At 01:51 PM 8/25/97 -0400, you wrote:

Don't take this wrong; the tone may be somewhat sarcastic.  Nothing
personal.

On Mon, 25 Aug 1997, Phillip Masters wrote:

The question is not who came up with the concept.  Lot's of anime's use
stories non-Japanese to work from.  If it's a Japanese company/person
doing it, it's anime/manga.  Very simple.  Why?  Because this is what
the creators wanted to call it (The Japanese people I mean, I don't know
who coined the term).  We call ours cartoons, comics, and animated
features.  They call it anime and manga.  

Ok, how about films which are worked on cooperatively?

Ghost in the Shell had Western personnel working with the Japanese
studios, as did Tenchi Muyou! In Love.

Or how about Disney TV productions, or Warner Brother TV productions,
which have a lot of the work done by places like TMS (a Japanese animation
studio).  Does this mean 'The Disney Afternoon' consists of anime, or
Animaniacs and Tiny Toon Adventures were anime?

No?  But they were animated in Japan!  They had American writers?  You
just said that doesn't matter!  :)

While 'anime' literally means 'animation' in Japanese, they apply the term
to everything - EVEN AMERICAN ANIMATION - aired over there.  Disney films
released to theaters are classified in Japan as 'anime'.  It'd be like if
we just called 'anime' 'animation' - effectively, translating the term
back into English.

So if we accept that -we- as a community are applying the term 'anime' to
a particular art style, what elements are we using as the judgement for
that art style?

I think we need to move past the boundaries of nationality because those
can get extremely confusing anyway - look at some older cartoons, like
'Mysterious Cities of Gold'.  A Japanese-French co-production (loosely)
based on a British novel and simultaneously produced in three languages in
three countries.  Is it 'anime'?  Is it 'animation'?  Is it whatever the
heck the French would call it?  :)

Just my $0.02 + state sales tax where applicable.

We all know what we mean when we say anime.  What we don't mean are
cartoons whose flavour is western.  American, British or whatever.  You can
argue semantics about who worked on what....  And that there are things we
consider to be anime that are based on classic European novels etc etc
etc....  But to argue that just because of this and just because of that
that the boundaries of what is anime and what is not is blurred is purely
mischievous.  It is like saying because we are fans of anime and series
like Crayon Shin-chan then we should also like American equivalents like
The Simpsons and accept that as anime as well, when we know bloody well
that The Simpsons is NOT anime, regardless of whether it has Japanese
artists or whatever working on it.

There aren't equivalent followings of American and European animation and
comics....  Certainly not in the rabid obssession that anime derives from
its followers.  Why?  What is it about Japanese animation and manga that
sets it apart?  Perhaps, as I said before, its because its flavour is not
western.  The psycholgical and social attitudes are different.  The mixture
of immaturity and complexity, of incipient sexuality its repression and the
mixture of extreme violence or the lack of it is NOT emulated by animation
from outside Japan, with the exclusion of very few "alternative"
productions.  Nor is the intrusion of these elements into what we would
consider "children's programming" ever likely to be seen in an American
television production.

In short, despite efforts to erase the boundaries of nationality, they will
remain.  I'm not a fan of anime because I find it complimentary to the muck
served up on local television here in Australia, be it American, English or
Australian, I'm a fan because I find it an ALTERNATIVE.  To argue for its
subsumption into some common international community is to argue for its
dissolution....