Defining Anime Article Online

as the article suggests, there’s no clear-cut definition for it that you can use to slice “anime” from “non-anime” with precision. Like a Hollywood blockbuster… most of them are not made in Hollywood, a lot of them are filmed outside of America with non-American film crews, a lot of them are made for a world market (as opposed to a strictly American audience) and so on. His example of rock music often blends into other genres to make undefinable hybrid pop music.

He lays out a lot of common features of anime, like its heavy use of symbolism, symbolic imagery and iconography, iconic character archetypes (tsundere etc.), yadda yadda… but all that is just an expression of Japanese aesthetics and Japanese culture, pervasive in all Japanese art. Reducing the world to iconography and symbolism (whether graphic or intellectual) is what they do.

In other words, you really can’t get away from the “japanese-ness” that’s at the core of what we identify as “anime”. Some productions are more “japanese” than others, hence the feeling that Suzumiya Haruhi is more “anime” than (say) Transformers or Aeon Flux.

So despite what he says, “Japanese animation” is as accurate a definition as you’ll ever get for “anime”. There are many hybrid productions that are only “partially anime” or “superficially anime”, but I don’t think that renders the definition unusable. It’s fine to call something “partially/superficially an expression of Japanese culture” since that’s what we really mean when describing a hybrid or pseudo anime.