What is Anime?
Anime is the Japanese shortened word for 'animation'.
In Japan, 'anime' would be any animated production, from Disney to Legend of the Overfiend. Anything that is animated, be it Japanese, English or French. Outside Japan, though, 'anime' tends to refer, specifically, to Japanese animation.
In Japan, anime is a rather popular form of entertainment. It comes in the form of tv shows, cartoon. movies at the cinema as well as direct to video releases (OVA - Original Video Animation). Anime spans many genres, from silly romantic comedies (Marmalade Boy) to fantasy adventures (Vision of Escaflowne and Fushigi Yuugi), high-tech science fiction (Macross Plus), and much more. The most distinctive quality of anime is the subject manner: much of anime deals with "real-life" topics that American cartoons wouldn't touch with a 30-foot pole. For instance, the death of major characters is common in anime, as are complex relationships between characters.
Most of the time, anime comes from a manga - Japanese comics. Occasionally, though, you'll get an anime first, and the manga will follow... but as a general rule, anime comes from a popular manga series. The manga are sold in anthologies, either weekly or monthly, and have a huge number of readers! Even more, if you consider that these anthologies are read once, and left on the train (often by businessmen and office ladies on their way to work - manga, you see, doesn't have the same stigma as comics tend to have in the west) for someone else to read. (They are cheap throw-away items - the Japanese version of graphic novels follow, and these are more likely to be collected.) As with anime, manga comes in many genres for all age groups - manga for businessmen, women, boys, girls, romance, fashion, adult titles, sports and more. It's a huge industry in Japan, and very, very popular.
For example, Pokemon, Dragon Ball Z, Fushigi Yuugi, Detective Conan, Bleach, Naruto and etc!
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