Texas America Murphy said:
Dear Nerds, explain to me what the heck the deal with Anime is.
But for all my education I cannot possibly comprehend why people call this ?art.? I was hoping that maybe y?all could enlighten me. There must be something I am missing.
I am sure that many flames have ensued, but I won't even read them because I'm sure they will just upset and annoy me. Instead, I will respond directly to the OP as if his question was neutrally phrased (which it wasn't).
Anime is Japanese popular culture. Much of it's appeal is that it contains different archtypes, different tropes, and different stock characters than western culture. It also contains western characters and archtypes filtered through eastern culture. This creates a really strange and unique set of ideas.
This provided an entire generation (myself included) with something that was unlike anything we'd ever experienced before.
Additionally, because the Japanese generally have short attention spans, many series (not all by any means, but many) are fully realized within 13-26 episodes. This means that the writers can arc the plots with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Many older Anime fans (like myself) were originally attracted to this tendency. However, this stands out less now, since many western TV shows have adopted this style in the past ten years or so, because Anime proved that fans actually liked shows with that sort of plot.
Finally, returning to my first point, because there is another culture involved, there are new genres that do (or did) not exist in western culture. For instance, "Magic Girl Shoujo" is basically a genre dedicated to female super-heroes for female viewers/readers. I make this distinction because most western super-hero stuff is usually targeted to men or both men and women, but rarely just to women. The option to have a genre targetd to me is... nice. Female super-heros who aren't wearing fetish wear and bikinis? Great! Even if they do spend too much time worrying about Boys. **sigh**
But I digress. The main appeal of Anime is that it offers a unique insight into familiar forms of artistic expression. If you don't like japanese culture (samurai, ninjas, giant mechs, etc), or standard "nerd" genres (sci-fi, fantasy, speculative fiction, historical fiction), then you probably won't like anime, since it's just the japanese version there-of.
Anyway, I hope this answered your question in a non-fanish way. I've defended anime and manga in academia at the Doctoral level, so I'm quite experienced at looking at Anime from the outside and explaining it's appeal (and value). Hope this helped.
-- Bara no Hime
P.S. Also, I'm not a particular fan of Naruto (long ninja shows bore me) or Guren Lagen (hated every single character), and I've never seen Code Geas. I'm a huge anime fan, but I can see how those two shows could turn you off - they turned me off too.