In short, animé is Japanese animation. It literally means the word “animation” in Japanese, but many people often mistake it with manga, which is the Japanese word for comics made in the style of animé.
Animé and manga are significantly different from their counterparts in America and the UK. For the most part, cartoons and comic books in America/UK are thought of as geared toward youngsters. Cartoons and comics books in Japan are geared towards all ages. While there is a large amount of American animation and comics which are intended for older, more mature readers without the need for bulging superheroes, they are seen as something separate from the conventional line of comic books. Millions of subway riders in America pass their time reading novels on the train. In Japan, you're just as likely to see someone reading a comic book. While well thought out, "adult" animation is something rare in America/UK, there are plenty of TV shows, movies and direct to video (called Original Video Animations or OVAs in Japan) examples of anime.
What is the Style of Animé?
Animé is usually in the form of a cartoon, but Japanese series' that include actors and have plots similar to animé are often considered animé too. Animé has a unique style of things, such as when characters show emotions. Below is a list of unique things the characters do when they are faced with certain emotions.
(Animé) Sweatdrops
Sweatdrops are something that you will find in virtually EVERY animé ever created. They often symbolise embarrassment, reactions to weird and strange behaviour or even fear. The two pictures above are of an animé guy sweatdropping in fear and nervousness.
Wide Eyes and Fear
Wide eyes are most commonly used for fear and just plain freaked-outness or being surprised, but can be used for other things. In the pictures above, the animé boy has extremely wide eyes accompanied by a sweatdrop (explained above) and purple/blueish lines below his eyes that are usually used to symbolise poison or bad tasting food, but also are used when someone is VERY scared.
Anger
Anger is made to be very over-the-top in animé. In the picture above, the girl is furious and this is shown by her giant evil pupil-less eyes and wide mouth. Some of her teeth have also been made sharp like fangs, just to add a bit more over-the-topness. The picture above is really only mock-anger, however, and real anger is expressed in much different ways, such as veins sticking out of the hands, face, ect, which is a common technique used in an animé known as Dragonball. Yelling, growling, roaring, ect is also a technique used to show anger.
Puzzled
Animé characters, particularly small children's, or “chibis” which they are called in Japan (which literally translates to “runt”) mouths often go small and their eyes go big when they are puzzled or dumb-founded. This look adds a tad bit of innocence to the chibi.
Crying
Often, when animé characters cry and it isn't really serious, huge jets of water come out of their eyes. When it is serious, depending on the type of animé, it is either rendered as just shining drops of water which fly out of the eyes of the crying character or just plainly, two tears running down the cheek of the crying person. In any case, in animé, exaggerated or true, often the character will have “drop-ovals” at the bottom of his or her eye before or after crying. “drop-ovals” are shown in Picture 1.
Dubbing
Animé usually is created in Japan, for Japanese audiences and then is brought over to America to be “dubbed”. Dubbing is when specialist companies take the animé and make it suitable for the children in America. More often than not, they require voice actors (known as “seiyuus” in Japan) to give the English characters voices. They may ask a different company to translate the script for them, such as JN Productions, who translate the world-widely known show - InuYasha aswell as many other animé shows. Many people despise English dubs because of the fact that many concepts are ruined in “making the show suitable for children” and often, the voice actors are unable to act very well.
During the dubbing process, they must also remove the things that they find to be unsuitable or too bizarre for children. This often includes any relation to Japanese culture, blood, (in younger animé) guns, et cetera. Sometimes, even the littlest things are cut out for seemingly no good reason. Above the blood of the wound is unnecessarily edited out in an animé called Yu-Gi-Oh! (Yuugiou: Duel Monsters). To the left is the edited picture, to the right is the original picture. Pointless edits like this have given the English dub of Yu-Gi-Oh! a bad name, aswell as giving the company who dubs it, 4Kids Entertainment a bad name.
In dubbing, I personally think that there are 4 steps.
Translation of the script / creation of a new English script.
Choosing the VAs (Voice Actors).
Dubbing the animé show.
Editing it to fit the new script or editing it to make it suitable for children.
In reality, there are many more steps in the dubbing process. The above 4 are the main things.
Openings/Ending
In Japan, every animé has a well-thought out Opening themesong and Ending themesong. Often, when dubbed, these are discarded and replaced with dub themesongs which consist of merely cutting out clips from the show and putting them together with an English music track. In Japan, however, they create the scenes especially for the opening and think it out thoroughly. Japanese companies usually ask Japanese singers to sing the opening for their animé or use a pre-existing song of a singer to also promote them. Animé themesongs also nearly always change when a new season begins. For example, the original Yuugiou: Duel Monsters had 5 openings and 5 endings by the end of the 5th season. The pictures above are from the 3rd opening of InuYasha known as Owari nai Yume, translated as Unending Dream sung by the Japanese singer Aikawa Nanase. People often look down and take for granted the extreme work that it takes to create a good animé Opening/Ending, but I for one appreciate it greatly.
In conclusion, I love animé because of the amazing amount of work that goes into creating it and because it is a great piece of animation with great stories, artwork, music, et cetera.
