I just read an artical on Toonzone regarding a documentary on anime that aired on Starz Network with some shocking revelations about the mainstream media's bias towards animation as a legitimate medium.
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The link between anime and Michael Bay's live-action 'Transformers' is even more tenuous, since it is through the original Japanese toy line and vague hand-waving about the importance of giant robots in Japanese cartoons. Conflating manga and toys with "anime" is exactly the kind of sloppy thinking that pervades this documentary. Citing these three movies also reveals the infuriating message sent throughout the film: anime is not worthy of real attention on its own merits, and only achieves TRUE artistic success when it is filtered through American sensibilities and turned into live-action entertainment. An unidentified Hollywood type suggests that 'Cowboy Bebop' would make a terrific (live-action) movie, somehow ignoring the fact that the existing animated movie is already pretty good on its own. It's worth pointing out at this point that the screener copy we got seems incomplete. About half of the on-camera subjects are not identified, and one hopes this is not true of the final version or else it would make a bad film unforgivably worse.
And if that wasn't bad enough...
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The fact that this documentary is only interested in examining anime as it can be appropriated by American culture is also revealed by the fact that there are exactly two Japanese speakers in the entire movie, both of whom are given the same amount of screen time as actor Michael Madsen expressing genuine surprise that a cartoon could have real emotional impact (apparently, all those movie-watchers over the years must have been imagining their emotional reactions to animated movies from 'Bambi' to 'Toy Story 2'.
So if it's done entirely by pencil, it can't possibly have any emotional impact on anyone simply because it was drawn by a pencil. As a cartoonist, i find this mentality insulting, and with that stupid 'Alvin & The Chipmunks' movie succeeding, it only adds more salt to animation's current wounds. Here's the entire article.
