Forum - View topicDid you used to think anime was weird?
|
Goto page 1, 2, 3, 4 Next |
| Author | Message | ||
|---|---|---|---|
Fermi
 Posts: 8 |
|
||
|
Before you became a fan of anime, did you used to have the same assumptions people have about anime being overly violent or sexual? Or maybe you just couldn't get used to the big eyes or the animation style of Japanese cartoons, but you eventually got used to it in the end?
Several years back (2001), I remember the craze among all of my middle school peers was anime on Toonami. I wasn't an anime fan back then and I didn't want to be one at the time. Having only seen a glimpse of Sailor Moon at the time, I just never gotten to appreciate the style; I think "ugly" was a word that I had originally associated with the animation and art of the anime I've seen (outside of what aired on television anyway). Eventually my opinion of anime being a cheaply-made form of cartoon fell by the wayside when I watched Spirited Away a couple years later. That movie eventually changed the way I perceived Japanese cartoons, both in its style and in storytelling. And from there, I looked on the Internet for the anime shows that existed at the time and started to deepen my appreication of anime. |
|||
|
|||
LuckySeven
 Posts: 587 Location: Georgia, USA |
|
||
|
Nah I can't say I ever thought anime was weird. Animation in general can be weird, but that's why I like it. I have been watching anime since before I knew it was anime, and it certainly felt different from other animation I was watching at the time, but I never would have outright called it weird.
|
|||
|
|||
|
JacobC
ANN Past Staff
 Posts: 3728 Location: SoCal |
|
||
|
Wow, that's a great discussion topic!
Sadly, I was hooked on it too young to have an outsider's perspective and think it was "weird." But I did have the stance my boyfriend currently has for a long time: anything outside of standard action/adventure anime was weird. I thought the slice-of-life shows were unfunny and kind of strange. I didn't really get it. Then someone got me hooked on Fruits Basket and I slowly adapted to anime humor. Now it makes me laugh, it didn't always. If you think a lot of anime doesn't have a very different sense of humor, try showing it to people who understand what anime is but don't watch it. They will NOT think it's funny, I guarantee you. Not laugh-out-loud funny. This isn't true for all titles, no, the BEST comedy anime are universal, but a lot cater to fans who "get it." So, I guess that's the bridge I crossed. There's more to anime, turns out, than Gundam and Outlaw Star. |
|||
|
|||
jetz
 Posts: 2148 Location: Manila, Philippines |
|
||
|
Never. I've been watching anime almost all my life. When I was about 2 or 3 years old, there were already a lot of anime series on local TV (Tagalog dubbed, of course), and most of the animated shows I were watching that time were anime (most of them were WMT or mecha series, like Voltes 5), although I didn't realize I was watching anime until 6th grade.
I think that most people my age (from here) have at least watched one anime during their childhood (All my friends, even those who don't watch anime now, know who Sailormoon is), so only a few people think that anime is weird. What they think is weird is the fandom - Most people still have the notion that anime is only for kids, so they find it odd that there are people, 18 and above, who are more hardcore fans than children. |
|||
|
|||
Dorcas_Aurelia
 Posts: 5344 Location: Philly |
|
||
|
Used to? I still do. Not in the sense that it's omnipresent, of course, but that, you're far more likely to see such things in anime than western animation. Where's the western equivalent of Mnemosyne, Black Lagoon, or When They Cry? The first glimpse of anime I ever saw was while channel surfing about ten years ago. There was a bloody decapitated hydra corpse, then the scene changed to a (for all intents and purposes) naked girl on a bed. I still have no idea what the show was, but I remember it clearly.
Of course, most of my other early exposure to anime was through television (broadcast only, my parents have as much spare income to spend on cable back then), so I saw more of the standard child-friendly (and more or less edited) shows like Pokemon, Digimon, Cardcaptors, etc. Of course, I didn't really associate those shows as distinct from other cartoons at the time, so I didn't develop much of an opinion of anime before plunging fully into the subculture. edit: homophones 
Last edited by Dorcas_Aurelia on Tue Nov 11, 2008 1:39 am; edited 1 time in total |
|||
|
|||
|
dormcat
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 9903 Location: New Taipei City, Taiwan, ROC |
|
||
Basically we East Asians all grew up in this way; only that most people gradually drop the hobby, yet people like you and me keep loving it. So this topic is more or less reserved for those Westerners who have never watched Japanese animation before adolescence. 
|
|||
|
|||
|
DieHardBleachFan
Posts: 277 |
|
||
|
No, I can't say that I ever thought it was weird at all.
I've been watching anime since I was very young, before I even knew it was anime. I knew it was different from many of the cartoons that I watched, but I never reall thought it was weird. It was simply another show that entertained me. It wasn't until a couple of years later that I "rediscovered" anime and began to fully understand what it was and what the major differences between anime and cartoons were. Once I knew more about it and discovered that there was such a wide variety of anime to choose from, I became more interested in it and slowly started watching various series. Soon, I found that I was watching several animes at once and that's when I finally became hooked for good. So, I never really thought of anime as weird. Just a unique form of entertainment that I happened to come across and become hooked on. |
|||
|
|||
Elfen12
 Posts: 480 Location: Bay Area |
|
||
|
Hahaha this will be an amusing topic if it passes so to speak. Lets see though, i think i did think anime is weird. I remember my brother had a friend who liked anime. I always thought he was weird. I must admit, i guess i was one of those peole who always thought they were oddballs. However, now i'm one of 'em. Hah, it's funny how things work out isn't it. I'm glad i watch anime now, it's good. Hah, thinking about this brings back some memories... This one time i saw my brothers friend's collection, i thought the actual art of the box sets and stuff looked really cool. Hmph... yeah, i thought anime was weird before i started watching anime.
-Elfen12- |
|||
|
|||
|
JacobC
ANN Past Staff
Posts: 3728 Location: SoCal |
|
||
Uh...everywhere?  Oh, you just meant in animation.  Well, it's all over American TV and movies anyway.
|
|||
|
|||
RogueJedi86
 Posts: 501 |
|
||
|
I remember before I got into anime, I thought it was hyper-violent stuff(I recall vaguely seeing something like Samurai Champloo, maybe its OP). It took FMA premiering on Adult Swim to get me into anime. I been a fan ever since. I've stuck to my morals though, I only watch anime on tv, I don't fansub. Thankfully my cable package has access to Sci-Fi channel, IFC, Encore Action and a few other channels that air anime, so I'm not left too far in the dust with new anime to watch. I've seen plenty of good ones. Thank god for AS premiering Code Geass so soon, and Sci-Fi's AniMonday doing the same with TTGL.
|
|||
|
|||
|
ryokoalways
Posts: 562 |
|
||
|
I grew up with Doraimon, so no.
On the contrary, I thought American Cartoon was weird. |
|||
|
|||
Top Gun
 Posts: 5320 |
|
||
|
Very much so...or at the very least, I thought it completely conformed to the big-eyes, flashing-lights, huge-hair, lots-of-yelling stereotype. (Actually, essentially just like this.
) I formed this opinion before I even had a grasp on what the term "anime" really meant, other than "those weird Japanese cartoons." My attitude was largely shaped by Pokemon, which, even though I liked it well enough at that age, still conformed with just about every one of those stereotypes. Sitting through a few episodes of DBZ didn't help matters, since that felt even more stereotypical and weird to me than Pokemon did, and I was even more turned off to what I thought was the genre as a whole. (I still have a huge grudge against that show, in fact.  ) I did see a smattering of other anime episodes on Toonami, and it was the few of .hack//SIGN I happened to catch that first clued me into the fact that maybe my assumptions about these crazy Japanese cartoons were ill-founded; the idea of animated characters just standing around having serious discussions was a completely alien one to me. But it wasn't until I discovered [adult swim] a few years after that and was exposed to such shows as Wolf's Rain, Cowboy Bebop, GITS and Big O that my stereotypes were swiftly and irrevocably shattered. I've been hooked ever since.
|
|||
|
|||
ikillchicken
 Posts: 7272 Location: Vancouver |
|
||
|
"Did you used to think anime was weird?"
Hell, I still think it's weird. Not that I mind though, being a little weird myself. I never really even knew what anime was until I was already knee deep in it. I watched shows like Pokemon and DBZ but had no idea they were specifically related or that there were many, many more similar (or more frequently dissimilar) shows. I was pretty much introduced to anime gradually so there wasn't really any big initial shock. |
|||
|
|||
|
_Earthwyrm_
|
|
||
|
When I was in my young teens I followed DBZ on Toonami, and I used to wake up early every Saturday to catch the latest episode of Pokemon (which was a big deal - before Pokemon 'morning' was a foreign concept on weekends). I knew that they were Japanese anime, but it didn't really matter to me, except in that vague 'Japan is cool, they like tech. and they make JRPGs' kind of way.
Eventually, I stopped watching Pokemon and couldn't afford to get Cartoon Network, so I stopped watching them both. A few years later, when I'd more or less forgotten about DBZ and Pokemon (The series, anyway), my elder brother said to me something along the lines of "I watched this film, 'Spirited Away' when I was at my girlfriend's place. You'd probably like it, it's weird." I thought something along the lines of 'Weird, eh? And it's Japanese is it? Japan is cool... they like tech. and they make JRPGs and DBZ was pretty cool...' A few weeks later I picked it up at the store, took it home and popped it in my DVD player. It was weird... spoiler[parents turning into pigs, giant bath-house inhabited by spirits, no-face puking all over the place, giant babies turning into rats, and some moustachioed dude with arms all over the place...] After the movie ended, I thought 'That was brilliant. I gotta get me some more of them animes.' Time passed, and I have since gotten myself some more of them animes. These days, it takes a lot more to make me think 'Well, that was weird'. It still happens sometimes though. |
|||
doctordoom85
 Posts: 2094 |
|
||
|
I assumed it was mostly kid's stuff, with DBZ (the edited Funi TV broadcast) being the closest thing away from kid's stuff (I never watched other Toonami like Kenshin, Gundam Wing, or Outlaw Star). Then after X-play ranting endlessly about Fullmetal Alchemist and Naruto, I checked them out, After seeing spoiler[Nina's death] in Fullmetal Alchemist and spoiler[Zabuza/Haku's death] in Naruto, I realized anime had much more to offer than Pokemon and such.
|
|||
|
|||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group