So, yesterday in my weird, long thread about irksome visual novel marketing phrases, one of my points was "anime-style doesn't tell me anything" and that "decontextualized ...we're real shit at deciding what 'anime art' is and isn't." And I wanted to try to explain my theory....

Which of these are from an anime? It's not a gotcha, but an opening to examine what "anime art style" actually is.

All these characters have roughly similar proportions, and a still image doesn't convey movement in a way that would reveal telling animation quirks.

Kowabun and Aku no Hana use rotoscope to realistic proportions with some shader stylization. How "anime" do they feel? What if they were compared with A Scanner Darkly or American Pop? If you make an internal distinction between them what is it and why?

What about Doraemon vs Garfield makes one "anime" and the other not? Is it in their aesthetic or in their cultural connection? If you checked off items in your internal visual test for "anime vs western" would you get an accurate answer?

What about Sazae-san vs The Simpsons?

Which of these Stan Lee cameos is anime vs western???

When you think "anime style" do you draw up any images like these? Why not?

So this thread is super pedantic and I purposely pulled from off beat shows but the idea is to rethink what EXACTLY we mean by "anime style" in non-animation contexts and when marketing for English-language games in a medium with Japanese roots and heavy cross-cultural ties.