What is Anime?
There is a general awareness today that the market for anime is growing in the U.S. However, there is less awareness--or agreement--as to exactly what "anime" is.

"Anime" or "animé" is the Japanese word for cinematic animation, taken from the English word "animation." To the anime enthusiasts in America, "anime" means any animation produced in Japan, no matter the intended audience--whether a TV cartoon series for young children (Samurai Pizza Cats and Sailor Moon are two recent examples, and there was a Japanese TV animated serialization of Heidi, Girl of the Alps in 1974, eight years before Hanna-Barbera's Heidi's Song feature), an animated adult cultural feature (there have been two feature-length animated productions of The Diary of Anne Frank), or an action-adventure thriller filled with violence and sexual situations.

However, since the main American market for anime consists of teens and adults looking for light entertainment, that is just about all that gets licensed for American release. Most juvenile cartoons and the adult intellectual animation tends to remain on their studios' shelves in Tokyo. As a result, a perception has been growing in America that "anime" is synonymous with violent, sexual animation only. A February 1, 1998 New York Times story on contemporary Japanese animation comments on its wide range, but emphasizes that "animé refers strictly to `adult' Japanese animation ... racy, battle-ravaged animé ... `pornimation,' as some of the steamier romps with Western-looking women, from college girls to the princesses of sci-fi legend, are sometimes called in the United States ... animé is all violence and sex ..." The article also refers to one of Japan's most popular children's TV cartoon stars, the robot cat Doraemon, as "scantily clad;" an innuendo equivalent to identifying Donald Duck or Porky Pig only as cartoon characters who go about in public without any pants on.

This has reached the point that major American animation presenters with Japanese titles in their lineups are trying to disassociate themselves from the "anime" label. Michael Johnson, president of Buena Vista Home Entertainment, said in Daily Variety, February 13, 1998, of Disney's forthcoming U.S. release of Hayao Miyazaki's 1997 Japanese box-office-record-breaking feature Princess Mononoke, "This is not anime ... it's not effects-driven or violence-driven." Mike Lazzo, vice president of programming for the Cartoon Network, assured the public in USA Today, December 18, 1997 that anime is not shown on American TV. "Japan animation is so different from what airs here ... It's far edgier, adult and violent. Anime isn't very story-based ... The story is hard to follow." When it was pointed out that the Cartoon Network shows Speed Racer and Voltron, both juvenile action-adventure TV cartoon series produced in Japan, Lazzo said that "neither show is in the style of anime." (In the original Japanese version of Voltron, the Earth is completely destroyed by the space villains. That episode is omitted from the heavily rewritten American version.)

This evolution of the definition of anime will doubtlessly be intensified by the increasing importation of Japanese animated adult erotic fare, to mix with the action-adventure anime market. When the first anime-genre videos were released in 1990-91 through mail order and direct sales to the comic-book fandom specialty stores, it was understood by this market that these were animated equivalents of movies like The Terminator and Die Hard, full of explosions, blood-'n-guts, adult dialogue, and often a brief risqué nude scene. Around 1994 the anime videos expanded into the major video mass-market chains and became accessible to the general public, which tends to assume automatically that all animated cartoons are safe for children. This resulted in the necessity for warning advisories on the video boxes such as "Contains violence and nudity;" "Contains brief nudity and mature situations. Parental discretion advised;" and, "Recommended for Mature Viewers." But these did not yet include explicit sexual titles.