Anime, Here To Stay?

An Explanation Of Anime

By Tash Jones

Anime is popular. Simple and concise sentence. Anime is popular around the world. Anime conventions despite being on a grand scale in the UK, are nothing compared to the amount that occupy the Americas. I’ve scoured the databases for lists and in California alone, there are handfuls yearly.

My question is why do people enjoy Anime? To me it’s a comic and a relief away from the stress in my everyday life. It is more relaxing than a simple film or novel, as it is a reminiscent of my childhood. The reason it sticks in my mind is the over-exaggeration in not only the dialect of the characters (and the over-emphasized punctuation following it), but also how their faces are filled with more emotion than humanly possible – the wide mouth, the drooping eyes, the tears sprawled across the face, the boldened font to the side of a character when the ‘anger’ emotion is being portrayed. The way that the characters are minimized.

The reason I love Anime is the same reason everyone my age loved Pokemon, and Digimon, and Yu-Gi-Oh when they were younger. The believable and the unbelievable stories have a paradigm. The way how you believed that when you grew older there was a chance you could be a Pokemon Master, and that that life was real, but the way that you are able to distinguish between the character who head multiplies in size, and the one drop of sweat on his forehead when he is furious, from being realistic.

The current Series I am reading is called ‘Chocolat’, the customized backgrounds, which are a slide away from the story and a continuity error (if Anime cared for that). The little side boxes which are the internal thoughts of the characters, are so sarcastic, which in turn reminds me of the British Comedy and British Humour.

The dazed-knocked out look is something that defines the genre in full to me. It is in a way something I wish that could be translated into real life. The swirly eyes, the lines and tears across the face, the wide mouth and the the steam hat us eluding out of them as they are mercilessly dragged across the floor by a non-sentimental character.

To wrap up, Anime is popular as it is aimed at Children, Teenagers and Adults. There can be simple storylines such as in Chobits (where a robotic character attaches to it’s master and in-turn “loves” him), or complex story lines such as the feature-film ‘Paprika’ (where refrigerators are dancing, dreams within dreams within dreams are happening). Regardless of the story, one thing is certain and that is the precision of the art-direction, it is simply superb. No faults. Whether you are a frantic lover of Anime or have yet to see anything other than the few TV programs that you by-chance caught as they were on your prime-time Television sets, I would recommend nipping down to your cheapest DVD shop and purchasing something. It’s really like no other genre, in my opinion, gives you a lot of time for interpretation.

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