Braindead Shithead

IMHO, the Japanese have been making the most interesting movies in the world for the last 10 years. In every genre, they easily kick the hell out of American movies (duh!) and outclass the Euros by a wide margin. You want violence? They do it great. Horror? Bow to the masters ("Audition" rules)! Sci-Fi, comedy, indies...they've got it. They also boast two of my all-time favorite directors, Kurosawa and Ozu.

I must admit, with the exception of Miyazaki, I'm not familiar with Japanese animation. Nothing against anime, I just don't tend to watch animated films, even the great Pixar films. I don't know why. Basic stupidity, I would imagine!
 

I think the general distaste for animated films is a cultural thing. In the U.S. we're so indoctrinated with the meme "comics and cartoons are for kids". That is definitely something you don't see in Japan where it's viewed as just another art form, albeit a hugely commercially lucrative art form. In the U.S. it's also a bit of a self-reinforcing meme when one looks at the crap that Disney puts out. Why Pixar should have succeeded where Disney fails (bad writing and sucrose-laden stories aside) is beyond me, but maybe Pixar's stuff is close enough to reality that it somehow skirts the concept of animation as a childish artform.

I'm also not sure why I never fully realized that negative connection in my own head. Surely when it comes to the Disney stuff from the 1960s on it was true to me, but I never wrote off animated films totally. So when I first discovered anime (and sad to say it was with Toonami) I wasn't predisposed to dislike it. But as I noted in a recent comment over at Kanaete , what really grabbed me, and made me sit up and pay attention with anime had nothing to do with the animation. It was the music. It was unlike any music I had heard used to back up a film or cartoon series before and it was really good! So by virtue that the Japanese production companies spent so much effort in commissioning great music that perfectly matched the atmosphere of their productions made me take notice and think to myself, "Hey, if they put this much into the music, maybe I should pay attention to the artwork and the storyline as well."

For the most part I wasn't disappointed. Sure, there's a lot of crap that gets produced in Japan, especially when it comes to anime and pop music. There's a lot of formulaic anime, and a lot of over-produced techno-pablum music. I say that easily 95 out of 100 anime series are junk and are rather cynically made. But those 5 out of 100 series are really amazing works of art.