AWKWARD ZOMBIE

DOesn't everyone blame the French Canadians?

I don't. That would be weird blaming myself.

That same studio also made Martin Mystery, which is inexplicably set in the town I currently live in.

The semantics confuse me. Does anime have to be made by Japanese people to be called anime? Is it just a subset of cartoons with certain traits, or any animated work made by Japanese people/for Japan, or are we pretending it's an entirely different medium?

I mean anime is the Japanese word for cartoon, and anime made in Japan is all influenced by Japanese culture. I don't consider Avatar: The Last Airbender or Legend of Korra to be anime despite being drawn in an anime-influenced style.

Doesn't french use the term animè for denoting western cartoons and Japanese anime indiscriminately?

Overall the semantics boil down to the fact that the word bodaciously means the same thing in english and Japanese: animation. If you're going to get technical about using the original language word we should probably be using eiga for Japanese movies and terebi gaemu for Japanese video games.

Also


bodaciously just the word "game", so you can use the word "game".

We're getting awfully off topic here, but what traits of anime does Totally Spies have? It always seemed like standard Western animation to me.

- Characteristic eyes (although it is westernized, the basic design and the way they convey emotion in cookie-cutter extremes like emoticons is from anime).
- Snout blush
- Sidemouths
- Abstract colorful backgrounds (bonus points for sparkles and floating cutesy objects)
- Radial action lines
- Hummingbird arms and other limbs being smudged out as a way to convey movement
- Eyebrows drawn on top of the rest of the hair
- Floating teardrops appearing on the side of the head (i'm sure they also have floating vein outlines)
- Asymmetric haircuts that are mirrored instead of redrawn when a character turns their head
- Super deformed faces and mouths reaching the edges of the face
- Moeblobs
- This scene"animé" just means "animated". Western animation is called "dessin animé", lit. "animated drawing".

What you're saying is that it looks like anime because it has notably low budget production values.

Anime is produced as cheaply as possible, and that cartoon shares a lot of wildly cheap animation tricks and designs.


for the record i dont care, it just looks like an anime-inspired cartoon style to me.

I never thought that a gif of Totally Spies would span more than a page worth of discussion, but I guess now I've seen it all.

not even just "Game" it's a japanized version of "Televi(sion) game"
The amount of japanglish in common words/phrases makes me wonder how many cringy loanwords/phrases English has that are blatantly apparent to the original languages, but that we just don't hear anymore.