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What makes anime really different from western animation?

The answer in both cases is one of timing. A large part of what made Community so great before was a sort of restraint: a knowledge that silence and patience was as important to both comedy and emotional breadth as the punchlines. (The new episodes breathlessly try to push out as many jokes and as much dialogue as fast as possible, and fails to engage.) And so it is with anime: even the lamest dude-falls-on-boob gags are delivered with awkward silence, a pregnant pause, and THEN a sight gag. At the other end of the spectrum, quiet moments of pathos are given space: they're unlikely to be filled with obviously emotional music queues or operatic gestures. A sad character in anime is more likely to just sit there silently in the rain for a few beats. Those quiet moments are essential to anime. They are truthful, and they connect us emotionally to content that might otherwise be just as lame as its most dire Western counterparts. I suspect that part of anime's youth appeal in the West comes from younger audiences' heightened sensitivity to these subtle emotional pokes.

I think that there are several dimensions to this question. It's a matter of why the animation market has emerged as it has, how the stylistic tropes differ and how the storytelling differs. I've often wondered why anime, or rather anime that embraces genre other than comedy, merged in Japan but has scarce analog in the west. A guess is that the Comics Code Authority stifled the American comic book market, for which some original dramatic animation is produced, and thus leading to the concomitant stifling of that branch of the culture. This might not have been a suboptimal outcome. I think that there's ultimately a very constricted market for this kind of content, not enough to support a very large industry, so it would probably never have been economical for anything like it to emerge in America after it had emerged in Japan.

Worse animation, better detail. Watch JoesphShow's videos for more. I personally think the aspects that seperates the two types of animation is just that. Animation. Although Gundam W Endless Waltz may put Gundam 0083 to the test in terms of animation detail, its animation is really no better. Hell, I'd say it's WORSE. While Spongebob may have odd art, the fact of the matter is that it moves more fluidly than both combined, which is sad, because Spongebob is low budget. Though DuckTales has both animation fluidity AND detail down. Ghibli may have good animation, but it can't compare to Toy Story 1's animation, which is not a good thing.

Anime has better animation. Almost everything western is Flat Like Kansas, and as someone who has some experience with animating, let me say this to dispel all those people who go on and on about 'budget' and 'time saving': nothing saves you more time than making everything Flat Like Kansas. I could draw like 5 flat frames in the time it would take me to draw one frame in a sequence that utilized the third dimension. Also, Toy Story is 3DCG, which is a completely different medium than drawing animation, so comparing them is meaningless.

While Spongebob may have odd art, the fact of the matter is that it moves more fluidly than both combined, which is sad, because Spongebob is low budget.

Heroes are flawed. Villains have likable characteristics. Moral is more of a lighter/darker grey than a black/white scale. Not all the questions get answered by the creators, some need to be answered by me. Heroes can die. They still do come back all too often, but some really do stay dead.