An email has been going around urging people to sign
this petition:
To: George Bush
Some people are signing against anime and are calling is to be a "perverse, evil, insiduous form of animation from the dark land of Japan, and is corrupting America's youth at unprecedented rates." Anime is NOT corrupting the youth of America, and since when has America become a country of Christians? Isn't there a SEPARATION of Church and State? Isn't this a ban on our Freedom of Speech? And Freedom of Press? What does anime have to do with brainwashing our youth?
Even though I'm not sure what 'signing against anime' is supposed to mean, I do know that there is no movement underfoot by any politician to ban anime. But it's worth scrolling through the messages left by the 4129 people who signed the petition. Some of them are quite amusing.
Comments
Anime can never be banned; it's too popular. The government has better luck controlling illegal substances.
http://www.petitiononline.com/cutiepie/petition.html
An obvious troll, but it doesn't take much to get a reaction from media fans.
I was bored, so I thought I'd kinda mess with the system. It's a totally serious petition, though.
I have to say that I'm not really a fan, and I did have an ex-boyfriend that was a fan for all the grossest of reasons...
That said, I have a hard time with a lot of cartoons. This kind of runs into that line that parents should really be screening what their kids are watching & playing with. Also, if you say no to one thing, you really have to say no to it all. You can't say that Disney violence is okay, b/c it's cute, but Pokemon violence is not okay..for whatever reasons...(I've never seen it).
I think it's interesting that people get a good deal more concerned about this sort of thing than they do about the gov't sanctioning torture of prisoners and suchlike.
(The fact that I know this scares me.)
Hentai is creepy in lots of ways. However, it is porn, and as far as I know that means it can't be bought by anyone under 18. It's not corrupting the children anymore than non-animated porn is.
I always have to laugh at people who start/sign these online petitions, like they actually think they will make ANY DIFFERENCE WHATSOEVER. Or that anyone important will even be aware of their existence. No, online petitions are not considered valid under the law for obvious reasons: someone could sign it five hundred times under different names. There is no way to prove that 4129 individual people support this petition.
I don't even think legal petitions hold much water as far as Making Things Happen.
Petitions generally hold little merit for anyone, and the few times where they have "worked" is only the result of the accompanying publicity.
Online petitions are the worst, because they truly represent the anonymity of the internet, and are generally considered a joke.
1)hentai means perverse.not all hentai is anime and vice versa. perverse does not only mean sexually but any dark or what could be considered adult anime.
2)second in Japan anime is HUGE. I mean take Spirited Away which was released in the US by disney/pixar. it is the highest grossing film in Japan's history. not highest grossing animated film highest grossing film period. or perhaps "Grave of the Fireflies" which is considered by most otaku (japanese word ofr over obsessive fan-fanboy, you can be otaku about anything , sports, movies, video games but mainly it aplies to anime and manga (japanese comics) fans) to be the pinnacle of anime is about a brother and sister trying and failing to suvive post WWII japan. of the dozens of people i know that have seen this movie NONE have not cried during it
3)Manga-this is the origin of most anime. the comics which average several hundred pages in legnh and are in black and white are read equally in Japan by businessmen, children school teachers and moms. EVERYONE READS THEM! they all don't obviously read the same ones.
4) things ar eVERY different in JApan. in alot of ways. protitution for example is seen as just another job like being a teacher or a truck driver or a lawyer. ther eis NO AGE OF CONSENT IN JAPAN EITHER. are they worse for it? copare stats on sex crimes between here and there and you tell me. their religious belif stem i large part from animist beliefs (that spirits reside in all things), lineal piety (reverense towards ancestors for allowing you to exsist in the fisrt place), and buddhist philosophies (universal harmony and oneness). these are EXTREMELY different form the Judeo-Muslim-christian beliefs we have here in the 'west'. anime tends to deal with alot of these deaper issues.
sorry if i've gone off and none of this is targeted to any posts here but ignorance annoys me
Okay...but I do know that my ex-boyfriend used to get these pics of the kids from Pokemon doing weird gross things to each other. I was like...They're portraying kids you sick bastard!!
Anyway...I have a hard time with dubbing. The way mouths don't match up with words really distracts me. I'm never sure who's talking. I used to get some anime movies when I worked at the video store...but I would never actually pay to watch anime. (Any kind.)
"Welcome Maegan"
Now the healing can begin.
Please remove all articles of clothing prior to healing.
Speaking of ignorance, learn to type and spell.
No petition has any legal value (unless it's filed as a motion in court). A petition just means a written request for something (it could be for anything). People get up these kinds of petitions, I suppose, because signing them is easier (but infinitely less effective) than writing actual letters, or sometimes just in an attempt to get attention.
In this case, I side with tem2 when he (she?) says the original anti-anime petition was "an obvious troll."
Isn't it obvious? This nefarious movement is being spearheaded by deaf users of American Sign Language, who insist that all movies should be subtitled, not dubbed as are most of the imported Japanese cartoons.
Duo x Heero forever 😉
I got started watching anime about fifteen years ago and I can say that anime covers just about every genre of movie making. I have seen Manga in black-and-white and in color. I like anime primarily because it gives more freedom to the artisic people to tell the story. One of my favorites is "They were Eleven" which involves aliens, spaceship, gender-changers and a love story. Trying to do that in a "normal" picture would cost a fairly large fortune and wouldn't necessarily draw enough of an audience to justify the cost. There are some American animation studios now that are doing anime, and the style is basically the same. And, having watched anime in Japanese, the mouths don't match the words there either. At least not so you'd notice.
-Hentai IS porn, or let me put it this way: One could argue an R-rated horror film is 'pornographic', but that doesn't make it porn. Similiarly a graphically violent anime is not Hentai
-Anime is no bigger in Japan then animation is here. It's used more frequently in 'non-traditional' genres, yeah... but aside from Spirited Away (which was made by a HIGHLY respected director) it's not as big as live action there.
-An Otaku is a very bad thing to be. (to people who want to know the true Japanese meaning: think of the biggest dork possible, now imagine they smell HORRIBLE!!!... American 'otaku' like to think the word means 'Super well learned fan' when it really means "Comicbook Guy from the Simpsons Has A Better Social Life then me"
-Not "everyone" reads Mangas... they'll write them in many different genres and you do see business men reading them, it's as common as seeing someone reading a book on the bus.
-Mangas (at least the ones you refer to) are more like American Comics in their "Trade Paperback" forms then their monthly issues. The mangas most people read are big thick anthologies like Shonen Jump, that are super cheap and are then thrown away. "Mangas" in their 100 page one story form are just collections of those runs. Sometimes you will see original Manga pop up in 100 page book form, but American comics are the same way.
-Prostitution is still very illegal, 16 is the age of consent not "NO AGE", and I doubt you compared the sex crime stats because there no better then here.
-Not all anime is deep and spiritual, 'Otaku' like to think that because most of them like Sci-Fi/Fantasy... which just like in any country has deep and spiritual themes! (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, even to a degree Spider-man are religion/spiritual in base) There are animes that are NOTHING but commericals, you going to tell me Yu-Gi-Oh or Dual Masters is any less a commerical then Teen Titans or JLU? Or that Hamtaro or Super Milk-Chan are more spiritual then Fairly Oddparents or Spongebob?!
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And Teen Titans and JLU are not commercials. They both tell deep and meaningful stories, and I'll put the quality of their writing up against any show the networks air.
Also pretty well impossible. How could write a law banning "anime" in a way that wouldn't also ban just about every other movie or cartoon?
If you do that, then you must also get rid of R- rated movies, and pretty much ANYTHING that might be offensive to people!!! There is no law that says you HAVE to watch or read anything that has to do with Manga or Anime. You have the CHOICE to aviod it just as some religions tell you to aviod R- rated movies or drinking alchohol. Just a thought.
Besides, why ban cartoons based on the country of origin?! While we're at it, we might as well confiscate all the Czech, French, and British cartoons too.
Please. Read. A. Book.
I can remember, vaguely, a small group who picketed the White House in the 50s demanding that animals be made to wear clothes. It was a hoax then and this is something similar as far as I can tell.
Anime can be good or bad, just like Hollywood movies. I like anime and would protest any serious effort to ban it. It might get tried, there was an effort to ban comics in the early 50s, and comic magazines were made unlawful which is why they are called comic books now. Regardless of how this turns out, anime will continue in America - if it does get banned, the name will change and nothing else.
Ban On Anime...
Thanks for that interesting post. It makes great reading!
if you choose which anime you watch and manga you read, you won't find any pronography or "Fan Service of any kind. Anime has a rating just like anything else and you can eaasily avoid harmful content. Secondly, i'm an Otaku, i'm not stinky, and have alot of friends, hardly any of them otaku or comic book fans or whatever. I wish people would stop being so narrow minded.
Otaku means house.
Tentacles are positivly arousing.
Now let's join hands and hum.
A few people here though think that any such peition id pointless and won't change anything. Well, that's about as stupid as some anime or hentai are. What would happen if Martin Luther King in the 60's said, "wow, this is pointless and won't change a thing anyways." Get the point? And to the person comparing the usefulness of this petiton to the ban-ashley-simpson petition, well as far as I know, ashley simpson isn't sigining any record deals lately - or any deals.
Can't you enjoy anything these days?!
Deep down, everyone has perverse thoughts anyway, no one can escape their own minds. So in reality, people against this kind of thing for that reason, are all hypocrits.