Animesque - Television Tropes & Idioms

Also called anime-influenced animation, amerime or Americanime (if it's American), Franime (for French things), or fauxnime, many animated shows produced around the world could fairly comfortably be called Anime, but for the technicality of not being Japanese in origin (interestingly enough, the Japanese call all animation "anime"). Most of them are even listed in the Anime section at Fanfiction.net, which is separate from said site's Animation section.

Some of these are merely co-productions between Japan and other countries, predominantly France and Canada. Others bridge the gap between western animation styles and that of Anime, while others, particularly that of the Saturday morning variety, simply use a a form of it as an excuse to use animation limited as all get out; the plots and direction are otherwise a standard cartoon. Though most of these works are created by and primarily shown in the United States, many also involve Eurasian production studios. Also, most Western Animation is technically animated by Asian studios because of cost efficiency. When it is produced and/or primarily funded by western sources but has a distinct eastern flavor, then it can be called Animesque.

"Amerimanga" or "original English-language manga" is also common in bookstores. Thanks to Tokyopop's marketing campaign and mass picking up of American manga works, the company has become synonymous with the term, although some purists tend to have a critical opinion of them if they use the more gimmicky aspects of the medium, and some of their releases don't even look particularly like "manga", just plain ol' black-and-white indie comics labeled as manga.

To be fair, in Japan, there would be no difference; "anime" has been adopted into English to describe Japanese animation based on the common word for any animation in that language (hell, Looney Tunes are as much anime to the Japanese as Naruto), and so too has "manga" ("comic(s)") been adopted from Japanese to describe Japanese or Japanese-influenced comics. Then again, one could also argue that if there's no difference between American animation and "anime" or black and white comics and "manga", there's really no point in having the term in English to begin with. But then, we have words like "faux" and "ersatz" (both of which pretty much mean "fake") in English, so maybe it's a moot point. This is before you consider that the word "anime" is actually a short form for animēshon, which is a Japanese approximation of the English word animation.

Ah, the joys of chaotic linguistic evolution. Reborrowing

is a bitch, ain't it?

Also of note, this is a case of full-circle evolution as the anime style was inspired by classic American theatrical animation of the 30s and 40s (for example, the big eyes of anime characters is straight from Bambi or the old Fleischer shorts like Betty Boop) and now western animation could be seen as returning the favor.

Western animation and comics adopted some Tropes from Anime and Manga, including:

Anime Facefaults (also known as orz), along with elements such as Scary Shiny Glasses, the sweat drop, etc.
Increased use of Japanese references, from names to cultural elements, with the obvious expectation that viewers will find them familiar (or at least interesting).
Use of genres typically found in Anime, like Humongous Mecha, et al.
Camera Angles and various narrative devices such as Eyedscreen and still motion action scenes.

Some, though, go too far:

Panel in right-to-left order rather than left-to-right.
Speech bubbles shaped to accommodate Japanese text, but filled with Latin letters. Especially noticeable when the bubble is tall and narrow, (perfect for katakana or kanji, not so much for multisyllable English words) or large and square (Meant to accommodate a single, large Japanese sign or four in a 2x2 configuration, but too tall for singlesyllabic English words, like "yes," which is longer than it is tall.)

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