I currently have a love/hate relationship with anime. There is good anime and there is bad anime. Some anime has very detailed and stylish graphics, dark and inolving plots, and deep, often tragic characters (eg. Trigun, Battle Angel). Other anime has very poor artistry, pathetic, uninteresting, and unimportant plots, and are obviously only created for their merchandising opportunities (eg. Beyblade, Yu-Gi-Oh). It is easy to become confused or lured into spending time/money on the poorer quality of anime, missing out on some of the far better ones if you are not careful. (Just so you know, I'm not going to talk about hentai in this rant. You can relax now.)

It all started for me with Sailor Moon. The animation, storyline, and characters were all so deep and detailed, so much better than anyting made in the USA or Canada. I loved it. I have no idea why I like the big eyes/small mouth thing but I do. I watched it in awe, despite the fact that some of the voice acting was poor, I loved the storyline which got very intense towards the season finales. It was the intensity that really hooked me, at the big final showdown with the villian I was on the edge of my seat with tears streaming down my face. That has never happened to me with any american cartoons.

It doesn't stop there with Sailor Moon.

Ghost in the Shell, Trigun, Hellsing, Slayers, Cowboy Bebop, Gundam Wing, Rurouni Kenshin, Akira, Lain, Perfect Blue, Vampire Hunter D, Princess Mononoke, Dragonball Z, even Pokemon have a lot of passion and emotion driving them and my current number 1 favourite is Battle Angel. When I first saw Battle Angel (aka Battle Angel Alita) I knew it would be something special to me from the first 5 minutes. The story of a dystopic future in which a cybernetic doctor finds the remains of a small cyborg girl in a scrap heap, repairs her, and brings her back to life. He names her Gally and she is like the sweet little daughter he never had. Her picture is my profile picture. I love Gally so much. Took me a while to track down the DVD on ebay. Damn good stuff though. I can't even compare animation of this quality, not just artistically but storywise, to animation made in America. I look at Spongebob, PowerPuff Girls, Dexter's Laboratory, Rugrats, Home Movies, most of the shows on Teletoon, the quality of the animation itself is utter shit. It makes me sad to see how little effort goes into making the shows look good, not just silly. One of the biggest reasons that I get so annoyed by all these cartoons with poor quality aritstry is because it's gotten worse than older cartoons such as Batman or Gargoyles. The quality of these cartoons is far superior to newer cartoons, which is the exact opposite of what should be happening. It's scary.

On the flipside, not all anime is of good quality plot-wise. I lothe the anime shows that are obviously developed only as a marketing tool for kids to buy their toys and cards. Yes, I'm talking about Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Beyblade, Monster Rancher, and all those other ones that involve a lot of duels and battles between easily merchandisable items. You know what I'm talking about. They are shameful and they portray a bad image of anime. They give anime a stigma of unintelligence and irrelevance. I am reluctant to list Pokemon, even though it also very clearly fits this description also... because I actually like Pokemon. I guess I'm slightly biased towards Pokemon because they're sooo cute, well the old ones anyway not the new ones. The bad anime is just fuel for people who hate anime. It gives them a never ending fount with which to denounce japanese anime as crap, and for good reason, this stuff is crap. It aggravates me. Then people start blaming the easily merchandisable anime on bad behaviour in the children who watch it. I read a story a couple years back about a kid in Quebec who stabbed another kid in the shoulder for his Pokemon Card. Of course everybody blames Pokemon and nobody blames the parents.

Seriously, a couple years ago I came up with a foolproof plan to make millions of dollars. I would create an poor quality anime cartoon about a bunch of kids who have these yo-yos that they duel with. They would call these yo-yos "Uber Battle Spinners" or something and they would come in all these funky designs that would make them look like they had circular saws attached to the outside and they would have holographic animal stickers on them. The kids on the show would have these huge battles with these Uber Battle Spinners and the holographic animals would shoot out of them when they spun them fast enough and would battle the other kid's holo-animal to win. There would be a great threat to the world that only battling these yo-yos could solve. There would be all these Uber Battle Spinners for sale of all colours and with collectable stickers to stick on them and then there would be different collectable strings for them and flashing lights and stuff. I'd be rich cuz kids would buy them because of the no-brainer show.

If you want to give anime a shot, be careful about the english dubbing as it is often pretty bad. They take voice acting very seriously in Japan, whereas in North America they'll use any ole shmoe they can get for cheap. Hayo Miazaki's movies usually have very good english dubbing done by some fairly big name actors, and it makes a big difference in the depth of the story, as opposed to someone who isn't an actor just reading lines and not getting into the character. Yeah, some of the english dubs are terrible. Listening to the english dub of Battle Angel, the woman playing Gally was painfully obvious she was a mid-thirties woman trying to sound like a 12 year old girl and failing miserably. In Trigun the character of Rem is a very kind, elegant woman with a beautiful voice, and in the english dub the woman who does her voice is tone-deaf. She was so off key, it was terrible. Slayers english dub for the tv series is actually pretty good, I like it. Gundam Wing, Ghost in the Shell, and Vision of Escaflowne wasn't too bad either. Even Pokemon has some good voice acting in the english dub. Ranma 1/2 has some notoriously bad voice acting, same with Sailor Moon.

So... in conclusion, there are a lot of good anime out there that just about anybody can enjoy but you have to sift through the crap to find it. Stay away from the ones where kids duel and collect things, they are the poorest shows in animation quality and plot and character depth. Listen to some of the older anime fans, they can usually recommend some of the good stuff. If you're looking for pure silly funny random hilarity featuring high school girls, Asumanga Daioh could be right up your alley. If your tastes lean more towards psychological thrillers with total mindfuck plot twists you probably would like Perfect Blue. Just... try to get the Japanese dialogue with english subtitles as a lot of the english voice acting is very poor.