Anime needs a new name

[Troublesome Lagomorph]

No, that's Hentai. Hentai is Japanese cartoon porn. Anime is Japanese animation. In fact, anime is simply short of animation. No name change is needed.

Hah, took the words right out of my mouth.

 

[[.redacted]]

I don't think most people relate anime to tentacle rape. Most people wouldn't know what anime is, even less know that animated tentacle rape porn exists. The people who know either of those terms don't tend to associate the two in my experience. The image problem with anime is the opposite; it's only widely-known from children's shows. Its connotations are juvenile rather than vulgar.

What really needs a new name is comic books. No wait, I mean graphic novels! Suuuure, whatever you say. Graphic novels. That sounds much less like a feeble rebranding effort for a medium desperate to be taken seriously. It's a shame because it's not worth talking to most people about, say, Maus or Persepolis. A fellow who brings up a comic book over dinner is then tied into defending the medium, and takes on all the comic-book-reader connotations. I always think a book like Persepolis ought to be read in school.

Getting a little off topic there. It's broadly related though, so I'll leave it in.

Not at all off topic, this is exactly what happens to anime. And I have to say, being treated as 'children's cartoons' falls into the same category as being associated with hentai/ecchiness - it's all about a massively negative image conjured up by general assumptions made about a medium, the same as happens with comics/graphic novels.

This is exactly what this thread [sub](which started as just a 'post-a-name-for-fun' type thing, but is, despite my trying not to let it, tending to drift towards far more serious interpretations of the original dilemma)[/sub] is all about.

 

[PureChaos]

i, and everyone i know, pronounces it an-ih-may which sounds much better than ann-ihm-a so it doesn't need changing

 

[Sinclair Solutions]

I've always liked "Japanimation."

 

[Nocturnal Gentleman]

I call them cartoons. Well I actually say anime and cartoon synonymously. When people say I'm wrong I just ignore them. A name change doesn't really matter anyway. You can call it whatever you want but when you pull it out I'm going to think the same thing.

 

[Mr.Napier]

A new name is pointless, as long as its from Japan there will be the extreme fans, aka weebos and they will ruin the new name that anime is given. So rather the better solution would be to kill off any and all weebos. Extreme yes, but its the only way to even be able to mention anime with out people staring at you like you like well a weebo.

 

[Atmos Duality]

"Semi-animation"
(due to current anime's insistence of using key frames, repeating frames and panning shots)

 

[Rickyvantof]

How about
Crappy Cartoons

I already call it that

 

[RatRace123]

DOHFIUEBDBE (Doe- Few- Bid- Bee)
That's an appealing name, and I thought it up by randomly mashing some buttons on my keyboard.

 

[Caligulove]

I only knew about the term 'anime' until I started high-school and the kids that were obsessed with it started being in my classes or reading manga "secretly" while class was in session.

Before high school, I knew it and called it Japanimation- what my parents called it, and I had little exposure to it before high school.
Still don't care much for it, but think 'anime' is a swell term.

 

[Arehexes]

It's true... Anime does bring up pictures of Chulu and schoolgirls whenever I think of it... But I'm fine with that...

Hell! I've been calling it Hentanime for years now...

Hentanime...I like that, I'm going to start using that.

 

[u4527646]

I prefer Japanimation.

Dunno why, it just sounds a bit better.

I actually like anime too, but if we're discussing something to change it to for ignorant english audiences then Japaninmation is cool.

 

[Souplex]

We already have a name for it: Cartoons.
Just because it's from Japan doesn't make it not a cartoon.

To play devil's advocate, the term "cartoon" has connotative meanings that, even if the proper definition works, would render it a problematic name for anime.

To elaborate, whenever you think the word "cartoon," you most likely think of Bugs Bunny, Micky Mouse, Felix the Cat, and other mascots of old-school animated shorts. You may also think of things like Spongebob. Basically, the term implies animated shorts of zany characters doing zany things (kid-friendly or no; several Adult Swim series would fit the connotative meaning). Even though "cartoon" may simply mean animated (though I'll address that in a bit), by calling anime cartoons, you're lumping things like Gundam, Darker than Black, Baccano, and other things like that with things like Loony Toons, whether you mean to or not (not that I have anything against Loony Toons, but you can see the problem, no?). Basically, even if cartoons and anime are the same by proper definition, steps must be taken to avoid connotative issues (extrapolating, of course, you'd need to do the same thing with a good bit of western and (former) Soviet Bloc animation).

On a side-note, "cartoon" originally referred to newspaper comics in the early 20th century, becoming adapted to also refer to animations of the time due to their stylistic resemblance to said newspaper comics. Its referring to animation in general is a bit of an artifact.

Cartoon doesn't refer to all animation, just animated doodles. Things like claymation already have their own separate terms to refer to that branch of animation. Cartoons should be the official animated doodle term.

 

[A random person]

We already have a name for it: Cartoons.
Just because it's from Japan doesn't make it not a cartoon.

To play devil's advocate, the term "cartoon" has connotative meanings that, even if the proper definition works, would render it a problematic name for anime.

To elaborate, whenever you think the word "cartoon," you most likely think of Bugs Bunny, Micky Mouse, Felix the Cat, and other mascots of old-school animated shorts. You may also think of things like Spongebob. Basically, the term implies animated shorts of zany characters doing zany things (kid-friendly or no; several Adult Swim series would fit the connotative meaning). Even though "cartoon" may simply mean animated (though I'll address that in a bit), by calling anime cartoons, you're lumping things like Gundam, Darker than Black, Baccano, and other things like that with things like Loony Toons, whether you mean to or not (not that I have anything against Loony Toons, but you can see the problem, no?). Basically, even if cartoons and anime are the same by proper definition, steps must be taken to avoid connotative issues (extrapolating, of course, you'd need to do the same thing with a good bit of western and (former) Soviet Bloc animation).

On a side-note, "cartoon" originally referred to newspaper comics in the early 20th century, becoming adapted to also refer to animations of the time due to their stylistic resemblance to said newspaper comics. Its referring to animation in general is a bit of an artifact.

Cartoon doesn't refer to all animation, just animated doodles. Things like claymation already have their own separate terms to refer to that branch of animation. Cartoons should be the official animated doodle term.

Considering that both things are animated doodles, my point still stands. Also, claymation doesn't have the connotative issues I mentioned earlier.

I think the official term for animated doodles is simply 2D animation (hand-drawn doesn't work due to the prevalence of computers in modern animation).

 

[nesto]

i also just say Japanese Cartoon.

the subject harldy ever comes up though. A few times we were talking about Dragonball Z at work, I mentioned Fist of the North Star, no one new what i was talking about so that ended that.

 

[linkvegeta]

its true, anime means animation and could easily refer to anything from Micky mouse to dragon ball Z. i do think there should be a special word that directly specify Japanese animation

 

[A random person]

"Semi-animation"
(due to current anime's insistence of using key frames, repeating frames and panning shots)

To be fair, when you think about it, that was gonna happen with animation in general when you realize that most vintage animation (i.e Loony Toons, Disney cartoons) was theatrical and in the form of shorts, meaning there was a bigger budget that had to be spread out less. When animation switched to television with TV's rise, it became far lower quality (think anime's cheap? Look at the kind of crap Hanna-Barbara did, even with good shows like Rocky & Bullwinkle. Hell, many saturday morning cartoons were called "illustrated radio" due to their cheap animation). As animation's also very expensive, inevitably studios were gonna think "hey, what if we didn't put as much money and effort into the smaller things people don't care as much about?" Have a good bit of action like many anime series do (for one reason or another, western animation was, and still is in many respects, more focused on comedy), and the budget will be going where it's needed most. Oh, and stylization is also accompanied by lower animation quality in many cases (see: Chuck Jones).

Not that there aren't limited animation qualities specific to anime; a pretty wrecked post-war economy doesn't lend itself to smoothly animated nature scenes (hell, supposedly anime partly arose as a result of Japanese people wanting to make films, but not having the budget to do it live-action; animation's expensive, but not as much as special effects and physical sets/location shooting), and panning shots and speed lines are outright stylistic tools in many cases, partly carried over from manga (not that I mind, as long as they're used within moderation).

/fantasies of being knowledgeable about animation

 

[Toriver]

The name is fine. What anime needs is a long enough break to come up with a mess of new ideas. Many of which will undoubtedly come from the West. Which brings up the other thing it needs: Fewer fanbois wrongly insisting that anime is soooo original and the West is "always stealing" from it. Uh, no. The Japanese are gigantic borrowers. I love them, but neighbors who borrow your lawnmower, paint it pink and put kitties on it and never return it, they most certainly are.

I love anime to death, and before you question that, you can imagine one-year-old Bruunwald sitting in front of a grainy TV in 1971, watching Speed Racer like it was a Christmas gospel, and proceed from there, through Gatchaman, Star Blazers, up through Akira, through a decade of great one-offs like Cyber City, Ninja Scroll and Wicked City, on to marriage to a woman who loves Fushigi Yugi, Love Hina and Boys over Flowers, and finally onto later series like Bleach, Trinity Blood, Claymore and Tsubasa. I even have always liked Sailor Moon and we own VHS of all the original Japanese broadcasts.

But really, at this point, after 40 years of anime, there are two important things I have learned.

One is that the little girl helping the heroes on their quest is actually the missing empress they are trying to find, that the hero who shouldn't overuse her power is going to become a monster by doing so but will be saved by the love of the person she tried to send away, that the two main characters who fight constantly are actually in love, that the girl the guy likes is going to punch him a lot, that two characters meant to hook up are never going to during the series run, that everybody knew each other in a previous life (or as children), that most situations can be resolved by the timely third act arrival of the title character, and that there is some hidden power deep within any hero that is going to rise up after he should have been defeated.

The other thing is that Western kids, especially Americans, possess such self loathing, and are so under-educated regarding their own folklore and myth, that they are unable to recognize endless incarnations of Western influence in modern Japanese storytelling, and will buy eagerly into any argument that our side of the world borrows solely from that side of the world without so much as a spellcheck. A wrongheadedness that is the greatest source of my frustration with, and gigantic dislike of Fanbois.

Seriously. Search Wikipedia. Do a little homework. Japan is the source of many interesting ideas. So is China. So is India. So is Africa. So are Germany, France, England, Ireland, the Slavic nations, Native American lore, South America and shock of all shocks - Greece (whod've thought?). Anime borrows from all of them, quite liberally (not to mention a too-heavy reliance on hackmasters like George Lucas), so please let us not continue on with the myth of the Collective Japanese Genius from Which All Things Borrow.

Instead of renaming anime, let's just educate its fan base.

*slowclap* Bravo, man, bravo.

And if people did a little homework on the origins of anime to begin with, they would learn that *gasp* anime itself was learned from the West!

The conventions of Japanese animation style, such as a lack of attention to facial motion, like the mouth simply going from closed to open frame by frame, and the over-used backgrounds and very detailed yet largely stationary character models, were adaptations from American animation of the time, changed to accommodate nothing more than the low budgets of Japanese animation studios after World War II. Animation was non-existent in Japan before this time, and get this... the Americans taught the Japanese everything they knew. That's right. Americans gave anime to the Japanese. Over time, despite budgets and profits for anime studios becoming ever-larger, the conventions of anime have largely not changed because fans appreciated that attention to detail and other aesthetics that anime artists put into their work. Meanwhile, Western animation, despite a shrinking attention to detail, has moved on to much faster-paced and fluid animation styles. Neither one is inherently better than the other.

And if you want to praise anyone for originality in storytelling, praise mangaka, not anime producers. Just about any anime out there today is based off a manga of the same name, and the story is often retold page-for-page. The ever-dreaded "filler" in anime is what happens when the anime studio is left to its own devices to come up with a story for the characters and setting. And as most fans admit, the great majority of filler out there is crap.

EDIT: Left a thought hanging... fixed.