12/8/2004

Anime (アニメ) is Japanese animation, often characterized by stylized colorful graphics depicting vibrant characters in a variety of different settings and storylines, aimed at a variety of different audiences.

Terminology

The word anime appears in written form in three katakana characters a, ni, me (アニメ). Japanese pronunciation is /ɑnimɛ/, but in the United States and the United Kingdom, speakers typically pronounce the word as /ˈænɪˌmei/.

The English word transliterates a Japanese term. The etymology is generally traced to an abbreviation of the Japanese transliteration of the English word “animation” (shortened, as many foreign words appear in Japanese). Some non-Japanese fans claim the word comes from the French animé (”animated”). Occasionally in English the word is seen written as animé, with an acute accent on the final e to let one know that it is pronounced, but this follows no standard transliteration scheme for Japanese.

Internationally, anime once bore the popular name Japanimation, but this term has fallen into disuse. It saw the most usage during the 1970s and 1980s, which broadly comprise the first and second waves of anime fandom. The term survived at least into the early 1990s but seemed to fade away shortly before the mid-1990s anime resurgence. In general, the term now only appears in nostalgic contexts.

The term Japanimation is much more commonly used in Japan to refer to domestic animation. Since anime or animeshon is used to describe all forms of animation, Japanimation is meant to distinguish Japanese work from that of the rest of the world.

The voice actors for anime usually bear the Japanese equivalent designation, seiyū.

Characteristics

Anime features a wide variety of genres and unique artistic styles which varies from artist to artist. It can have as many genres as live action cinema, including adventure, science fiction, children’s stories, romance, medieval fantasy, erotica (hentai), occult/horror, action. Most anime includes a variety of thematic elements. For example, it is not uncommon for strongly action-themed anime to involve humor, romance, and even poignant social commentary, and romance-themed anime may involve a strong action element.

Anime has become an expressly commercial art form; producers and marketers aim for very specific audiences, with well-defined categories for shōnen (boys) and shōjo (girls) genres, as well as for teenagers and adults.

Osamu Tezuka adapted and simplified many Disney animation precepts to reduce the budget and number of frames. This was intended to be a temporary measure to allow him to produce one episode every week with inexperienced animation staff. Anime studios have since perfected techniques to draw as little new animation as possible, using scrolling or repeating backgrounds, still shots of characters sliding across the screen, and dialogue which involves only animating the mouths while the rest of the screen remains absolutely still, a technique not wholly unfamiliar to Western animation. The overall effect of these techniques—reduced frame rate, many still shots, scrolling backgrounds—has led some critics to accuse anime of choppiness or poor quality in general.

However, there are often scenes where the frame rate of the animation far exceeds the norm of the rest of the work. These are commonly called “money shots”, where more effort is put into the animation of one scene to give it emphasis over the rest of the work. Animator Yasou Otsuka was the pioneer of this technique.

Exceptions to these rules are big budget films, often from Studio Ghibli. These movies have much higher production values, due to their anticipated success at the box office. Some animators in Japan can overcome production values by using different techniques than Disney or the old Tezuka/Otsuka norms of anime. Directors such as Hiroyuki Imaishi (RE: Cutey Honey, Dead Leaves) simplify backgrounds so that more attention can be paid to character animation. Other animators like Tatsuyuki Tanaka (in Koji Morimoto’s Eternal Family in particular) use squash and stretch, an animation technique not often used by Japanese animators; Tanaka makes other shortcuts to compensate for this. Some higher-budgeted television and OA series also forego shortcuts found in most other anime. The 2003 version of Astro Boy, despite being a Tezuka creation, was also very well animated as Sony claims to have spent three times as much per episode compared to other series.

In short, anime tends to be dominated by a school of animation thought that emphasies direction over character motion as means to save money. Other schools of thought in animation do exist in Japan but these works are less common.

Anime has been available in the North America and Europe for some time. Anime releases there are usually dubbed into the native language of the country in which they are released. Anime series are also sometimes edited by Western distributors to remove what they feel local audiences would consider to be objectionable content. This is especially true with series that are marketed to children, such as Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokémon. In other cases, editing is done to change content to make it easier for Western viewers to understand. Some anime enthusiasts object to one or both forms of editing. Those viewers often watch anime titles in DVD format, because DVD releases are typically unedited and often include both the dubbed audio and the original Japanese audio with subtitles. Another advantage of DVD releases is that there are no commercials, unlike in television releases. Although it is a violation of copyright laws in most countries, some fans also watch fansubs, digital recordings of anime series that have been subtitled by fans. The ethical implications of producing, distributing, or watching fansubs is a topic of much controversy.

(Source: Wikipedia)