I don’t remember anything like a pilot, though the first episode has a lot of setup for the rest of the series. The series ran a lot of seasons, wiki says there were 195 episodes. Also four movies, which are like Star Trek movies in that the second and fourth ('Beautiful Dreamer" and “Lum the Forever”)are the ones I’d most recommend.
IS RWBY pronounced R-W-B-Y or Red White Blue Yellow?
I think anime’s meaning has expanded to style as well as country of origin. Here’s how I’d define it:
From Japan: Always anime
From outside Japan but anime style: Anime
Cartoons outside Japan but not anime style: Cartoons
Kill Bill I & II had a lot of anime elements in it.
I have to try the movies. I watched the first four regular episodes (subtitled) on GoGoAnime and was less than impressed.
YouTube has some grainy episodes dubbed into English by English people with English accents, which are extremely funny. Shinobu gets to curse, calling Ataru a “lecherous BASTARD,” a “shit,” and a “girl-chasing PUD.” In general, the dialogue is much more amusing than in the American subtitles on GoGoAnime.
Also dirtier. In the first episode when Shinobu offers to marry Ataru he says “You’ll marry me? We can FUCK EVERY NIGHT?” Somehow that doesn’t show up in the USA subtitles, either.
It is pronounced Ruby, like the gem.
I would call RWBY, or any anime-like show produced outside Japan to be in the anime style. Real anime comes from Japan.
Urusei Yatsura actually had six movies, although only the first four were produced during the run of the TV show. Even though the TV show had a five season run, the manga ran a few years after the show finished. There were also a bunch of direct-to-video episodes and specials. I agree that UY 2: Beautiful Dreamer is the anime’s high-point. It was written and directed by Mamoru Oshii, best-known for creating Ghost in the Shell.
The problem with getting all but the most hardcore Takahashi fans into UY are multiple.
-Sheer volume of the series, plus a lot of it is out of print.
-Stories depend a lot on punny humor (always hard to translate) and references to Japanese folklore, culture, and history.
-People tend to want to start at the beginning of a series, and the beginning of UY, both the manga and the anime, isn’t nearly as coherent and polished as what came later. Rumiko Takahashi was 21 when she when she began UY, and it was considered unpromising enough that she was simultaneously working on another manga series. She really didn’t have a clear concept of what she wanted to do with UY. Ataru and Shinobu were supposed to be the show’s “official couple” and Lum was a villain and not supposed to be a recurring character after the first story arc.
Nah, that’s not nearly confusing enough. Let’s go with Voltron: Legendary Defender instead.
If you were a kid in the '80s, odds are good that you watched Voltron, the story of five friends who each piloted a robot lion that could turn into a different, humanoid lion. “Voltron” isn’t really a thing in Japan, though. The cartoon was originally called Beast King GoLion, before it was rebranded for American audience. The show had some success for a while there, but eventually dropped off the radar.
This year, Netflix released a new version of Voltron. This one didn’t use recycled animation from a Japanese cartoon. It was all original animation, by an American company, for an American audience. It is, absolutely, an American cartoon. But it’s based off a Japanese cartoon, and still features characters who look like this, react to things like this, and spend most of their time fighting things that look like this. It’s largely faithful, at least in look, to the Japanese original. But it’s entirely made by and for Americans.
Anime, or not anime?
Talking to JpnGal’s parents before about animated shorts/films in general. They referred to all types as simply “anime”. When discussing old Mickey Mouse cartoons or features like “Frozen”, they said “amerika no anime” (American anime). And when talking about “Doraemon” or Miyazaki films, they said “anime” or “nihon no anime” (Japanese anime).
In Japanese dictionaries I checked around here, “アニメ” (anime) refers to any animated film/video.