Can Americans Make Anime? Pages PREV 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 NEXT | |
I'm not posting a list of what I like, these are widely considered some of the most popular animes out there, and some of the best. And for whoever said Naruto and Shippuden are the same. I suppose technically they are the same but the writer found it necessary to separate them and so I separated them also. And for people who say what is on my list isn't good anime. I believe "good" is a matter of opinion, and frankly I don't give a fuck what your opinion is, I stated mine and thats that. | |
Final Flight of the Osiris and Kid's Story were made by the Wachowski Brothes. Both parts of The Second Renaissance were written and directed by Mahiro Maeda, who helped animate Castle In the Sky and Porco Rosso and directed Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo and even designed the Angels from Evangelion. Program was written and directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri, the creator of Ninja Scroll and Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. World Record was created by Madhouse involved in Trigun and Death Note. Beyond was by Koji Morimoto, who didn't do much of note (he did direct the concert scenes from Macross Plus apparently). Detective's Story is by Shinchiro Watanabe, of Cowboy BeBop fame (and Samurai Champloo, and Eureka 7) Matriculaed was done by Peter Chung, which is admittedly Korean American. | |
Of course Last Airbender and Legend of Korra count as anime! I see cosplayers dressing up as those characters every year at FanimeCon. But I agree with Chris here, a work's place of origin or home platform shouldn't hamper which genre it belongs to. | |
First, anime literally means animation from Japan. So by this very definition Korra and Avatar are not anime. Second, anime is not a genre, it's a medium. | |
Thanks for that. I'll check them out when I get the chance. This should come in handy. The reason I have so much trouble is because I'm primarily a manga reader and I get my manga through an iPad app. The anime selection is huge, but unlike Netflix, it's just an alphabetized list of titles, 99% which I've never heard of. | |
I say yes. From what I have learned over the years is that Anime was heavily influenced by Disney back in the day anyways. The so-called strictly Japanese productions that many of us old Anime fans have seen contain many western influences as well. Aside from some of the story telling there are a few techniques in design, animation and color tones that help make it distinct but I don't think that these techniques should be exclusive to the Japanese. Artist and story tellers all take from each other (in a good way) to advance their mediums. The criticism is superficial. Works such as, Avatar: The Last Airbender was amazing. I like it "more" than much of what I see from Japan. Batman Beyond and Teen Titans, awesome! | |
Are we sure we don't mean "good" animation? All the animation in North America is 3D or cheap-n-quick kids shows and Adult swim stuff, mostly animated in Asian studios. But hey, the French are getting it. | |
This question really just seems to be about semantics. But most english speakers who use the word anime don't use it to mean animation. A native english speaker won't recommend you to watch their favourite 'anime' futurama, they will say their favourite 'cartoon'. But really it is all just semantics. In my opinion Americans can't make anime because the word implies a certain cultural flavour that a non native can't reproduce. | |
I'd just assumed he was specifically referring to Final Flight of the Osiris (given the link he posted). If not, oh boy. | |
I see anime more defined as a stylistic art design more than anything, and if I refer to something as an 'anime,' it's probably just because of the art design that was originally produced and, now, probably inspired by Japan. Personally, I think any conventions or purists that look down on the Avatar series purely because of its roots just see it as something that doesn't belong based on its production, which I guess it somewhat understandable, given how a fairly good amount of these people are die-hard otakus that would give a leg for their Japanese stuff, but honestly I feel they need to get over themselves. The series, and other Western animations that have taken cues from anime (*cough*TeenTitans*cough*) have proven to share some of the similarities of the more positive notes of the typical popular anime, these being a smooth and slick animation, good writing, fairly good art design, well-developed and likable characters, and humorous comedy bits. The purists probably want to argue that 'anime' can't be made anywhere better than the people that originally designed it, but they honestly need to take off their rose-colored glasses and realize that most anime, especially some of the more recent stuff... kinda sucks. Or, at the very least, isn't as great as they hail. Not saying that everything released in the past year or so sucks or wasn't that great. Madoka ftw. Tied with TTGL as my favorite anime of all time. | |
I'd just like to say how excellent this post is. You hit the nail right on the head and there is nothing more I could add to such a well thought out and fantastic argument. Seriously, 5 star post. | |
Here's my 2 cents: The title "anime" is not descriptive of a specific art style. One Piece is sharply different from other anime series, yet it's still considered an anime. No, what makes anime "anime" is the underlying production procedure. Brian Hanson of Anime News Network talks about it here. The animation industries of America and Japan essentially evolved differently, and do things differently. The very first animators in Japan watched cartoons coming out of America and tried to reverse engineer them without any idea how they were actually made. This difference goes beyond simple geographic boundaries. To use the bourbon analogy, it's not simply using the bourbon recipe in Canada. It's as if someone took a case of bourbon up to Canada and some brewers there tried figuring out how to make it without actually knowing the recipe. Could they end up making something that tastes similar? Yes, but it still won't be bourbon, and not just because it wasn't made in the United States. Conversely, bourbon won't be the same thing as the drink the brewers in Canada came up with. So Legend of Korra and other western animated shows are categorically not anime. But does it really matter? Good storytelling and good art is not something that any nation owns exclusive rights to. | |
Anime is effectively the same thing for Japanese animation as the term "Western Animation" is for Disney or Dreamworks animated productions. While the medium (anime itself) is Japanese by definition, the genres typically associated with anime (shonen fighting, slice-of-life, giant robot etc) are NOT exclusive to the medium, and nobody insists otherwise. Avatar is Korean animation with a western script done in a style reminiscent of Japanese animation, and thus can "merely" be called anime-esque. The issue is that we don't use the generic "Eastern Animation" to describe typical Anime productions because the major producer of the stuff Westerners see is Japan. TLDR; Korra isn't anime, which is exclusive to Japan, but is instead "Eastern Animation", since it was animated using a Korean animation company. | |
Whoa, that is French? What is it called? | |
Nope, it's not. I'll tell you why - desperately trying to categorize something that is indistinguishable is 100% pointless, because it defies the very purpose of having categories in the first place. Animation is something anyone, anywhere is capable of doing. Regardless of what happened in history, we need to move on and recognize the fact that anime CAN be made anywhere, and CAN be made completely indistinguisable from the "original" stuff made in Japan. It renders the category pointless. | |
It's called "Wakfu" which started as "Dofus" as an MMO, then came Wakfu the MMO, and for two years Wakfu the TV series has been going. You can get some infoo and peek at some episodes with subtitles here | |
I'd just like to point out, that if you replace anime with jrpg you also just wrote an entire article about stupid jrp arguments. Just sayin... | |
Yes, western animators are fully capable of creating endlessly regurgitated tropes centered around youth worship. These ones that seem precluded from the party such as Avatar franchises... are actually much better off for not being anime. However, Korra, and its slightly colder reception than The last Airbender, is representative of the shift in view towards anime in the west. TLA started right in the middle of the last rise of Anime in the west. Since then anime is being rejected, and as such years later despite having all the same core elements of its predecessor, Korra does not generate nearly as much interest as TLA. Simply put... Anime was a fad for western audiences. The fad has started to fade in popularity back to its Niche roots. Its not going to completely disappear. Its just going to crawl back into the dark hole from which it came from for a while. | |
My only experience with so called American anime is... Teen Titans pretty much. And they pretty much missed the point by inserting really annoying ass Puffy Ami Yumi songs, overly using whooshy backgrounds and using sweatdrops. All three which are fairly uncommon in modern anime, whooshy backgrounds falling out of use as animation progressed and sweatdrops being a really 90s thing. Insert songs still happen, but they tend to pick better songs. Anyway to attempt to be 'anime' is completely missing the point since anime itself has no real definition. Genres? Anime is every genre, and arguably coined a few sub genres of its own - mecha, magical girls, deviant porn etc. In essence, it is simply a medium. You might as well try to be... a movie. There simply isn't an all encompassing definition for what anime is. It does have some format conventions - shows tend to fall under 'seasons' of roughly 12-13 episodes, running for roughly this length or multiples of this length. There are still shows that fall outside this convention, and there are movies, OVAs and what have you. I pretty much prefer to define anime as Japanese animation cause it just makes things simpler. It really shouldn't be some kind of all heralded title for people to reach for. Also anime fans are bloody retarded about things sometimes, I feel this just keeps shit cleaner. Can American produce animated shows that reach/surpass the quality of the Japanese? I think the potential exists, but on a whole the Japanese has a huge headstart. Their animation industry is simply huge, farting out new shows quarterly with heaps of studios from the good, the bad to the ugly. We get original shows, but a huge bulk is manga adaptations - and well Japan has a stupidly competitive manga industry. Then we have their voice talents. None of their shows are limited so to speak - anything goes. Sure you usually think of big eyed schoolgirls, robots and tentacle porn but right now I'm watching a show about an engineer who lost his job and goes back to chasing his childhood dream of being an astronaut. And another about a guy wooing a woman older than him, except she's haunted by her dead husband that only he can see. Japanese animation pretty much targets just about every demographic on a whole. Outside of Japan, well, the majority of it is aimed at children. There's this certain stigma that animated shows are for kids. And the few shows that aim outside of it as far as I know, are comedies - Simpsons, South Park etc. I haven't watched Korra, and have watched a bit of Avatar but while there are a few shows that do try to tell a big story - in terms of general output, Japan has the upper hand and will for a while yet. When it comes to the silver screen though, I do believe Pixar blows them out of the water depending on what shows we are comparing together. But even then, Pixar is only one studio compared to... how many Japan has dumping how many shows to the silver screen yearly? As for creating something indistinguishable from what Japan produces - well. It is because something is made somewhere that it gains a certain identity. I believe its possible, but at the current point - nobody fucking gets it. Slap some half arsed glittery eyes, sweatdrops, whooshy backgrounds and get a horrible band to play some horrible tunes. By 'trying to be anime', they become something that cannot be any more further away from it. It'll probably take more effort, figuring out their pipeline, manpower, budget, properly studying the countless styles they have etc. Following their format. Bleh, losing track of my rant. | |
Animation is a medium. Anime is not. It is simply animation from Japan. That's all it is. | |
Animation is something anyone can do, yes. Anime, on the other hand, means it's from Japan, so it can't be made anywhere. That's what the word means. Also, I was creating a hypothetical situation. They aren't currently at the state when they're indistinguishable. Avatar, for example, is in English as one very obvious difference. Ignoring this, I simply don't agree with your premise that making things indistinguishable makes them authentic. Rollex and Armani certainly care when duplicates of their watches and suits are made in China and are, quite frankly, just as good quality. For some reason, having "the real deal" to people matters. If Rolex doesn't make it it's not a Rolex, even if it says "Rolex" on it. And, secondly, country of origin just seems to matter to people and, as it stands, Anime signifies country of origin. I guess people, like Rolex, see it as a sort of "authenticity" thing. When I ask my friends "hey do you want to watch dead snow?" and they ask "What is it?" I say "It's a Swedish movie about nazi snow zombies". We preface things with their country of origin, at the very least as a language indicator. People do this all the time; hell you saw it in this thread with people talking about Wakfu, they indicate it comes from France and is french. If we had a word for french animation, like "gittington" (a nonsense word I made up just now), it would totally be a gittington; but we don't have a word. | |
I'm an adherent of Stuergeon's Law. There's very little good in most genres and media. | |
Anime is quite distinguishable from Western animation under the surface. Shown here. Here, I'll copy the relevant bits if you don't care to click the link: "And those differences in the sheer discipline of animation are what really screams to the trained anime-watching eye that something like The Last Airbender is not anime. I doubt that kids or people less trained on anime were able to really discern the difference, but it doesn't take somebody like an Anipages Daily reader to tell that something like Avatar doesn't hold on key poses as long as anime tends to, or that the camera angles tend to be less dramatic and more static. American and (generally) Western animation is created through such a factory-like system of automation that it's always a miraculous thing, to me, when the animation takes even a small little risk. Western animated shows are "timed" extremely closely - meaning, every movement, action, and piece of dialog is coded onto the "layouts" which provide the blueprint that the animators have to follow. And if they don't, that basically screws up the entire scene - dialog doesn't go where it needs to be, characters overlap each other, that sort of thing. Once the episodes are timed and drawn as layouts, the animators' job is to basically plug in the necessary jigsaw pieces (or "drawings" I guess) into the puzzle, and the whole thing flows. (Of course, I'm speaking in generalizations here - not every cartoon show follows the same formula for production.) Because the budgets are (typically) much smaller for anime, and the teams are much smaller, there *is* a certain amount of "freedom" on behalf of their animators. That's because, honestly, they're not beholden to strict timing - after all, they don't start recording the dialog until after the animation is in production. That gives the animation crew a ton more freedom to play with the timing and the action as the director deems fit. There's a certain "looseness" to the timing in Japanese animation, I think, that gives it its distinct flavor - moreso than the "jerky movements" and "flapping mouths" that people always point to. Western shows simply don't have that luxury, since they have to strictly adhere to the "click tracks" (temporary dialog/music tracks) in order to speed up production." | |
A lot of shows both anime and not have been animated in Korea for awhile now. Most western animated sitcoms are animated in Korea, which is why you see korean animators in the credits. So while all the animation was done in Korea, the show is written, produced, directed and voiced by and for a western audiences, which makes the show western. | |
Rolex and Armani are actual brands; anime is not. | |
Anime should never be defined as where it originates from, since much of the animation is outsourced to Korea, hell Avatar was made in the same place as HotD, Asobi ni iku yo, Simpsons, Family guy, Futurama, ect ect. No I use the term anime to refer to an animation made for the Japanese market (primary market, not a Disney film later sold in Japan but a Disney film like Fireball made specifically for Japan audiences). This also rules out style because anime is extremely varied, just as South Park is a much different style then Finding Nemo, Jin Roh is a much different style then Binbou Shimai Monogatari. So yes Avatar uses many of the same styles as certain anime, the large eyes, main female lead, issues that often crop up in anime stories are explored, but is Avatar an anime? I'd say it's not, it's a really good American cartoon made for an American audience, otherwise it would have been marketed and sold primarily for the Japanese audience. | |
With the same logic, animation and film are not separate media either. After all, it's all just motion picture, recorded on a film tape or on digital storages, regardless of whether it's frames are drawn individually or recorded photographically. But "medium" refers to tools and techniques that a creator is using. Just like a stone sculptor and a bronze sculptor use different mediums even if the end result looks vaguely similar, or just like the work behind live action movies and animation is different. But beyond that, there are many minor styles and techniques that can be considered mediums on their own, there is no objective line. Are 3D CGI and 2D animation the same medium? Live action and stop motion? Novels, and comic books? Singing and instrumental music? Japanese anime also uses it's specific techniques, so we might as well call it a medium, even if the distinction is less than obvious. It's certainly SOMETHING, given that it has it's own audience, fandom, separate industry and companies. But it's certainly not a genre, since it expands to any and every genre from crime mystery to porn, and from romantic melodrama to space opera. Therefore, medium. | |
No, you have to be Japanese or at least Asian to draw overblown cartoons about robots or evil, dark tentacle monsters. Now that will bring up the "What is true anime" debate, and inevitably, how the west "Just doesn't get it". As far as I know, "Not getting it" is the most basic theme of anime in general. Don't take this the wrong way, but its different from just about every other art style out there and its only limited to the creators imagination. In short, its weird stuff, and we have people who draw weird stuff too. | |
I'd say Avatar isn't anime for a few reasons. A lot of people will say, not Japanese? Not anime. Which I guess is a valid argument I suppose. Not one I agree with but none the less, I see where they are coming from. Other people will say that geography doesn't matter, and that it's in the style of anime, and THAT is my problem. It's NOT in the style anime at all, it's just a very smartly animated series. In fact, if anything it resembles modern Manhwa, which is the South Korean equivalent of Manga. So no, I don't think it is anime, but that in no way means that we should enjoy it any less. | |
I think Afro Samurai is the answer to this question. An obvious YES | |
And how does an anime title made completely by Japanese prove your point? | |
Just to add my 2 cents I don't really care about what constitutes Anime or not, but there's a fundamental difference between Japanese animation and Western animation influenced by "anime", as I have never found the stuff made in Japan enjoyable to watch, but have had no such problems with several western productions | |
Wow. Nine pages of comments already. | |
personally I find the term anime to be dated. Anime is just japan's word for animated show or movie and they lack the "for kids" stigma so it varies as much as live-action shows. For this reason the term is basically useless for defining someones tastes I mean should we really be grouping Shin-Chan with Elfen Lied? | |
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i wasn't nitpicking i was just saying when there is enough of something generalize can't be helped from time to time