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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 2037473" data-attributes="member: 5171">Generally speaking, anime provides a wide variety of entertainment forms (comedy, horror, action, romance, etc), but it usually does so through the lens of Japanese culture.  That is to say, generally speaking, you're getting your entertainment delivered to you with a set of cultural assumptions in it -- just like you are with American cartoons.Now, there are commercial reasons for the success of anime in Japan, and it's possible that if enough corporate studios got behind it, 2d animation in America could take off in the same arenas -- although there've been enough 2d flops to make the American corporate execs pretty leery about that.  (I'm not saying that Titan AE was good or bad.  I'm saying it was a flop, financially, and the execs, whether right or wrong, look at that and say, "We put big actors and a lot of money in there, and it still flopped.  Whatever the reason, it's not gonna work for us right now.")All that said, I still, generally speaking, don't dig on anime, primarily because I don't dig on the cultural differences.  This doesn't mean I hate Japan.  This doesn't mean that I think Japan is more sexist than the U.S. -- it means that I have learned to accept the American cultural stuff that I don't like in a movie that I otherwise do like, because I've grown up with it, and I can tune out some stuff.  I can't tune out the Japanese stuff, because it's all new to me, and I have to sit watching the whole movie going, "Really?  This is what they think about women? This is their idea of a tenderhearted romance?  This is...? Feh."So, my short answers are that:1) American 2d animation is unlikely to get the kind of market penetration that Japanese animation gets any time soon.2) Every culture brings its own stuff in with it -- and while few people can justifiably and intelligently claim to be able to judge one culture as superior to another, it is perfectly reasonable for folks to like or dislike certain cultural things because of their own personal preferences.  Nobody should be casting stones.3) Market forces are not evil bad things corporate people do to program the unsuspecting public.  Corporations sell anything they think anyone wants to buy.  Right now, they think Americans would rather just buy anime DVDs than go see stuff in the theater -- at least, in sufficient quantities to be profitable.And personally, I enjoyed "Spirited Away", thought "Princess Mononoke" was decent but somewhat overrated (possibly read too much build-up), laughed at the few Ranma episodes someone showed me but didn't feel a need to hunt more down, and have seen a lot of stuff (Ninja Scroll, I think, maybe, for example -- the one with the poison babe and the guy with the sword on a string) that was built up for me as wonderful and struck me as lame.  I almost find the dialogue stilted (less so when subtitled, but then, I turn on captions even when watching U.S. TV, so possibly I'm biased toward reading) and the brood-factor too high for me to enjoy.Please note that I'm not saying no anime could ever entertain me (as you'll note by the use of "enjoy" in that paragraph).  I'm saying that the stuff I've seen seemed to have some things that didn't do it for me personally as part of the basic cultural assumption.Which likely means that if you did see a big upswing in American animation, it'd probably be American animation, without many of the cultural assumptions that anime usually makes.  It would have American cultural assumptions -- which means that you probably wouldn't enjoy it -- at least, not in the same way that you enjoy anime.It's okay to like Amelie and not There's Something About Mary.  It's okay to like There's Something About Mary and not Amelie.  It's okay to like both.  It's okay to like neither.  But it's obvious to most people that they come from different countries, and carry different cultural assumptions with them.  And that difference is a valid reason to like or dislike either of them.  It's subjective as heck, but it's valid. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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