Anime needs a new name

[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.

 

[Neverhoodian]

How about "animation where everyone has freaky-huge eyes?"

Hmmm, doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it? Ah well, I tried.

Seriously though, take a photo of yourself and enlarge your eyes to anime-style proportions. You'll have nightmares for weeks.

 

[A random person]

snip

I'd actually cite anime as part of my pro-globalization views; even though it definitely came from the west (though since America invented animation beyond those wheels with slits, that's kinda inevitable), it still came into its own as distinctively Japanese (why yes, I am trying to pretend that I learned something from my AP Human Geography class).

As for the creativity of anime studios, there are a good bit of series/films that started as anime (Gundam, Code Geass, Evangelion, anything by Miyazaki, anything mentioned here [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnimeFirst]), though I won't deny that much of it comes from manga and light novels.

 

[Del-Toro]

I honestly just refer to them as cartoons (not trolling), or japanese cartoons(not trolling) when I feel I need to be more specific. Anime works, among other fans of the format(it IS a format, not a genre, "live action" isn't a genre, and neither is anime), so I don't really think we need some form of massive overhaul.

 

[A random person]

How about "animation where everyone has freaky-huge eyes?"

Hmmm, doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it? Ah well, I tried.

Seriously though, take a photo of yourself and enlarge your eyes to anime-style proportions. You'll have nightmares for weeks.

Okay.
*enlarges them to Monster-proportions*
Huh, they're not changed.

Now if you really want nightmares, imagine a Fairly Odd Parents character untooned (I recall looking through an archive of untooned characters; the Naruto and Sasuke ones were the least horrifying).

 

[Busdriver580]

They're cartoons. To say they aren't is just pretentious. Frankly, I think giving them their own classification as anime in the first place is probably undeserved.
You shouldn't attempt to change a word just because of its connotations, that's pretty weak.

 

[Dog Wednesday]

Most of us who watch it on a regular basis hardly ever call it anything to be honest. We simply use the shows title. For example, we wouldnt say "Im watching the anime Azumanga Daioh" we would simply say "Hey Im watching Azumanga"

 

[xdom125x]

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).

If this logic is applied, then live action tv should have 2 names: 1 for shows intended for adults and 1 for shows intended for children. The anime and cartoons are both animated so should have an umbrella term describing them both. It would be tragic that Gundam and the like would be lumped in with Bugs Bunny but they are linked. I don't think it should be under the banner of cartoon though because of your reasoning.

 

[ikillu87]

Here's the brief:

In the English language, the word 'anime' (ann-ihm-a), sounds feeble and is stained with the residue of tentacle porn in the mind of the general public.

Anime needs a new name, go for it, escapist.

[sub]what an unfortunate metaphor, that was not intended...[/sub]

Cartoon. Because that is what it is.

Edit:
And that doesn't make it bad. I like cartoons. I just see no point in making it known it is made in Japan.