Japanese animation

The Japanese animation industry has attracted much interest in the West, with English-speaking fans avidly adopting Japanese terminology such as anime (short for "animation").

The best known anime director in Japan is Hayao Miyazaki, famous for "My Neighbor Totoro," "Spirited Away," and "Princess Mononoke."

As in the West, Japanese animation tends to follow Japanese comic book styles (called manga). Anime is divided into the same genres as manga, much with an emphasis on violence, romance, sexual comedy, and beyond. Anime ranges from dark and horrific in nature to cute and childlike, depending on the age group it is aimed towards.
Many of Anime's genres fall into the following categories:

Shounen - Japanese for boy, Shounen is the most popular genre in Japan and the most well known outside the country. Aimed at prepubescent boys, Shounen are often action/adventure series featuring martial arts, Japanese and Chinese folklore, simplistic animation and conceptual fantasy and science fiction. Popular titles that have been translated to English include Naruto, Bleach, One Peice, Dragonball/Z, Gundam, Fullmetal Alchemist, Prince of Tennis and Astroboy. Pokemon, the 1990's superfad, is also Shounen.

Shoujo - Japanese for girl, Shoujo is also popular outside of Japan, with such famous dubs as Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura (Cardcaptors in America), Tokyo Mew Mew and Fruits Basket. Within Shoujo there is the subgenre of Magical Girl, where an otherwise average Japanese girl has magical powers with which she saves the world. More often than Shounen, Shoujo are romance tales or rely heavily on romance in the plot. The Heroine is often saving the world by night and snagging the boy of her dreams by day.

Seinen - Japanese for young man, Seinen targets the 18 to 30 male audience, though it is not uncommon to find much older men reading manga on the train ride to work. The most popular titles to date in America are Lupin III, The Big O, Ghost in the Shell, Strawberry Panic!, XxxHolic, Blood+, Berserk, Cowboy Bebop, FLCL, Samurai Champloo, Oh My Goddess!, Outlaw Star and Trigun. Titles like Lupin III and Ghost in the Shell are cult classics, while Cowboy Bebop was the first anime aired on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. Seinen has all the elements of its juvenile, but is often darker and more mature (or immature, depending on the sense of humor) than Shounen, with horror, mystery and suspence.