Very few people I meet have neutral attitudes towards Japanese animation. It’s one of those things that you either “get” or one of those things that you stratch your head wondering why people who don’t look like children love such a childish thing. The only people I know that aren’t one or the other are people like myself that were very much into it at one point but whose interest waned with time.

As far as I know, most of my readership is not into anime. So, as a public service announcment, I will lay out what it is that I see in it.

American television (let’s leave animation aside, for a moment) typically follows certain story rhythms. We put shows into nice, neat little categories. We have family comedies with clueless fathers and goofy neighbors. We have buddy-group comedies about young singles on the prowl. We have office comedies that are generally unlike any office we’ve ever been a part of. In one-hour increments we have lawyers and detectives handling cases one episode at a time or civilians that shockingly have someone they meet that week die that week every week.

I’m not knocking American television. A formula does not generally make or break a show. The question of whether or not we care if Ross and Rachel or Sam and Diane or Niles and Daphne or Ashley and Pete get together are as interesting or boring as the writers make them. But by and large they work from a similar framework.

Anime, on the other hand, works from a very different framework. Because the animation is (generally) so unrealistic, they are free to incorporate wild elements into everyday life. Imagine Sam and Diane mixed with the outlandish martial art fights and a gender-bending curse. It may be utterly unappealing to you, but it’s not generally something you’ve ever seen before. Imagine a show wherein the End of the World is a subplot, simply the contextual backdrop to what’s really going on?

The more of it you watch, the more you start to recognize the anime story rhythms. The main reason my interest started to dwindle is that it stopped being original. The fifth time you see a variation of the same anime set-up (say a clueless guy surrounded by conniving female suitors) before the originality stops being interesting enough to keep your attention. But the great thing about anime is that it was like starting from a blank slate. Everything was new and original.

Some of the originality was based on the different things you can do with animation without breaking a budget or having it look too weird (particularly when the characters are markedly non-proportional, as is the case with most anime). There’s no reason that American entertainment can’t capture some of this originality and more and more it’s doing just that (Airbender – The Last Avatar being a stellar example). But there’s also the originality that comes with a foreign culture. They have different cultural norms and assumptions about how people act. This just adds some spice to the stew, in my opinion.

I’m the first to admit that it’s not for everybody. A lot of people used to believe that we were on the cusp of an entertainment movement (of, if anime, than animation aimed at non-children*). And in a way we worry as anime is so much bigger and more in the mainstream now than it was back in the day. But for the most part it’s still a niche programming, but popular enough to be lucrative and not anywhere near the source of embarassment it might once have been.

In some ways it’s interestingly become too big to be interesting. It used to be that there were comparatively so few releases that if you met an anime fan on the street there was reason to believe that you had seen at least some of the same things. There were so few voice actors that you got to follow them from one show to the next. Many shows had nearly identical voice casts, which was actually kind of fun. Now they’re translating and pumping the stuff out so fast and with so many people that some of the community and continuity seems to be lost.

* – The question of age-appropriateness is increasingly becoming moot (though I don’t think it will ever be entirely so). Barney and Power Rangers aside, a lot of the new entertainment aimed at kids is interesting and complex enough for adults. There’s no denying that children are the intended audience for Harry Potter, for instance, but it’s written in a way that parents and kids can read it together. It seems that less of the cartoons that I saw growing up are remotely interesting past puberty. I think that this is on the whole a good thing.