Category: Other

I’ve always found the differences between the Japanese language and other languages to be particularly fascinating. I’ve touched on this before when I discussed “Literal Vs Adaptive Translation: Which Is Better?” and brought up the fact that English and Japanese are from two completely differently language families, meaning that many Japanese sentences can be translated in multiple ways and still be “correct”. However, something that I’ve wanted to discuss for a while are Japanese words that are used surprisingly differently in other languages.

The first word I would like to take a look at is a word that I’m sure many of you are intimately familiar with, anime. Written as アニメ in Japanese, notably in katakana to denote that it’s a foreign word, the word anime is an abbreviation of the Japanese word for animation, アニメーション, which in and of itself is a loanword from English. However, what I find quite interesting is the difference in the use of the word anime between Japanese and other languages. Outside of Japan, the term anime is used specifically to refer to animation that is produced in Japan, albeit with some entities trying to change that definition, while in Japan, the term anime actually refers to any and all forms of animation. I’ve noticed that some people struggle with this concept, the idea of anime referring to anything animated probably seems preposterous, but that doesn’t change the fact that that is what the word means in Japan.

I recently wrote about Hideaki Anno and his passion for Japanese popular culture and I mentioned the possibility of discussing his filmography someday. Considering how positively that article has been received, I’ve decided to take a look at the legendary Hideaki Anno, his fascinating career and his impact on the anime industry.

While I’m going to be focusing predominantly on series and films that Hideaki Anno directed, I’d be remiss if I didn’t discuss his career prior to directing. Ever since Hideaki Anno was a child, he’d always been interested in art and film, to the point of being considered a “problem child“. He later attended the Osaka University of Arts and ended up working as an animator on Super Dimension Fortress Macross. He was eventually kicked out of the Osaka University of Arts for not paying his tuition but not before he teamed up with a number of other students to create “Daicon III and IV Opening Animations”, short anime films that were made on a shoestring budget in a friend’s house. He eventually went to work on Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind under Hayao Miyazaki where he was assigned the task of working on the God Warrior, a very complicated scene that ended up becoming an impressive set piece in the movie. He, along with the other students who had worked on Daicon III and IV, founded Daicon Film in 1984 which was later renamed as Gainax.