The Joys of Anime As Expressed By An Adoring Fan

          Are you familiar with the term anime? Some people are, some people aren’t. Or they’ve heard about it, but don’t know what it really means. Anime is the shortened version of the term “animation” and in layman’s terms, anime is Japanese cartoons. But to those who are acquainted more intimately with anime, the word anime has a more special meaning.

            

          In TV shows, you are constrained by several factors. Things like budgets can make special effects laughably horrible. Bad acting can make strong dialogue weak and awkward. TV shows can come off as cliché or “been there, done that.” You have to worry about cameras and lighting and bad weather ruining shots. Actors may be injured or have issues with onset conditions.

           

            In anime, you have more options. You don’t have to worry about actors being disturbed by intense heat or cold. Your voice actors are in a controlled environment: the studio. If you want to create a technological, futuristic world, you can do so with the same budget as if you chose to do a “slice of life” anime, which is an anime that is realistic and doesn’t employ anything like magic or other supernatural elements and is thus a “slice of real life” (usually set in or around a high school setting). Sports anime, or anime focused on a particular sport such as Kuroko's Basketball or Haikyuu!! (volleybakk), are similar to slife of life, since sports anime typically don't include magic. Typically. 

            

           As far as setting and location, you can go anywhere. You’re limited only by how well you can draw and animate. You don’t have to fly out to Ireland and film in a beautiful location. You can draw a beautiful location and what’s best is that you can draw places that don’t exist. Anime eliminates the hardships of live-action sets and special effects and budget issues by being less expensive and looking much better, much less cheesy than a TV show. 

         The irony being that 2-D effects can look more realistic than live-action effects simply because the human eye is highly attuned to artificiality. Try watching the old Godzilla movies or modern shows with bad budgets like Lost Girl or children shows with charmingly bad effects like Wizards of Waverly Place.

          Then try watching Puella Magi Madoka Magica and tell me which one looked dorky and embarrassingly fake.

         You can portray magic or technology without the cheesiness or technical difficulties a live-action set would create. You can also create events that could never be believable in a live-action, such as the 3-D Maneuver Gear of Attack on Titan. 

Could you do this in a live-action? They're attempting to, but I'm worried about that live-action movie they've been working on. How could you portray this believably on a real-life set? 

                In anime, the quality of “special effects” is as amazing as it needs to be because anime is only limited by animation budget. If you want a mystical, scenic setting, you don’t need to fly out to Ireland. You can just draw and animate it and the view will be breathtaking all the same, without issues like cameras breaking or the sky being too overcast to shoot anything. 

                Anime can appeal to all ages, from little girls fond of the sparkles and magic of the magical girl show Sailor Moon to the older, to young boys interested in fighting and adventure with shows like Dragonball and Naruto, to dark shows with mature themes appealing to older audiences like the recent Attack on Titan. Anime has many different categories, such as shonen for young boys, shoujo for young girls, seinen for young adults, and josei for young women.

                  

            There are many types of anime. Some people enjoy the cutesy, child-friendly, more Western-cartoon type of anime, the kind you may be acquainted with such as Pokemon, Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Dragonball, Sailor Moon, Slayers, and Fairy Tail. 

          These types of anime typically focus on friendship, fighting, and adventure, but usually aren't too violent. Also keep in mind that by "violent", I mean relatively. What Western audience describe as too "violent" for kids is different than what constitutes as "violent" in Japan. 

          There is a common misconception in the Western world that anime is either cartoons for kids or weird pornographic material for perverts.  The truth is that anime can be for kids, teenagers, and adults. Anime like Attack on Titan, a grim show about survival and sacrifice with hopeless, despair, and dark themes appeal to teenagers and young adults, while deconstructing the usual shonen themes of friendship and love conquering all. Anime like Puella Magi Madoka Magica deconstruct anime clichés such as the “magical girl” by putting a dark spin on the classic anime genre. Anime like Bokurano deconstruct other genres, in this case mecha, to the same effect.  

          

          For example, Attack on Titan is a shonen anime. This means it's aimed towards little boys from elementary school age to high school age. However, it appeals to teenagers and adults due to its darker content which includes intense drama and violence. 

   

          People die in anime. And Attack on Titan has a record for killing a lot of its characters. Even in anime that are less... intense as Attack on Titan, the themes are often a lot darker than cartoons tend to be. 

          Which is why it tends to piss anime fans off when you call it cartoons. Truth be told, cartoons and anime are the same thing, on a technical level. But fundamentally, they are different. Cartoons are often comedic, humorous. Shows like Ben 10 and Young Justice League and Batman Beyond are humorous, but also include a lot of action and plot that resembles the complex plots you often see in anime. Shows like Avatar the Last Airbender and W.I.T.C.H. are sometimes mistaken for anime, but the reason you don't call them that is because they weren't produced in Japan, but spiritually, they resemble anime. 

          Anime is something that is difficult for someone who's never seen it before to appreciate. Once you've found your "gateway" anime (an anime serving a purpose much like marijuana as a "gateway drug" to other drugs), you never go back. It's an easy thing to become addicted to, as evidenced by the fact that I chose to write a rant about anime for a school project and far exceeded the  minimum word limit. It's not really an addiction you want to break away from either.  

          Often, I am asked what anime should a first-timer start with. 

           Hopefully, you already watch anime, but if you don't, I hope  my rant has convinced you to give it a shot. 

          Good ones to start with: 

Attack on Titan

Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood

Fairy Tail       
       Bad ones to start with: 

Free!

Deadman Wonderland           

Pupa

Higurashi

          

           To be honest, any anime is a bad anime to start with if you go into it without an open mind. The art style might throw you off, reading subtitles might annoy you and there might not be an English dub, and maybe you just won't like it. 

             I wish anime was mainstream in America, but as it is not, I hope my blog has helped convince you to try it when you're bored and have nothing to do. Hopefully one day you, like me, will end up going from having nothing to do so you're watching anime to watching anime because it's all you want to do. 

                

 If you want to talk about anime, contact me at: thewswc@gmail.com