Cartoons or Anime?

For many years, the quality of cartoons and their content has been declining, to the point where there are only a handful of titles worth mentioning(those of you who follow Cartoon Network will get where I'm coming from here). Shows such as the Regular Show, the Amazing World of Gumball, and Adventure Time are three of the rapidly shrinking american cartoon market. Conversely, anime, or Japanese animation, is on the rise, even in foreign countries like Russia, France, China and not least of all, America.

Years ago, some of you might remember, we had excellent cartoons like The Power Puff Girls, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Edd, Ed, and Eddy, Samurai Jack, Camp Lazlo, Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends, the original Batman animated series, Casper and Friends, Scooby Doo, The Jetsons, The Flintstones, Dexter's Laboratory, Tom and Jerry, The Looney Tunes, Megas XLR, Justice League Unlimited, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Teen Titans, Mucha Lucha, and of course Pinky and the Brain; these only to name a few!

So when we look at all these amazing old cartoons from years ago, and then at the disgustingly short list of cartoons today, how can we explain the decline of quality American animation?

A simple way of explaining it, comes in the form of anime. For those of you unfamiliar with anime, some easily recognizable names are Naruto, One Piece, Bleach, Death Note, Code Geass, Attack on Titan, Claymore, Ninja Scroll, the various Gundam and Transformers series, Kuroko's Basketball Fullmetal Alchemist, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Cowboy Bepop, Soul Eater, Final Fantasy, Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Dragon Ball Z and of course Pokemon to name a few.

Casually looking at them, you'd immediately notice that their art styles are significantly different. Anime portrays its characters as "real" and don't tend to over exaggerate what we would define as "cartoony" aspect of the characters. Moreover, anime is a weekly release of episodes that all follow the a single story line, and not standalone episodes like cartoons.

Additionally, anime put great emphasis on character development, so you become attached to the characters as the series progresses, meaning you have a sort of motivation to come back and keep watching.

Shonen (young men) Anime, unlike common cartoons, are almost always inherently violent, with deep undertones of philosophy, and ethics in addition to action, aspects lacking in American cartoons.

Simply put, the generation that grew up in the 2000's did so on shows like Pokemon, Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Dragon Ball Z, and Gundam. As we watched them we noticed the obvious difference in art styles, and when the internet became a household utility, we used it to try and find out more about these shows. What we found was the vast world of anime from Japan that's we'd never dreamed of.

Once we found non-censored, original Japanese dub versions of our favorite shows (the original versions for all intents and purposes), we stopped watching TV shows on Saturday mornings. As our generation grew up even more, we became more and more spoiled by anime and it's incredibly better content, so that when we tentatively returned to cartoons, we found ourselves unable to enjoy them as we used to.

Thus anime rose, and cartoons died. What we have left are pale shadows of the old ways of cartooning. Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes are what we remembered, and what we came back to was trash (comparatively).

Following Generation Y was what I call generation Y-1/2, essentially all the middle teenagers and children of today, who have grown up with smartphones, computers, cheap internet, and sports. They have live action, more anime, sports, and social sites to keep up with; very little thought is wasted on cartoons. Because of their exposure to real life violence through television, regressing to a more docile from of entertainment is unappealing. Thus anime rises, and cartoons fall.

Some examples of this are DC and Marvel licensed anime-styled series of our well-known super heroes.