Japanese animation, more commonly known as anime, is one of the most underrated styles of entertainment. It’s usually characterized by a distinct style of drawing, colorful graphics and unique themes. Often, this art is disregarded as “cartoons” or a geeky obsession, but to fans, it’s more than that. Anime is a diverse art form with distinctive production methods and techniques that consists of an ideal story-telling mechanism, combining graphic art, characterization, cinematography, and other forms of imaginative and individualistic techniques. The production of anime focuses less on the animation of movement and more on the realistic aspects of settings, as well as the use of different camera effects. Diverse art styles are used and character proportions and features can be quite varied, including characteristically large emotive or realistically sized eyes. With over 430 production studios, the most famous among these are Studio Ghibli, Gainax and Toei Animation, anime is a fast growing industry, but why is it looked down upon?
Anime has been around since the 1900’s, but it’s only truly been appreciated this year- and I was part of this.
I used to stereotype people who watched anime as “geeks” or “weebs.” I thought of watching anime as a weird and negative thing.
However, this all changed at the start of 2016 during which I became an all-out otaku*. Once I began to watch anime and loved it and obsessed over it, I started to be ashamed of it. I felt this way because there was already a group of people at my school who loved anime since grade school; and people never really thought highly of them and dismissed their anime obsessions as weird. After a few weeks, however, I just stopped caring and let my otaku flag fly because anime is f*cking amazing and I f*cking love it.
*Otaku, defined by Urban Dictionary, is used to denote a zealous fan, usually of anime and/or manga.
All in all, anime is such a colorful world with extraordinary characters and places that are just waiting to be discovered. If you ever feel like getting into it, here are some great tips and anime suggestions:
- Attack on Titan (Shingeki no Kyojin)
- Sword Art Online
- Free!
- Haikyuu!!
- Death Note
- Noragami
- Nisekoi
- Food Wars (Shokugeki no Souma)
- Kuroko no Basuke
- One Piece
- Naruto Shippuuden
- Bleach
- I usually watch anime on kissanime, which is a great website with a lot of shows to choose from and it’s for free.
- Watch anime subbed, NOT dubbed. The subtitled versions have more accurate translations and Japanese is just so soothing to listen to.
- Anime is great to share with friends, but please don’t let it turn into a fad.
- Watch all the specials episodes; they’re fun!
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