Other country's animation

"Anime" has the great benefit of being quicker to say and type than "Japanese Animation." I'm also not sure how the French version of the word can be pronounced with an accent and the Japanese version without, because without an accent it becomes "ay-nime."

Complaining about the term by claiming that "it should all be cartoons" makes as much sense as complaining that sub-genres in jazz shouldn't exist. On one level, this may be true, but on another level, Louis Armstrong's trumpet playing style is aurally distinct from the bebop trumpet of Dizzy Gillespie or the multiple different styles of Miles Davis (cool jazz, modal jazz, or fusion). I'm not going to ditch any of those terms, no matter how non-sensical they may seem, just because "it should all be jazz." There is a non-trivial semantic loss by doing so.

This is not an invitation to engage in the usual tiresome semantic debate over "what is anime?" by the way ;).

The analogy to jazz is also the key to understanding why there isn't a distinction made between the animation of different countries all the time. For that to happen, you have to have 1) a distinct difference between styles, and 2) enough of the work produced in a particular style for a shorthand term to be created for it. I like Canadian animation and there's a lot more of it than you'd suspect, but for the most part I can't tell a Canadian cartoon from an American one. I also can't tell the difference between a lot of French cartoons like the latest Fantastic Four series. It'll take something like The Triplets of Belleville for me to see the radical differences in style between an American cartoon and a French one, but it's the only example of a recent exported French 'toon I can think of off the top of my head.

The other major reason why I think Japanese animation gets a special term reserved for it is to dodge the unspoken connotation that "cartoon" (and "animation") has with "for kids." There was very real value in making a distinction between a "cartoon" and "anime" to ensure that some unsuspecting mother didn't buy Urotsukidoji for her kids. I think there is still very real value in that, because "cartoon" is still "for kids," whether we like it or not. The Simpsons and South Park and their ilk are just considered "not cartoons" by the majority of the American populace. I think that's changing, but very slowly.

-- Ed
 
Yeah, I agree that how they should be label, but since American decided to "class things up" and try to differentiate between american animation, we need to have fancy names for foriegn animation, especially since most people will turn the other way if they hear it is from a country they don't like. After all in one of my animation class we're looking at foriegn cartoons, and the proffessor refers as things like "name of country" animation. So atleast you know people are calling it as such.
 
I call all cartoons that are not produced in Japan cartoons, and only mention their country of origin if it comes up in conversation, or if I feel like giving out useless trivia that no one outside these forums would care about.
 
Jazz is a genre, "Japanese animation" is just a country of origin. There's comedy, action, drama, and other genres that are found in Japanese animation, just like in other parts of the world. If "Japanese animation" were a genre, then that's basically saying Pokemon and Perfect Blue are the same types of shows.

That's because you're trying to find a style that isn't there. Everyone has their own style, it's not something hardwired into a person's DNA based on their skin color or nationality. John K's work doesn't look like Bruce Timm's work, nor does Alessandro Barbucci's work look like Iginio Straffi's. Musashi Kishimoto's to Fujiko Fujio's, etc. One movie can't represent a country's animation style, it's too vast for that.
 
Artistic style is dictated by the culture you grew up in and live in, nothing to do with DNA. The writing style of a Canadian writer from Newfoundland is gonna be different from an American writer, or even a writer from Quebec or Birtish Columbia.

Don't underestimate the importance of the origin of the creator (and their influences) on the final product.
 
I never said that anime was a genre in itself. It's a way to categorize work in a medium, in this case by country of origin. We don't happen to have an English loan word for French animation or Italian animation or British animation. That doesn't automatically make the loan word for Japanese animation invalid, nor does the fact that the Japanese don't make the same distinction.

If you're going to quibble about a separate classification for some cartoons as "anime," then why should we stop there? We could dispense with the distinction of "animation" and just call it all "film." It's all the same thing -- 24 frames a second simulating motion. Actually, we could just as easily call EVERYTHING animation. "Live-action" film is really just animation where the cels are a series of photographs in sequence instead of drawn or rendered images. Isn't that a rather arbitrary categorization as well?

-- Ed
 
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