What’s So Good About Anime Anyway? [Part 1!]

I want to talk about the accidental properties of anime that were lacking in American cartoons as the time that anime exploded, the things Nickelodeon and Hanna-Barbera could have leaned into even before anime inspired them to do so.

I want to think explicitly about the things I try to apply in my own work even only under the surface.

I want to focus on craft and considerations that go deeper than “big eyes and blue hair.” I want to dig deeper than style.

I want to talk about what’s so good about anime.

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Bending English with J-Pop: FictionJunction YUUKA

But yeah, to be more explicitly pro-Asian in a way that fits National Poetry Month, I want to talk about what non-Native and bilingual speakers of English taught me about how to use the language. Some people call it “broken English” or even worse “Engrish,” but I’d like to think of it as bending English, a language which was a flexible mongrel. I mean, as a fan of AAVE/Ebonics and skin-official siblings of the coiner of “based” and “bling,” I should know a thing or two about the extra-boxilar possibilities of English.

The non-Native and bilingual speakers in this case are all J-Pop and J-Rock artists, hence the blog title.

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