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My understanding is that the word itself literally means any animated media. At least within Japan. It’s only outside of Japan that we’ve constrained it to Japanese styled animation. They’ve got such a huge range of animation styles, genres, etc and “anime” is everything from their simplest, most basic ones aimed at toddlers to the extreme MA rated horror, gory or ecchi and mature or historical stuff and anything and any style in between. There’s watercolor, realism, abstract, chibi, there are so many styles, genres and combinations in addition to animation techniques but they’re all anime. They’re aired from Saturday mornings to late night television with a wide range of audiences. The same is true of animated media made elsewhere in the world for audiences that we’d call cartoons or Disney Digital or whatever you call Pixar—it can all be considered anime in the purest sense if you want to go with a basic sense of it being animated pictures. I mean Disney ripped off anime (Osamu Tezuka) apparently so there’s that extra bit of evidence for the argument that it’s all the same if you want to go the influence route.
Don’t get me wrong, every culture has their own individual traits and characteristics. I’m not saying anyone can just make anime the way it’s done in Japan. What I’m saying is the most basic definition, as they use it, to my understanding, is as described above. And we, as outsiders, have turned it into a niche thing by virtue of both the language and the visuals being foreign to us. seiryu as much as we nitpick at with other, what do you think of the big picture of my response here? Or rather, what are your thoughts in general? Both works, actually, if you’ve the time or inclination. Please and thank you. ^_^
Woah...this is the second tag from you that I didn't get a notification for. I guess I gotta ask for some troubleshooting by the staff.
Hmmm...kinda a loaded question. There are definitely cultural aspects, so in some ways the influential foreign series do fit the "anime" label quite well (I'd throw Simpsons into this discussion from the impact on society aspect).
From a more technical standpoint, the technique of drawing (the same steps Oda uses for manga) of a rough sketch, a finalized sketch, adding shading/details, and then coloring. As a purist, I don't consider the CGI stuff "anime". There was a terrible looking CGI One Piece special that was fully CGI created. I don't think it's a coincidence that it was a 1x event.
Then as you mention, we have the definition aspect where everything can be considered anime. For me, it's all context of the discussion. I agree with the literal definition as well. But for example, I fully agree with Oda that CGI stuff is not One Piece "anime".
Asians are very racist in terms of having high pride about their culture and not liking when others don't take the effort to understand said culture. Japan was infamous for straight up hating on all foreigners and it's still only a relatively new thing for there to be acceptance of foreigners (bullying of interracial kids is still common from what I understand). So this too carries over in that 10+ years ago Japanese would not consider anything outside of Japan anime.
Either way, there is no one answer and it's actually a little bit of everything mentioned here. Just depends on the context of the discussion.