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

Well, if you want to split hairs about it, is Freezing a manga or a manhua (which has its own namespace)? It ran in a Japanese manga magazine and uses standard anime/manga/light novel tropes, but the writer and artist are Korean.

What about the Maximum Ride manga adaptation? The source material is American, it was published in English first, but the art style is stereotypically anime, and the mangaka is Korean.

What about Ultimo? Frickin Stan Lee coproduced that with Hiroyuki Takei (Shaman King).

Edited by StarSword on Dec 5th 2023 at 5:48:40 AM

By country of origin what's usually meant isn't the individual creator's nationality, but rather where the company producing it is based, where it was first released/published, where the majority creative team is from, etc.

So like... Freezing is a manga, it was published in a manga magazine. Maximum Ride is a graphic novel, IMO. The last one is a co-production and I feel it'd be weirder to not have those in Anime/Manga.

Edited by Serilly on Dec 6th 2023 at 10:52:01 AM

If that's the case, then War of the Rohirrim should be placed under the Western Animation namespace, but then so should Blade Runner: Black Lotus, which is currently under the anime namespace.

As you mentioned before, both of those are directed by Kenji Kamiyama, who is Japanese. This reinforces that there is no clear line and we shouldn't try to replicate MyAnimeList's method of strict rules for classification.

,More to the point, the animation studio for both series, Sola Digital Arts, is headquartered in Tokyo. If it was just the director, I'd understand lumping War of the Rohirrim with Western Animation, but it isn't.

Black Lotus I absolutely think is an anime series. It may be a Crunchyroll original but the creative team are all Japanese and it was dubbed in both Japanese and English in its original run.