hawk533 said:
So are you telling me that Eminem isn't a rap artist, because he's not black and didn't deeply understand black culture? And is Darius Rucker (former lead singer of Hootie and the Blowfish) not a country singer (despite winning a New Artist Award from the Country Music Association) because he originally headed a rock band?
Music genres are based on subculture, not just culture. A so-called "Rock culture" is not any more ingrained than "geek culture" or "evangelical culture" or "university culture".
I'm not saying that every community and every genre ever made is unreachable by outsiders, but there are some where the initial, by definition national-shared-consciousness-based execution, can't be simply assumed and trying to do so will result in the formation of a secondary style.
hawk533 said:
Cultures change and definitions have to change with them. Anime once was all animation that came from Japan, because all Japanese animation had a similar style and a shared culture. But as people have pointed out, there are many Japan-produced cartoons that are using western animation styles. And there are many US-produced cartoons using Japanese animation styles.
Except that they are not really. They are using vague approximations of what the foreign styles look to them, but the end result will end up carrying a lot of their own styles too.
Avatar looks barely different from 90's Disney renessaince cartoons. Since then, most western TV shows went the "bright, abstract, non-human" way, so out of contemporary animation, anime is it's closest comparison, just because that also has proportional 2D humanoids, but in it's details, it's still animated through the western principle of verisimilitude rather than through the art philosophy of wabi-sabi.
In terms of narrative, like others have already said, it's a hodgepodge of asian cultural elements, largely from China. American writers can write about what Asia feels like to them, but it will be distinct from what it feels like to Japanese people, and vice versa.
hawk533 said:
If you say all Japan-produced cartoons are anime, then what happens 100 years in the future? Would Japan-produced cartoons look anything like their cartoons from the 60s? And if they didn't, would they all still be lumped under the term "anime"? There would be no semantic benefit in doing that.
We have plenty of regional art categories, that were also limited to a time frame. "Russian romanticism". "The Italian Renessaince". "Victorian literature".
Maybe 100 years from now, art historians will talk about categories like "Millenial Anime", or maybe "Post-Evangelion Anime", and make it separate both from "Post-WWIII-Anime" and "Western-Animesque Shonen".
Or maybe it won't.
hawk533 said:
Culture is far more mutable. I can bring 100 Japanese artists to California and have them produce the exact same animation they would produce in Japan. As others have pointed out, some "anime" is actually animated in Korea. Using region of origin to distinguish something created entirely in a human's mind is not useful.
It's not the physical location of the people who have drawn the in-between frames that matters, but the decision making process of the publishing studio and the lead designers/writers.
Korea has lots of grunt workers recently, they do anything from The Simpsons to Sword Art Online, but these two still have a gap between their cultural background.
By the way, on the long term it DOES matter where the artist is from. For example it has been observed that Japanese-born people tend to draw Japanese faces in a raceless state, American-born Japanese people draw their own faces with markers of asian ethnicity, just like American people would.
Youth socialization matters A LOT in subconscious attitudes about how to draw humans, not to mention ow to tell stories.