identifiable pattern of production techniques and visual styles which were popularized by Japanese anime and are now being implemented in Western cartoons. So it would be sensible to be able to say something is Japanese anime or Western anime. But it could easily be anything else as well, so long as people actually used the word and knew what it meant. I just think it's valuable to have a term to describe these types of animations regardless of where they come from, and "anime" already means this to most people, even if a lot of them are "normies" or "tourists" to some people online.

Also anime as a term for Japanese animation was particularly useful in the past because it indicated a notable departure from Western cartoons people were accustomed to. Japanese animation needed its own term because it was so different from what animated works in the West were known to be at that point. But that isn't the case anymore. The West is producing and will continue to produce works which align with the syles and techniques Japan popularized across the globe, so it makes sense to keep the word we used to mean these things.

I'm not sure if techniques would be the right/only word, since some of it is just directorial decisions, but my assumption would be that these are done due to the nature of anime being produced on a weekly schedule, requiring frugal frame economics. For an example of what I'm talking about: things like, during dialogue scenes, (a)cutaways to expositional or (b)wide shots, or (c)cuts to non-speaking characters. These shots reduce the need for additional frames to be drawn since (a) no moving objects are on screen, just a background, (b) characters are too far away for detailed drawings to be required, or (c)characters are barely moving and may only have slight facial expression changes. Decisions like these allowed animators who were adapting the detailed works from manga to reduce the workload for a weekly episode while still maintaining visual appeal and a cinematic feel. This isn't so much a 'discussed' aspect of anime, but it does lend to the more complex and cinematic experience of anime compared to something like a Hannah Barbera cartoon.


Those are two examples, yes. Avatar uses an art style and visual tropes (chibi reactions, for example) previously only seen in anime, which ultimately is likely further attributed to the manga works they were adapting. Anime isn't exclusively defined by these particular styles, but it is the origin of the style in the animation world. Additional visual tropes would be something like a character eyes suddenly bursting into a sparkling glisten, dashing characters with speed lines, those fisheye forehead shots when characters look insane, scribble/vein/sweat drop/blue shadow reactionary effects - stuff like that. ATLA and Turning Red both make use of a variety of these tropes and styles, as do other Western animations which were clearly inspired by anime to varying degrees. Teen Titans began incorporating them pretty early on. Avatar followed suit, stylistically leaning further into it with an anime-inspired art style. Turning Red is a bit of an oddball since it's 3D, but general character design and some visual tropes definitely pull from anime. Then you have something like Otachan: Rabbit Season, which pretty much goes all-in and is effectively (so far, two episodes of) English-origin anime.


I agree that most of these works are mostly blurring the lines. But I do find it a bit silly to say something like Otachan belongs categorically in a different realm than anime:

No, I'm not crediting them with cost cutting and time saving measure lol. But, like South Park, the anime industry developed a unique style as a means to cope with their constrained timelines. It's not why they did it that's important, it's how they did it. And with anime's popularity, these turned from production coping mechanisms into an identifiably unique style which has since been picked up through osmosis by other animators.

I specifically mentioned how these techniques maintained a cinematic feel because I think that's one of the things which made anime so popular. Contrasting with South Park, which uses an extremely simple "childish" visual style to create an episode wach week, anime chose to maintain a more complex art style, but use a lot more static imagery and cinematic scene compositions.

I can't find any association between Magic Knight Rayearth and Batwoman director Shinsuke Terasawa, other than one person's review online associating the two works. Who are you talking about that connects those two works?

@valico it must be mine on IMDB. He was a key animator in one of the episodes, and the rest of the stuff in which he worked in the same was as terrible as Magic Knight Rayearth, a complete waste of both Megumi Ogata and Emi Shinohara (R.I.P.) IMHO.

@ProudElitist MKR is such a bizarre callout if he only served as key animator on one or two episodes. His credit list is pretty long with much more notable productions, and shows he was more involved in, than Rayearth lol

@kamonmabase the Project A-Ko vomit (I feel bad for the poor Emi Shinohara who had to debut her amazing voice with such a dreck), Gundam F-91, the shitty Appleseed movie, the insanely overrated Gundam Z, all "high" quality stuff. Practically the new Osamu Tezuka mixed with Satoshi Kon. Give me a break. And it shows, the Catwoman movie is absolute garbage, and not just for the terrible writing of Greg Wiseman, who I guess he never returned from the crappy World Tour of the not already particularly good Gargoyles series. The direction too was pure rubbish.

@ProudElitist I don't know how any of what you said is relevant to my comment which you replied to. What does any of that have to with how strange it is that you chose Rayearth as a primary reference for Terasawa's work?