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Chemical Weapon!
posted by:Achronos
Less self-righteous posturing and ad hominem attacks will keep this thread open and its participants' posting privileges retained.
First is that a lot of animation is... metaphorical in nature. Western animation is often much more so than anime (but not always of course). What I mean is, take South Park for example. Everything in that show, especially the characters don't look like actual people do. Their heads are ovals, their eyes are ovals, and their bodies are just kind of... little blobs, and yet, we still know what they are, not because they actually look like those real objects do, but because the shapes they use are metaphors, symbols for the things they represent. It's a kind of hieroglyphic-like thing almost. These kinds of things we call cartoons.
The difference is generally obvious to people when talking about non-animated visual art. We call the former type a cartoon or comic, and the latter type a drawing.
For animation however, the word cartoon is used to mean any kind of drawn animation, but that's a slightly different use of the word. Basically, the first type of example (more western things) are animated 'cartoons', whereas the second type (a more 'anime' paradigm') are animated 'drawings'. Now, there are both western and non western examples of both types (for example, Panty and Stocking and to some extent Lucky Star are more on the 'cartoon side' and are anime) , and it's a sliding scale, more or less rather than either or.
I personally prefer anime, because I prefer the animated drawings to animated cartoons. Anime tends to have an incredible sense of space and geometric kinetics, too.