The "Anime" PROBLEM

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I still wish that we would have a MAL equivalent for western animated shows and for other non-japanese eastern shows as well. It's insane how many good shows and movies go unnoticed every year from the wider audience due to lack of exposure and anime/manga elitism.

Thank you for doing a unique take on “is X anime?” by going into the different production philosophies of US, Japan, and Korea. I had heard about them in bits and pieces, but this is one of the most solid technical explanations targeted at layman I’ve seen on animation :).

when it first came out i genuinely thought scott pilgrim was synced to the japanese dub, just so weird to see the anime mouth flap approach to english voice acting. shows how much loose mouth flapping is associated with the anime approach to animating. i ended up watching it with the japanese dub anyway and it felt completely natural to me, absolutely an anime imo

And lets not forget the irony of some Chinese animation studios or "donghua" outsourcing their animation to Japanese studios because it's cheaper for them. Or game studios like Mihoyo with Genshin Impact effectively capitalizing the "anime" aesthetic in a scale that surpasses any Japanese studio.

Just to let people know that intersection and co-production happens more often than you think. One example Studio Trigger animating intros for other companies like Disney (Toy Story/Battlesaur) and Turner/Adult swim (Black Dynamite S2). For other shows and movies looking like the way they do, they shouldn't be blamed for taking inspiration from each other. At the end of the day it's all animation.

To add in on mouth flap thing The whole reasons why Japanese side prefer it is actually the deadline point that you said in 5:22. Since in the west they release their season in batches they actually have the time to put in and work of lips syncing while in the Japanese side the moment you finish episode that thing is going on air straight away so their deadline is SUPER tight to keep up with it, so with lips syncing taking a heck of alot of time and manpower to do it properly that's the first thing they cut out saving time do more importaint part or (sometime and) setting up storyboard and doing the next episode right away. Not only that VC is done in 1 SINGLE DAY with ALL of the cast inside a single recording booth with their audio director and record the entier script of a episode in 1 DAY while in the west recording day are generally space out evenely between cast with 1 or 2 cast member recording per day so that too is a part of why they prefer mouth flap TL;DR: Japanese media deadline is WAY too tight so they do mouth flap to cut down time and budget to get episodes on air as fast as possible

I can't believe this ancient debate is still going on. I actually can, but still, damn.

Great video! As a lifelong anime fan I've seen the anime landscape and fandom change over the years ever since the mid-90s. There was a time where anime was referred to as Japanimation. It was a very niche, sci-fi (in the US) based and adult targeted thing until the late 90s when it got more widespread attention due to Dragonball Z, Pokemon and the then new Disney distribution of Studio Ghibli films beginning with Kiki's Delivery Service and Princess Mononoke and has grown in popularity ever since. The later 2000s seemed to be when the debate over what was considered anime kinda started to me due to especially Avatar The Last Airbender. I recall the arguments and flame wars about it during that time. It seems to have cooled down at this point to become more like what you talked about in this video.

maybe the real anime is the friends we made along the way

I find interesting how these types of partly geolocational distinction are formed. Animation is not the only form of media where it happens, but its definitely one that has the most heated arguments about it. Movie industry has Hollywood movies and Bollywood movies among other things. There are the Nordic Detective Thrillers, British comedy shows and Korean drama. Of course K-pop is a huge thing right now. Japan and US have just been better than average at flexing their massive soft power influence than many other countries.

I think it would be great to get an insight into the history of anime in terms of the production and business side. I live in Europe where many don’t know how many "normal cartoons" from the 60s, 70s and 80s were outsourced to Japan for production. I really enjoyed this peek into what goes on behind the scenes, thanks for sharing!

It is funny when we talk TMS, who created some genuine Japanese-American co-productions like the Mighty Orbots and Little Nemo (although TMS was the only company behind Little Nemo's production). Transformers G1 was made in a similar way with Americans and Japanese behind the pre production storyboards, directing and character design, and even had some episodes aired in Japan first but it can't be on MAL because if Americans and Japanese share creative roles then it's presumed that the Japanese staff are subordinate.

In my opinion it’s about the feel you get from it. Japan and the West have different cultures, different humours, different norms, etc. I consider anime just Japanese cartoons with the distinctive anime style. So if it feels Japanese, (whether it was made in Japan or by a Japanese studio, or for a Japanese audience or not) then it’s anime, if it feels western, then it’s animation in the anime style. Because of this, imo, Scott Pilgrim is not an anime, because the feel you get from it feels western, despite having an anime style and being quite stylised, it still feels different from anime. Ofc this is a difficult ‘definition’ as it may vary from person to person the feel they get from it and ofc it’s a blurred line.

20:27 I genuinely think adding a co-production category is a good solution to some shows not being included where much of their animation is produced in Japan. Still kind of miffed about Cyberpunk Edgerunners being included in MAL's database, but not Scott Pilgrim, since they're in the same boat. As for what I propose anime should refer to: Anime is animation primarily handled by a Japanese studio, as in, the main studio must be based in Japan. Sure, Scott Pilgrim's director is Spanish--but he's worked at Science Saru since its early days! Which is why I don't think the ethnicity of an individual staff member should matter too much, just as long as that studio they're working at is... you guessed it, based in Japan.

I appreciate your chill YouTube personality, so many other YouTubers try to come off as so damn quirky it just comes off annoying and disingenuous. You also have a sense of humor I haven't heard very much and it was very refreshing

Very well said. I'm writing from Japan now and people say komikku more than manga and "Amerika no anime" is just common everyday phrasing for American cartoons. The idea that "anime" is particularly "Japanese," as you rightly point out, is less about some distinct cultural essence that rubs off on the screen and more about nationalism in Japan and Orientalism in the purported West. As you explain brilliantly, it's also simply not the case from the point of view of labour, distribution, or audience. And, with something like Batman: The Animated Series, it's not just that a lot of the animation was done in Japan, but just in common parlance, it's "バットマンのアニメ" because it's a cartoon.

All the best to you and your family, what a great channel you have created here. I hope you can get some rest over the holidays.

your videos go above and beyond on the analysis. thanks

Honestly, this is going to sound flippant, but the way that MAL's administration and userbase tends to handle these sorts of nontroversies is part of why I don't use that site, and I think it's symptomatic of a bigger problem with certain segments of the Anglophone anime fandom where what is or is not "anime" becomes a proxy for weird internecine culture war posturing and pretentious medium gatekeeping. I think it is more than reasonable to state that the approach to animation which comes out of the Japanese anime production pipeline is particular and distinctive and has a unique appeal, but the argument here has nothing to do with whether or not Scott Pilgrim Takes Off comes out of that pipeline or speaks to that unique appeal, which it does on both counts, but as a nonsense shibboleth for whether or not certain people, or really certain kinds of people, are "real" anime fans or not, and that's just bullshit.