To me, anime is animation that comes from Japan. It's a shortening of the Japanese pronunciation of animation.

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As one Japanese dude's opinion: Anime is short for "Animation" in Japanese. It originally started off as Japanese take on Disney (Osamu Tezuka was a huge admirer of Walt Disney, and he was both a pioneer of Anime and Manga).

That was about 50 years ago. A lot has happened in 50 years. Anime has taken on an…

Just Japan. Though other countries, notably Korea and some stuff from the US, are starting to develop styles that are certainly anime-inspired.

With 18-years as a fan under my belt, I can tell you that a majority of anime fans define anime as "Japanese animation." So what one self-proclaimed "anime expert" says means nothing if most do not agree.

Yeah, it seems like a simple enough question to say what anime is. Until you think about it for a little bit, and then you realize it's way more complex than you thought. But you can definitely say that it's Japanese. That's at the core of whatever you end up defining anime as.

No. in the English language, Avatar is not anime.

In the west, anime is simply cartoons/animation specifically from Japan.
It's simply a term to specify a cartoon's country of origin.

In Japan itself, it simply means "cartoon". Any cartoon. In Japan, Family Guy is anime.

But we speak English and use "anime" as a loanword.…

So everyone is going to give you answers that talk about the general meaning of the word "anime" mostly because the answer they really want to give you can sound very pretentious and has no supporting facts to prove it. Also it can just be really hard to put into words what "anime" is to its fans.

Anime is the shortened word for Animation which is now a Japanese word which is also their definition of animation for Cartoons. If it's "anime" then it implies that it's Japanese. Japanese have loads of words they've adopted and changed for their language. America has hotdogs, Japan didn't, so since they never…

It is pretty vague, but I personally just refer to what is essentially "cartoons made in Japan" as "anime". If it's on anime-planet.com, it's anime, if not.... not anime. :P

Don't listen to that guy. All high profile American animation is animated in Korea. Justice League, Adventure Time, Simpsons, Avatar, etc. And even if it weren't -saying that something needs to be animated by an "Asian" studio to be "Anime", is like saying Rap music can only be made by African Americans in the Bronx.

I don't know if Avatar qualifies as anime. It's obviously anime-inspired. But is it an anime? At the moment, I'd say no. But who is to say, really? When you get down to it, defining what anime "is" is hard. The only thing I can definitively say about anime is that whatever it is, it is distinctly Japanese in some way.…

I believe that anime is just the word Japanese use to describe any animated show or movie. So someone in Japan would call Avatar: The Last Airbender anime even though it's called a cartoon in North America. Personally, I use the word anime specifically to describe any animated Japanese show or movie.

I try not to get bogged down geography in terms of defining it.
To me it's more of a stylistic breakdown of drawing (enlarge eyes to make it easier to add detail, decrease the simplify mouths and noses because they're easy to push animations into the uncanny valley), and other common attributes of the genre.
It's…

The thing is, in Japan, "Anime" is just short hand for the phonetic writing of "Animation" they have. So Disney films and Rocky And Bullwinkle are "anime"/"animation". Which makes us calling it "anime" kind of weird.
I mean, I get that "anime" has its uses as a descriptor but, like "sci-fi" or "fantasy" what does and…

Anime was supposed to be animation from Japan, but it changed as it got more and more popular, its not just animation, Anime is a culture.

It's animated products from Japan plain and simple. Korean makers are starting to imitate the style and Korean "manga" such as Freezing have become anime but it remains a Japanese product. Think Scotch, you can brew something that looks and tastes the exact same but unless its brewed in Scotland its not Scotch.

I always assumed "anime" refers to either animation from Japan or animation from elsewhere made in the Japanese style.

As far as I'm concerned, if it is from Japan, I consider it anime. If not, anime-inspired fits well.

usually it's used to refer to animation created by Asian animation studios. not just studios out of Japan.