ANIME: SURPASSING THE BOUNDARIES

ANIME: SURPASSING THE BOUNDARIES

                                  -Sreenanda Naduvalath

Why is anime so widely loved?

      I’ve been asked this question many times. I’ve asked this question to myself many times. How can some 2D drawings impact our lives so much?

    The answer is simple: Because it’s completely different from everything else.

Anime was something I just started on a whim, but now it has become a part of my everyday life. In Japan, ‘Anime’ is a term that refers to all kinds of animation. But outside Japan, it has become a catch-all term for animation from Japan. ‘Anime’ is the animated version of mangas, graphic novels drawn in black and white. For decades, anime was not noticed by the world. It was a product solely produced by and for Japan. But over the last few years, anime has become a global phenomenon, surpassing the boundaries of nations and literature, and capturing the hearts of many viewers.

Whether it is a heartwarming and simple anime like Violet Evergarden, or an epic story about ninjas and war and sacrifices like Naruto, or a masterpiece anime filled with horror and tragedy like Attack on Titan, anime has always managed to make me completely mesmerized in it.

   Books influence us with words, movies influence us with visuals. But when it comes to anime, it’s never one thing. Anime is termed as different because it has a way of completely taking us over with epic art style, beautiful music, and amazing storylines.

 How is it different?

  When you look at it generally, anime might seem the same as everything else. But there are so many factors that set it apart, the first one being the well-developed and relatable characters. Many movie and book plots include a much-loved hero and a well-hated villain, and a couple of side characters. But in anime, the characters all get equal attention, making it more relatable. Another thing is the various plots. No two anime will ever contain the same storyline, because the anime field offers a variety of options to choose from. You can go from a simple high school kid’s life to 12-foot tall titans invading the earth and it won’t seem weird, because anime can tell you a story about anything and everything!

Another specialty of anime is that it never holds back when it comes to portraying emotions. It can make you laugh out loud in one moment and make you cry in the next. It can go from showing something humorous to giving a life lesson in an instant. You never know what’s going to happen when it comes to anime.

You can never challenge anime when it comes to visual effects. What makes an anime fresh and new are not the plot and characters, but the visual effects and art style. The backgrounds capture your attention in a way a normal film or cartoon can’t. The character designs are made to be unique and special, and anime offers the creators more freedom than any regular field can.

  While we can take pride in the fact that live actions and movies have great action scenes, it is still one step behind when anime fight scenes come into the discussion. As anime allows the artist to be more creative and powerful, the fight scenes in anime are unmatched because of the careful but epic art style, gripping music, and outstanding visual effects. Anime like Naruto, Attack on Titan, Dragon Ball Z, and Sword Art Online are all best known for their amazing action scenes.

Why is it so important to anime fans?

   If I was asked to list the reasons why I love anime, I could go on for hours. There are the inspirational dialogues, the beautiful art style, the amazing fight scenes; the unbeatable humor….but what made it so important to me was because of the things it taught me. The benefit of watching anime in Japanese is because gradually, you start learning the language. Nothing feels more satisfying when you hear a Japanese sentence and understand it without needing subtitles. Why I’m grateful to anime is because of letting me learn a foreign language without making me put extra effort into it. Anime helped me learn about the Japanese language, culture, and mythology. It was like it slowly became a part of me, like how we speak our mother tongue so fluently without learning about it. Anime offers us insights into various life lessons, and it never once gets boring! The more you watch anime, the more you discover. I think that’s what made it so special for me.

    In Japanese, there’s a phrase called ‘Koi no Yokan.’It means seeing someone and feeling that you’re going to love them. Not right away, but it’s inevitable that you will. Anime was like that for me. When I first started it, I knew it was going to have a big part in my life. But it didn’t happen right away. The more episodes I watched, the more anime I saw, the more things I learned, it slowly became a part of my life. And no matter what new things I learn about, anime will always have a special place in my mind.

Books, movies, manga, anime….all of them have a way of finding us and carrying us to an entirely different world. We get lost in them, and we find ourselves in them. Humans have always evolved with time, and so have the things around them. The evolution of stories into books, books into comics, comics into manga, and finally, the evolution of manga into Anime, a mix of moving 2D pictures filled with thousands of diverse tales and emotions is one of the remarkable things this world has witnessed.