Anime Definition: Is it a Cartoon or is it an Animation?

As the years pass by anime movies and series have a continuous growth of popularity and many generations, especially the younger ones probably know the anime terms that beginners or older generations who just started watching anime may not know about.

Inuyasha Anime

There are actually quite a lot of people who still have questions regarding anime definitions and are confused about what an anime really is.

If you’re one of those people who still have questions, especially trying to figure out whether an anime is a cartoon or not and you just want to clear things up, then you’re on the right page.

To start things off, anime is considered to be a specific style of cartoon. However, it doesn’t mean that if you hear anime it automatically is produced by Japanese people.

There are anime series or movies that’s produced in other countries and we can say that they’re inspired from this specific style of cartoon, and many choose to cosplay these characters as well.

So, is an anime a cartoon?

Many people, especially westerners consider anime as a cartoon. But, according to Richard Seghers from Medium, Japan doesn’t want Anime to be considered as a form of cartoon. You may be wondering why, this is because compared to cartoons that we see on TV such as Adventure time and Steven Universe.

Anime has more distinct body features and expressions, also, anime bodies are much closer to an actual human body and the only difference is the exaggerated face features. An example of the face features that has been exaggerated and highlighted in anime is the big round eyes and small mouth to make the style much more appealing to the eyes.

Now that you know the difference between the two, it’s up to you to decide whether you want to consider anime as a cartoon. Because no matter what, both are very entertaining to watch and can make your day better.

The second question is, is anime an animation?

Yes, it definitely is. Anime is an abbreviation of animation and it is created either by hand or it’s digitally made. When making an anime, a lot of frames are drawn by artists and all are in a particular sequence.

An example of that is an anime character waving their hand and they are smiling. Imagine how many frames are used in just a few seconds of animation? Everything is just incredible with how cartoons and anime are made.

For my final question, Is an anime a cartoon or an animation?

Anime can be both a cartoon and an animation, as I’ve stated earlier, it depends on you whether you will consider anime as a cartoon.

As for me, I believe that anime is quite different from cartoons, knowing that the cartoons that we watch on TV have much more exaggerated features than anime and anime is more anatomically correct.

There are quite a lot of differences between the kids cartoons that we see on TV and the anime we watch in Crunchyroll or Netflix.

Both have different target audiences and topics that are being animated. Hopefully, anime definitions are much clearer to you now and please do note that an anime can both be considered as a cartoon and an animation.

At the end of the day, we’re all entertained by different kinds of animations that we watch online or on our television.

References:

Seghers, R. “Anime is NOT a cartoon”.

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