Why Anime Isn’t Just Another Cartoon

A common enough argument amongst my friends. They get downright insulted when you call their precious anime a cartoon. But what really is the difference between an anime and a cartoon. Honestly, there isn’t any, it is simply the preconceptions that people attach to the term. Both terms stand for a media called animation.

In most people’s minds, a cartoon is meant for children, I quite frankly am quite tired of people looking down on my ‘little cartoon watching habit’. Cartoons were shows like X-men, Batman, Superman, Transformers, Winnie the Pooh, etc. Notice that Disney movies and South park are often called animations and not cartoons by most people (for what reason…I don’t really know…marketing maybe?)

If you take the most basic description of these terms, anime, cartoon, animation are at heart the same thing. What they are is a medium of expression and conveying ideas. We have to forget the preconceptions we have placed with these terms.

Anime takes on the role of how live TV developed ere. Where TV and movies in the US developed rapidly due to resources available, anime developed and branched out to the wide variety of genres seen in American TV and movies. This is not to say that Japanese live TV and movies did not develop, but the resources, culture, and limited space in Japanese encouraged manga (closest to thick japanese comic book) and anime development.