Where do we draw the line between "anime" and "western animation"?

So, I thought of this because of Blade Runner: Black Lotus and the upcoming Lord Of The Rings: The War Of The Rohirrim. Both of these series are or were animated by a Japanese studio (Sola, to be precise), and their directors are also Japanese. However, they are being financed and distributed by American companies, and ultimately it is those American companies that own their copyrights. One could argue, then, that these works do not technically qualify as anime since their ultimate creative and financial input is not Japanese, and they were produced for the American market first and foremost.

So what namespace should we put them under?

This is not MyAnimeList with its overly complicated rules on what counts as anime, as you can see with Scott Pilgrim Takes Off being in the Anime namespace. The market doesn't matter. Copyright doesn't matter. What matters is being made by a Japanese company by Japanese/anime industry creative staff.

(Just to clarify: This is just personal opinion, I think I worded it too strongly)

Edited by Serilly on Nov 22nd 2023 at 7:53:15 AM

I'm not saying we should use them, but what are their rules?

You know OEL Manga is a thing, right? We still call Amazing Agent Luna a manga despite having been created in the United States.

Which I'm still opposed to, by the way. I've brought OEL "manga" up in the namespacing thread a few times, but we've never concretely decided on anything.

Yeah, I'd also disagree with that.

Booplesnoot, their rules can be found here: https://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=141101

The market one is controversial because it's enforced arbitrarily based on how the mods feel.

Edited by Serilly on Nov 22nd 2023 at 5:31:16 AM

I concur

And I don't. Literally the only things that distinguish Amazing Agent Luna from any other manga series is that it was originally written in English (and that it wasn't serialized in a manga magazine, because we don't have those in this country). It's still marketed in tankoubon to the same target audiences as any other action schoolgirl manga.

Similarly, the boom in Light Novels being translated to English has spawned Western-written LNs. If we still had a Light Novel namespace, would you be wanting those exiled from it?

To clarify, I personally wouldn't even be opposed to just having one namespace tor all animation and one for all comics... But since that's never gonna happen, I feel like it only makes sense to base the distinction on country of origin, given we already don't group other eastern animation into Anime/ and manhua and manhwa into Manga/ — they get their own namespaces.

I think that OEL Manga occupy a different space than Animesque Western cartoons, personally

Edited by Libraryseraph on Nov 22nd 2023 at 10:52:52 AM

Individual works blur the line but the general rule is having a Japanese creative team and not just having animesque character designs or having the animation outsourced to Japan. Where the line gets blurred is when American groups fund or co-produce some works that originate in Japan, such as The Big O.

I'd stick with determining the namespace by the country of production for consistency. I'm not a fan of namespaces period, but there's nothing that can be massively done about that.

Yeah, in a perfect world everything in Western Animation/ and Anime/ would all go under Animation/; likewise manga, Western comics, Manhwa, and Manhua would all go under Comic Book/ or Comic Strip. But it's too late to change that now.

I'm just gonna stick to country of production like you said.

Though I'll say it, even The Other Wiki is torn on how to classify Scott Pilgrim Takes Off despite all the references pointing to "anime".

I classify something like Scott Pilgrim Takes Off to be in a pretty similar category to Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt. They're both shows made in Japan that have a very Western cartoon artstyle, but because they're made in Japan they count as anime. I know some Anime YouTubers like Chibi Reviews say the same thing and it seems like this website agrees.

Why is Wikipedia unsure about it?

Edited by ReynTime250 on Nov 30th 2023 at 10:40:35 AM

I have absolutely no idea, they're just being MyAnimeList tier elitists at this point. All evidence in citation points to it being an anime but several users disagree with that and now the show is just dubbed "a television show" until the debate is resolved.

The folks at MAL are elitists? How?

I see absolutely zero issue with this, and I have no idea why you're making such a big deal out of it.

Edited by JHD0919 on Nov 30th 2023 at 8:29:25 AM

They didn't catalogue Scott Pilgrim Takes Off purely due to it "appealing" to a different market.

To be fair, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off resembles the source material a lot, which is a comic book, so people are more likely to consider it a western product than an anime.

Edited by SoyValdo7 on Nov 30th 2023 at 7:50:03 AM

The folks arguing on the Other Wiki why Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is NOT anime appear to be in a minority position and based on very awkward argument: "It is animated in Japan based on the work and art style of a Canadian author [...]. It is no more Japanese than The Simpsons is Korean. (Mc Donalds Big Mac made in a restaurant in Toyko isn't Japanese food either.)" Which... is a take, holy hell lol

The ruling for me is very definitive for classifying the work as anime — it'd just be one thing if the Japanese were just the animators working under a western company that did all the creative storyboarding, scripts, overall concepts and shiz, and were ultimately just outsource laborers putting together an otherwise domestic product, but they are directly responsible for the animation and direction and storyboards and it seems basically all of the intensive, laborious production side of things of the series, with most western influence being creative decisions, which appear to have been handled in a significantly different crosscultural capacity to if they were working with a western studio.

Just because it has the aesthetic of a western work, adapts western media, and is marketing to western audiences, therefore that makes it western media, is almost literally surface-level observation and frankly almost insulting to all the Japanese producers who did the work featured in a bulk of the credits. There's plenty of anime that feature western aesthetic inspirations, adapts western works, and buttloads of those that don't still receive dubs in English and other languages and marketing as such. Aughhhh I can't believe this is treated with any kind of ambiguity with some people

Edited by number9robotic on Nov 30th 2023 at 10:39:54 AM

I count them as Anime. My definition of Anime is "Made in Japan by a Japanese crew and creative team".

An issue with putting "American works with a Japanese style" in the Manga namespace is that no one ever wants to put "Japanese works with an American style" in the Comic Book namespace.

• Should New Mazinger be moved from Manga to Comic Book? It's by Go Nagai, whose works are Trope Codifiers for Super Robot, Magical Girl Warrior, Ecchi, Bragging Theme Tune, Hot Blooded Sideburns and any number of things that people consider to compose "the anime style". And it doesn't really stand out among his body of work for being any different in style. But he wrote it in English and it was published in Chicago.
• What about My Hero Academia, which is not only modelled on American superhero comics, but IIRC is the best-selling superhero publication in America by a large margin?
• What about Spider-Man: Octopus Girl, a Japanese-published work which is set in Marvel's main Earth-616 continuity and filled with Continuity Nods to the Superior Spiderman run?
• Is the adaptation of The Saga of Darren Shan (written by an Irishman and set in Limerick) which ran in Shonen Sunday a comic book or a manga? What about the English edition?
• If the Video Game namespace was split in two in this way, which category would Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil be in?

I don't really get why we have a special category for Anime & Manga in the first place. If it's to do with shared tropes, they exist in other media from Japan as well (albeit more obscured by the Export Filter). If it's something special about how the industry is structured in Japan, then OEL Manga is an oxymoron because they aren't part of that industry. If it's for works by Japanese creators, we have indexes for that already. It's also really awkward whenever a page has long "Anime" and "Western Animation" categories, then an "Animation" category containing a single example from Korea.

There's also the weirdness of Japanese works published online sometimes being placed under Manga rather than Web Comic. The recently-removed Light Novel namespace had a similar problem where many of the works there were originally published as a Serial Novel or Web Serial Novel (both of which are supposed to go in Literature).

Anime and Manga are separate for well-established historical reasons. We do see the occasional attempt to unify them with their Western counterparts (and we just saw Light Novel folded into Literature), but the "keep them apart" crowd has always won out.

(x7) I just brought it up mostly because SPTO is very clearly anime as it was again animated by Japan and had a Japanese creative team deciding certain aspects too. So it just baffles me how Wikipedia could get so stuck on such an obvious question.

The fact that this wiki managed to classify SPTO very quickly shows us that there is definitely a line drawn between anime and western animation.

Edited by AudioSpeaks2 on Dec 5th 2023 at 5:39:59 PM