A beginners guide to basic terminology
This page was last updated Tuesday, November 28th.
Japanese for 'animation'.
'Anime can range from the very silly to the very serious, and is not necessarily intended for children or any specific age group.' - Michael Kim
Animation as an industry is much bigger in Japan than it is in North America, being of the same order of magnitude as the 'live-action' film industry there. All genres are supported through three separate mediums: TV episodes, Original Video Animation (OVA), and full length feature films. While anime varies in quality according to both production techniques and artistic merit, the level of sophistication is, in general, far superior to it's counterpart outside Japan, the 'cartoon'.
Anime that is subtitled by fans. The anime is imported from Japan, translated, subtitled and then distributed. This is all done by people on their own time, as an act of (near religious) devotion. And those of us on the receiving end are truly grateful. Once fansubs are produced they can be copied freely, and to relive the strain on the few main sources, most people get second or later generation copies from the huge network of people involved in copying and trading them.
Sometimes confused with anime, manga is the Japanese word for comic book (or Graphic Novel, if you prefer) and is used in English to mean Japanese comic books. Manga and anime are very closely related, as artists frequently crossover, as do the characters they create. Usually the manga is created first, and if it becomes really popular then the market it deemed capable of supporting a much more costly animation based on it.
Whether in the loving detail of Reiji Matsumoto's WWII fighter aircraft, or the perfectly fluid Valkyrie transformation sequences in Macross, the Japanese fascination of all things mechanical finds its way into a lot of anime. Mecha is the Japanese derivation of 'mechanical', and loosely refers to any and all cool pieces of technology. The term mech, though, is largely reserved for the large humanoid robots that battle it out in a myriad of science fiction anime.
In Japanese, a derogatory form of 'you' which also has the meaning of, roughly, 'no-life geek who spends all his time building GUNDAM models...' Be that as it may, in certain circles its meaning has evolved into a less perjorative term, namely, 'huge anime fan who is respected because he spends all his time building GUNDAM models...'
The main newsgroup for anime related discussion. It's a vital link for the many scattered anime fans in the world who don't have have a large fan base in their area. What's good, what isn't, what's new, where to get it, and just what the heck was the meaning of that scene in Giant Robo...
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