anime is media, so just do a paper on anime and its effects on the people that view it.
examples:
anime and gender roles: study the way anime portrays men and women. are there any recurrent themes? i find that female characters are often hypersexualized. some examples might be every girl in FLCL, haha. At the same time you could contrast this with artistic films such as Hayao Miyizaki movies that take a much less commercial approach to gender, or even that American-Anime avatar that's creators explicitly stated a goal to create female characters that possessed more than superficial qualities.
anime and body image: this spans far beyond anime, falling into almost all animated works. Male and Female characters are generally very similar looking. Men and boys are generally built with barrel chests and toned to muscular, lean body types. Women are the usually reasonably well endowed, thin waist, thin arms, heart shaped faced. What are the repercussions of depicting idealized versions of humans in this way? What does it say about our culture?
common themes in anime: what i usually see in anime is a strong tie to fantasy and creative worlds unlike our own. often they have adventurous and dramatic plot lines, straying for the more common cartoon prototype of being fun and silly for younger audiences. examples of this can be found in almost all animes: FLCL, Naruto, Samurai Champloo, even some Miyizaki films such as Princess Mononoke. Some exceptions might be the American-anime hybrids such as Avatar and Teen Titans that meld the intensity of Japanese animation and American levity. Animes also have a strong draw toward action, such as fight scenes which is usually done to show off the animation styles of the particular artists involved, as well as enhance and entice the audience. This is similar to live actions movies that seem to always be trying to top one another, with movies like Taken showing people slicing through bullets as the careen toward them (absurd in my opinion).
Hope that helps some =)
