Ironically, the big eye style was inherited from manga/anime artist Osamu Tezuka who in turn acquired it from… Walt Disney.
I don’t know if you’re referring to my earlier comment, but I put to you that your phrasing isn’t upsetting on my part, but presumptuous on yours.
Yes, I guess I mischaracterized the wisecrack in post 29. You weren’t upset and you probably weren’t bent out of shape either. Not so sure about now though.
Well… deal with it.
Not sure why this was addressed to me, as I have seen no anime, TV or film, that I thought had technically acceptable animation, that even Miazaki, the master of the genre, had the same limitations that I find so annoying in the cheapest stuff, that I don’t see in most Western animation. Honestly, I’d rather watch a flipbook animation from someone who had absorbed the lessons of Frank and Ollie’s “The Illusion of Life” than Spirited Away again.
De gustibus.
If a thread were started asking why some people dislike seafood, and the main answer was that they don’t like the “fishy” taste, it does no one any good to start pointing out that clam chowder is not grilled salmon and that they should try coconut shrimp. If they don’t like it, then they don’t like any variation, and have no interest in trying different recipes until they find one that they don’t dislike.
Personally, I have no interest in anime. As I have gotten older I find I have less interest in fiction at all, and stylized fiction even less so. No, I haven’t watched every series nor have I watched many of the movies. The entire medium is irrelevant to my entertainment interests. So I suppose indifference is a better description than dislike.
I think this is perhaps the smartest post in the whole thread - if you ask people why they don’t like something, you just tend to start a cycle of poorly researched reasons that the fans try to refute one by one not realizing that the point often isn’t in those particular reasons. Those who aren’t interested in a thing use generalized arguments that may be objectively wrong, but that doesn’t change the fact in the end they still don’t like the subject of debate.
If somebody asked me why I don’t like jazz I think my reply would seem as silly to any jazz fan as some of these posts seem to anime fans. I haven’t paid enough attention to jazz to criticize it properly and since I don’t like jazz, I’ll never get to that point.
One problem I have with many - not all - Japanese animated movies and OAVs is that they seem to lack a middle act. They start out with tons of introductory scenes and backstory, and they have a large, explosive climax, but in between, there’s maybe 10, 15 minutes of actual plot. It just seems wrong to me on a structural level.
I grew up on “Clutch Cargo”, heaven help me, and when my son started watching anime, “Dragonball-Z” and other Saturday morning-like cartoons, I couldn’t help noticing the similarities, 30 some years later. This is my major impression of anime. The art was usually fine, the animation was cheap and the dialogue was terrible.
The infantalized women is another impression I got when I tried renting some popular Anime movies years ago. Can’t remember the titles. Just couldn’t get past that.
I grew up with Gigantor, Kimba the White Lion, and Speed Racer.
In 40 years, anime hasn’t graduated past the kitschy music, flashy backgrounds, and uncoordinated mouth movements. The plot lines and back stories are freshmoric (lower than sophomoric). Novellas are more entertaining.
I have a teenager who loves anime, and has tried to get me involved. Today’s anime is like today’s cartoons: bland, warmed-over leftover third-rate plots with forced laugh tracks.
Thanks, but no.
some “atypical” Japanese animation features:
Sea Prince & Fire Child is about as close to classic Disney fairy-tale fantasy as you’re gonna get, in terms of both animation frame rates and magical fairy-people storylines.
The first Patlabor film is a existential police-procedural shot in a slow, thoughtful style by Mamoru Oshii. Sure, it’s set in the future and some of the police use giant machines, but they’re shoehorned in almost as an afterthought.
Belladonna Of Sadness is an experimental film based on the nonfiction book “Satanism And Witchcraft”, and it was the final nail in the coffin of Osamu “Astro Boy” Tezuka’s bankruptcy.
Satoshi Kon made several great films but my favorite is Millenium Actress. I’ll just quote Wikipedia here: Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan said of the film “as a rumination on the place movies have in our personal and collective subconscious, Millennium Actress fascinatingly goes where films have not often gone before”. Kevin M. Williams of the Chicago Tribune gave the movie 4 stars and put his feelings for the film this way: “A piece of cinematic art. It’s modern day Japanese animation at its best… It’s animated, but it’s human and will touch the soul of anyone who has loved deeply”.
and of course I must mention a personal fondness for the fine-art film about cyborg dogs battling space amoebas, Hellhound Liner 0011.
The Japanese cartoon field is a wide one, it takes a big ol’ stretch to say it’s all the same.
Aahh, Satoshi Kon. He left us too soon. I also love “Tokyo Godfathers” and “Perfect Blue”.
These and “Millenium Actress” (I’m not a fan of his “Paprika”) are all exceptional films, but if you’ve decided that you dislike anime, you’re probably never going to watch them and if you did you wouldn’t like them because, you know, they are animated films which were made in Japan.
Well, no. I’ve clearly been arguing the entire time that I have the entire oeuvre of anime memorized and emblazoned on my heart.
Meh. At my age I will not live long enough to view all the “exceptional films” I have so far missed. I don’t need to spend my limited film-watching time experimenting with something I *might *like, when there are so many other movies I know I *will *like.
Indeed—and more insightful than my pending counter that some of the “anti-seafood” arguments were that it all tastes like McSalmon nuggets; or that seafood isn’t “meat.” 
I never liked it, but wasn’t irritated by it until exposed to super obnoxious obsessive nerds who think they understand Japanese culture thoroughly from watching these shows. Including at TV Tropes, which I absolutely love, but find the unnecessary Japanese names and terms used in the names of tropes to be off putting. And to think- when I first went there, I thought it was odd how obsessed they were with Buffy the Vampire Slayer…
Like the hosts of J-Pop America Fun Time Now!, eh?
Decades ago, I announced to one of the owners of an SF/F bookstore I frequented in those days my disappointment in some highly touted anime features (Laputa was one) that had been shown recently. I explained what I found off-putting about them, and he explained that Japanese animation, even more than Japanese filmmaking, is influenced by Japanese theatre, especially Kabuki. All drama, and especially all animation distorts life, exaggerating some things and sloughing off other things. Anime differs from Western animation in that it starts with different assumptions about what deserves loving detail, what is expressed with a line or two, what gets exaggerated, and what gets ignored. The variations that anime fans point to when they say “it’s not all the same” are variations on the same theme, and it’s that theme that non-fans can’t get past. I suspect that many anime fans dislike things about Western animation that its partisans regard as integral to it.
In short, I still can’t stand anime, but now I know why.
Eh, the Japanese probably watch Doctor Who and think it’s sloppy and flawed. What, theres an attractive, helpless young woman and a tentacled monster, yet they don’t even try to show triple orifice rape? WTF is this cockeyed bullshit? Who even writes this stuff? And why isn’t she twelve?
I understand that the Japanese believe that American superhero comics are rather primitive for a lack of a better term.