One conventional definition of anime reads something like “animation created in Japan for a domestic Japanese audience”. This definition offers a false sense of clarity: it does not cleanly map onto what most people think of when they hear the term — neither in Japan, where it simply means ‘animation’, nor elsewhere, where it’s shorthand for not merely a large partially-overlapping set of stylistic and narrative conventions but also a difficult to define ‘vibe’.
It makes sense to basically everybody to imagine ‘non-Japanese anime’: this doesn’t provide any of the difficulties presented by imagining, for instance, a ‘square circle’; similarly, we can also imagine ‘live action anime’. In fact, we do not merely need to imagine these things: there is media that gets classified this way, and whether or not we agree with those classifications, we have an intuitive understanding of why someone might classify them in this way.
On top of this, the Japanese-ness of even unambiguously Japanese anime is a complicated matter. Emphasizing the Japanese origin of anime is problematic in that it sets inaccurate expectations for the content of anime and primes us for an inaccurate understanding of its history, but it’s also problematic because it feeds into a particular set of narratives that have been slowly weaponized by Japan’s slowly-recovering far-right nationalist movements.
