code lyoko is french I'm pretty sure

totally spies is either french or american. edit: it's french



I'm not exactly sure what you mean here since a lot of this is done in Korea anyway? iirc the Teen Titans tv series, while originally from DC comics and created by american Sam Register, was animated in korea by companies that also animate japanese shows. this isn't really a surprise since so many things are animated in korea, but it's still significant I think? more importantly, Korea has quite a few original shows that people probably call anime-inspired, though something tells me they'd resent that.

there probably are some shows made in other countries with an 'anime-influenced' style. my friend who spent a couple years in Russia told me in passing about a "bad russian anime for kids" but it could have been dubbed. I think they usually subtitle things there, but I guess that really wouldn't work for a kids show

edit: http://youtube.com/watch?v=21VS93i65LU I found this while searching for the russian anime menioned above. off topic but lmao

Character design, scripting, and even keyframing in a lot of cases is still often done in America or Japan. Korea mostly just does the grunt work of inbetweening. Sometimes the Korean studios are given more leeway, though....that's for shows that are actually animated by hand, mind you, which is becoming a much smaller number these days. 90% of the new shows being made in America seem to be done in Flash using geometric shapes and simplistic designs that save tons of money but make the animation fan inside me sort of want to die inside.

So shows like Teen Titans and Avatar are anime-inspired because of the American designers behind them....namely Glen Murakami in the case of Teen Titans, and for Avatar I think most of the main characters were designed by Michael DiMartino and Brian Konietzko....though Avatar actually gives the Korean studios a lot more freedom than a lot of shows, and it's done them well....there's more of a sense of involvement from the animators in Korea, and they've contributed some of the fans' favorite visual gags, like Foaming Mouth Guy.

At any rate, a series' visual style isn't really affected by whether or not Korea does the animation. The Simpsons is animated too, but its visuals couldn't really be accused of being very anime-inspired.

Also: WITCH was Italian, I think.

Chainer--you don't care for the Boondocks? I mean I get not liking Totally Spies, and though I haven't seen the Thundercats or Transformers designs in much detail I'm not surprised about disliking redesigns on classic characters in a majorly different style, but the Boondocks is probably one of the prettiest shows on TV. And that's helped all the more by pretty good writing.

In response to the subject at hand, I'm pretty sure there was another one by that company that did Totally Spies (which I hear sucked just as much), and Nickelodeon has a show called Kappa Mikey that I think is anime influenced (haven't watched it, though. I have seen screens and it doesn't look very well animated), and Perfect Hair Forever which also isn't well animated, and had a brilliant pilot followed by an unwatchably bad series.

Less visually obvious shows with a lot of anime influence would include things like Samurai Jack and Invader Zim. Zim even did a couple of Evangelion homages.

Different strokes for different folks, I guess, because transforming teen heroes that moonlight as a rock group sounds pretty cool to me. As long as it's not like a "Josie and the Pussycats" type of "Rock Group." Which I suppose it almost certainly would be.

But if it were like an animated version of Joss Whedon and Fabio Moon's "Sugarshock" with more transforming...

...damn, now I want an animated Sugarshock.

avatar never struck me as being heavily inspired by anime.  in terms of character design and animation, i think it has a pretty distinct western style and when i first saw it, being very much familiar with anime, i didn't associate the two at all.  maybe the eyes are a bit bigger, but i wouldn't label that as being distinctly japanese, and even that varies from character to character.  i didn't especially think the subject matter was very anime-inspired, either.  i mean, being influenced (and obviously modeled after) eastern culture doesn't necessarily make it similar to anime.  i guess maybe it is like anime somewhat in terms of tone and pacing, because not many cartoons you see on nickelodeon really display the same type of narratives, but i always felt even that was a stretch, as there have been american cartoons with similarly spanning story arcs.  the expressions seem to borrow pretty heavily from anime, though.

anyway, i thought this topic was about non-japanese animation, so i was going to come in and talk about the maxx because that shit was awesome and probably my favorite cartoon ever.  buuuuut since we are talking about what we are, i think it's becoming increasingly more difficult to find a show that isn't, in some way, derivative of japanese animation.  even shit like BEN TEN resembles what you could call the pretty standard anime style far more than it would have if it had been created ten years ago.  they've had such a huge impact on the way cartoons are animated that aside from shit like ed, edd, and eddie and other weird shows, i think most cartoons aired currently are at least a little inspired by anime.

Yeah, Avatar's a strange case. There's a whole lot of anime influence, obviously, and visually it uses some of the most obvious aspects of the style....but it mixes in a lot of aspects of Western animation that most faux-anime doesn't bother with. I think that's part of the reason it's so much more embraced by fans of anime in the way that things like Teen Titans aren't. It's got the big eyes and the speculars and mouths that get larger as the character talks louder, and a lot of the direction and color palette is very anime style....but the mouths are a lot bigger than anime ever likes to do, and the noses are more defined, too. And there's more difference between individual characters than just hair, too. That's not to mention people with lots of skin tones.

Also in terms of writing and performances, it's very western. The characters are definitely not character I could see occuring in a purely Japanese things. They're much more like American children, even if they're nominally Alternate-Universe-Asian, in a lot of subtle ways that would be difficult to define. Especially in the way the role of the females isn't so strictly defined as anime tends to. I could go on and on, because I love Avatar and have thought about things like this a lot, but I'll spare you guys. Basically, what I'm saying is that it's nice the way they meld the two styles more elegantly than a lot of anime-inspired stuff does.

Well I think in a way everything is influenced by anime and anime is influenced by everything. Anime is such a diverse style that when you come to the root meaning of the word ("Japanese animation") it really only signifies the area of origin, not the style of art. As a result, we get some completely different styles coming from anime alone; ranging from Jin Roh to Lucky Star. And yea, while (unfortunately) the bulk of anime tends to followa more closed art style, by no means is it restricted to that style. So I guess the argument here is more against the use of the word "anime" to describe a specific artistic style when in fact the term is much more diverse.

the whole FAKE ANIME stance is so dumb ugh I can't stand it I hope no one posts it

continuing what ninjapirate started, people really ascribe too much credit to anime, probably out of the whole Japanese superiority shit they've got going on. it's one thing to say a show's style is influenced by japanese animation, but it's another to think of everything made outside of Japan with ~big eye style~ as striving to be anime or whatever. all it really means is that it's a pretty popular style of animation!

Teen Titans is a pretty big mix of western and eastern styles too.

also Samurai Jack is obviously inspired by a lot of japanese stuff, but is there really a lot of anime influence there? out of all the samurai anime I've seen, none of them were like samurai jack much at all. iirc that show had a pretty different setup as far as the method of storytelling and the battles go.

Look at it in terms of direction rather than in terms of art style and writing, and I think you'll see it. "Camera" angles and cuts and things and just overall visual language.

Well I think in a way everything is influenced by anime and anime is influenced by everything. Anime is such a diverse style that when you come to the root meaning of the word ("Japanese animation") it really only signifies the area of origin, not the style of art. As a result, we get some completely different styles coming from anime alone; ranging from Jin Roh to Lucky Star. And yea, while (unfortunately) the bulk of anime tends to followa more closed art style, by no means is it restricted to that style. So I guess the argument here is more against the use of the word "anime" to describe a specific artistic style when in fact the term is much more diverse.

how much more diverse is it, really?  you yourself just said that the bulk of anime follows a very rigid sense of aesthetics.  while anime does only indicate where something's from, and not necessarily what style it was done in, these two do correlate in a very definite way.  because these things all come from japan, and in japan, certain trends are adopted and adhered to, obviously.  so while it's not technically fair to say that the term anime is indicative of style, it's more than fair to say that it's indicative of region, which will, the large majority of the time, be indicative of style.  sure, you can link things like the count of monte cristo and cite them as examples of why it's not entirely accurate to use the term anime to represent a specific artistic style, but i think that's a pretty insignificant differentiation in this case, and i don't think being so particular about it is really warranted, since the ratio of anime hitting the market at any given point in time is so heavily in favor of shows that strictly conform to whatever singular, recognizable style is prevalent at the time, that i don't really think you can blame anyone for ostensibly using the term anime to describe style more than region.

yeah, that is its japanese name.  but i always knew it as gankutsuou: the count of monte cristo, so i just typed that.  i could be wrong but who really cares anyway!