The thing that weirds me out about anime more than anything else, is that anyone can easily identify one by just looking at it, but if you try to come up with some kind of rule or criteria to distinguish anime from something that is not anime, someone can always point out at least one anime that would not qualify as anime under that rule.
It kinda baffles me how everyone just knows from their own intuition that this entire country/culture produces everything using the same visual stylistic qualities, but absolutely nobody can prove it outright by saying "All anime looks exactly the same as each other because they all have X, Y and/or Z". (I can only assume there is this type of secret venn-diagram of arbitrary stylistic rules the entirety of japan operates under. Where something drawn by japan can qualify as 'anime' as long as it crosses over at least two or three of those rules, while not strictly adhering to them all. That way, each one can use a different part of the venn-diagram so that outside observers can't outright figure out the secret formula that tells all of japan how all their drawings are supposed to look.)