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I have had an account here for years and have rarely posted. For some reason I decided that I want to engage with other anime fans. This is how I got into anime.

When I was growing up, I used to make fun of my brothers for liking "stupid Japanese Cartoons." I know they were fans of Naruto, Dragonball Z, Pokemon, and Digimon. They looked stupid to my mind. This attitude persisted for many many years.

Then one fateful night in December of 2012, everything changed. I was at a Job Corps in Clearfield Utah. I had recently moved into a new room which had two other people in it who watched anime.

Initially this meant nothing to me, however, I was struck by the beauty of some of the Japanese music I heard them playing. I slowly got worn down.

Around this time, I had been introduced to Doctor Who. Anyone familiar with that franchise knows that there are some truly sad moments in that show. For some reason I found I really liked that sad emotional stuff.

I was discussing this with someone, when he recommended Clannad. I was skeptical, but this was not the first time the show had been recommended to me. One night as I was sitting in the computer room in the dorm watching House, I got tired of it and wanted to try something different. I decided to give Clannad a try . . . and Clannad broke me.

I had no idea that an animated show could tell such a powerful story! Anyone who has watched Clannad knows what I mean. The art, the comedy, the character development, the sadness. And that is when I truly began to explore the wonderful and uniquely Japanese art form known as anime.

I still have not watch Dragonball Z, Naruto, or any of the other so called "gateway" anime, and truthfully I don't have much interest, but I have seen many many anime up to this point, and my life has never been the same. It's amazing how things can change.

My daughter brought home the DVD for Mononoke Hime that a friend had lent her. I was in my mid-fifties at that point and had never seen any anime. I was so impressed by the complexity of the story and the beauty of its presentation that I started browsing lists of top-rated shows. I'll admit I spent the first few years torrenting series, since buying DVDs was way too expensive, and there were hardly any other options. Now I've watched about 300 anime works over the fifteen years or so that followed, mostly via legal streaming once Crunchyroll became available.

I still torrent some shows not available by other means (Hyouge Mono, for instance) and ones on Netflix, to which I subscribe, since I'm not willing to wait for them to bundle the episodes. I rarely buy any physical media because most shows are not worth re-watching, and the ones I have re-watched are still mostly carried by their services. I do find it annoying that I'm now having to subscribe to both Crunchyroll and Funimation to have access to most of the available offerings. Until this season I'd been able to get by with just a subscription to CR. (I'm also an Amazon Prime subscriber, more for the two-day delivery option. The anime is a welcome bonus.) I see this as an unfortunate side effect of the entry of entities like ATT and Sony into what was a quiet little niche business.

You won't see any of those "gateway" shows on my list either. Just never had much interest in them compared to things like Cross Game, Mononoke, Dennou Coil, 3-gatsu no Lion, or even Kill la Kill.

Mine is kind of long and round about. I can't remember the start of my age, probably 8 or 9 depending on when you could look at the dates, it was the start of the Pokémon craze when I was introduced to it from a family friend. I then got directed to watch a morning block of shows referred to as Cheez TV here in Australia, and being a bit late into the first episode of an anime episode I watched, it was one where the skull of a cubone was spinning.

From there I would get up to watch Cheez TV and was introduced to a lot of cartoons that were not like the ones I had seen in the past; Cardcaptors, Dragon Ball Z, Digimon, Zoids,
Beyblades, Hamtaro,, YuGiOH and so on. For a couple years we even had paid TV, so I watched broader stuff that was available on Cartoon Network. I watched the first two Pokémon movies in the Cinema. But in all honesty, I did not even recognise all these shows as anime, only having a brief idea of their origin.

That was until High School (8th to 12th grade), where there were some older students that I kind of bugged, had a manga, I think that was the real first time I put together that a lot of the cartoons I liked could be grouped together into kind of styles of Japanese. Them being 10th graders, I think once they might have had a slightly naughty scene or so in a manga, so I might have become convinced manga was kind of naughty, and did not have the courage to look at the manga in the library. Maybe a peek. But anyway, I did not have internet for all of High School, which was considered a little weird, and going through puberty I might have found ways to download naughty anime related content (mostly pictures or so) onto USB for home.

Finally got internet at home after finishing high school, and going to be honest that before I started university I kind of indulged in naughty anime related content, so much that I would say that in 2008 I saw a lot of the porn parodies before I started checking out random anime shows that I came aware of, like watching Bleach or Death Note. I think the first new Japanese released show I was watching as aired was Toradora, getting into full swing in early 2009 as I joined this site to talk about it.

Was that too long?

I watched anime as a child in the 60s - Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion, Gigantor less often and Marine Boy once or twice. For a while, Kimba was one of my two favourite shows (the other being The Monkees) when I was around 9 or 10 years of age. My older sisters and I always knew they were Japanese - probably from the credits - so they left me with a positive attitude towards anime in later years.

I didn't have any further exposure to anime until March 1994 when I saw Legend of the Overfiend at the cinema. I didn't regard it highly. In the mid-2000s I dabbled further when, thanks to a nephew who was an anime fan, I saw Howl's Moving Castle in 2005 and Tales from Earthsea in 2007, again at the cinema. While I enjoyed both, neither has sufficient impact to turn me into a fellow fan.

The breakthrough came thanks to a friend of mine who was a subscriber to the Melbourne International Film Festival. I'd told her about the two Ghibli movies so she took me to see Paprika the same year (2007) as it was screening at the festival. Watching it was an epiphany: the visual brilliance and the dream game playing mesmerised me. I remember settling into my seat even before the prelude and the OP were finished, realising I was in for the cinema experience of a lifetime.

Afterwards I trotted off to my nephew who recommended a few TV series and better yet, gave me fansub copies of them. The first one I watched was Last Exile, which, while not in the same class as Paprika, captivated me with its dense, expansive story-telling over 26 episodes. I particularly liked the female characters Sophie Forrester and Lavie Head, the latter being my first exposure to a tsundere. Among his other recommendations were both seasons of Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex so, what with Last Exile and Howl's Moving Castle, I realised how impressive anime heroines could be.

The sleeper among the fansubs was Noir. I'd put off watching it as the OP suggested the series wouldn't be to my taste. When I finally did I was hooked by the repeated tease of the musical fob watch, the shoot-out on the building site in the first episode and Mireille Bouquet's quest to unravel the truth of her past. By the end I thought it was reasonably good, but unexpectedly found my self re-watching it repeatedly, becoming my first TV anime obsession.

Some time in the mid 1990's I was searching CompuServe's graphics forum for wallpaper for my computer. I downloaded a Zip file labeled (I think) Anime10. It was a collection of ten image files. The associated text file said this was to prove anime was not all "sex & violence". Unfortunately there was no explanation of what anime was, a term I was not familiar with. The poster's message was a bit undercut as the images mostly featured pretty women, some with guns. Laughing

Later in August 1997, I was in a comic shop with my wife because she wanted to look at their advertised Star Trek figures. I wasn't interested in those as I had never watched the show. I looked around the shop and discovered a rack of VHS tapes including one with a cover image from the image files I mentioned above. Intrigued, I looked at all the tapes and ended up selecting two tapes I found interesting (the first Oh My Goddess OVA tape subtitled and the first Ranma 1/2 tape dubbed) and took them to check out, my wife had decided against the Star Trek figures. As I checked out the store clerk asked "Do you like anime?". I asked him what he was talking about. He replied, "what you are buying". I responded "I don't know, I haven't watched them yet".

It turned out that the answer to his question was, yes, I did like anime and it turned out to be a bit addictive. On subsequent trips to the store I found they also had comic books featuring the same shows and I was really hooked as I'm more of a reader than a watcher. I now have several thousand volumes of manga and light novels and a couple hundred anime series.

Interestingly, my getting into anime solved another mystery we had. My wife collects Barbie sized dolls. At some point we had picked up several dolls on closeout sale consisting of Rick Hunter and the girls. This was either after the time of syndication of Robotech, or it had never been shown in our area so we could find no information on the source material. I was finally able to explain what they represented. On early forums it was interesting to read multiple people posting as to how much they hated what had been done to create Robotech and at the same time admitting that it was the show that had gotten them into anime in the first place. Wink

Oh, by the way, in August 1997 when I saw my first anime episode I was 52.

I had unknowingly watched anime at a fairly young age. I watched quite a bit of Moomin (its creator Tove Jansson is quite well known in my country) probably at a very young age. During my elementary school days (early 2000s?) there was a big Pokemon craze so I watched a bit of Pokemon that was shown on TV back then. Everyone bought Pokemon cards and traded them so of course I had to get some too. I still own those Pokemon cards and I still don't even know what they are used for and how. Also watched a couple episodes of Digimon here and there. There were also a lot of other anime that I watched a bit here and there like Sailor Moon, Beyblade and Hamtaro. What I remember is that those shows tended to air early and often on weekdays right before school so I didn't have much time to watch them. None of those shows left much of an impression on me past elementary school.

I think I got really, really into Dragon Ball Z somewhere around 2005-2006 when I was in junior high school. I wasn't really aware of the fact of DBZ was an anime back then so I guess I only really consciously got into anime when I started watching Naruto somewhere around maybe late 2006 to early 2007.

Last edited by AkumaChef on Mon Apr 13, 2020 9:21 am; edited 2 times in total

For me it was a case of "third time's the charm".

I remember watching "Tranzor Z" cartoons as a kid in the 1980's though I didn't know it was Anime at the time. I do remember that it grabbed me a lot more than typical American cartoons I watched at the time though.

When I was a lot older I had a friend I knew from boy scouts introduced me to anime. We were both into role-playing games like AD&D and had just gotten into Magic The Gathering, which was brand new at that time. I was hanging out at his house trading Magic cards and he decided to show me some anime which he had. Some of it was fansubbed but most were just raw bootleg tapes. Since most of it wasn't in English and I was more interested in playing Magic I didn't really give it much of a thought, though one of the titles he had--the only one I can recall by name--was the infamous Urotsukidoji, which I found more shocking than appealing.

I didn't really get into anime until my Freshman year at college in 1997. One of my friends got into Macross/Robotech (via the role-playing game), and pretty soon a few friends and I got into the routine of renting VHS tapes from a local comic book store on a regular basis. At that time the selection was pretty pitiful so we were mainly watching the old US standards like Ranma, Tenchi, A-Ko, El-Hazard, Urusai Yatsura, and so on. I remember it being a massive epiphany for me because I had the stereotypical western view that cartoons were either for children (most of them) or were purely humorous, like The Simpsons or Beavis and Butt-Head. Anime blew that completely out of the water because here were "cartoons" which didn't insult the viewer's intelligence. They had dynamic characters, engaging plots, poignant social commentary and more. Production values were good, the music was amazing (even though I couldn't understand a word of it). On top of that, Anime totally shattered the Western/Hollywood moral formula in which the "good guys always win", and I really appreciated that because it made Anime less predictable than western video. Titles like Oh My Goddess awakened me to the fact that romance-centric shows could be amazing as well. I soon met other friends in college who had fansub connections and they started broadening my horizons by introducing me to things you couldn't easily get in the west at the time: Macross Plus, AD Police Files, Nausicaa, Totoro, Laputa, Utena, Ghost in the Shell (1995), Galaxy Fraulein Yuna, 3x3 Eyes, War in the Pocket, Wings of Honneamaise... A couple new heavy hitter titles came out domestically at that time too: Evangelion, of course, and Key the Metal Idol. I was thoroughly hooked.

My friends and I quickly watched all the shows our local video store had, and before long we had either seen or decided we were not interested in just about all of the domestically available titles...so we watched more and more fansubs. The more we watched it became painfully obvious just how bad the domestic industry was at the time. Translations weren't very good; neither was the voice acting on dubs. Dialogue and even plot was sometimes re-written to change cultural references or jokes which they assumed a domestic audience wouldn't get. And most importantly, there was a very frustrating long wait to get new domestic releases. At that point I started getting into buying LDs straight from Japan because that avoided all the problems of domestic releases. Why wait for ADV to do their thing when you can just buy the raw? Not to mention the other advantages: LDs had random access and didn't need rewinding or FF. They didn't degrade when you played them over and over. They weren't edited or censored. The video quality was vastly superior to VHS, and was even superior to many early DVDs. Of course there was the language barrier, but to me that was a minor problem compared to the rest of their benefits. Fansubbers published script files online so we'd print them out and follow along with the video, assuming that the dialogue was even difficult enough to require that. Perhaps one of us would read the script out loud for the benefit of the rest. When there is no dubbing or subs it turns out you learn basic Japanese really quick. I needed language credits towards my degree so I ended up taking 4 semesters of Japanese in college. I figured why not kill two birds with one stone and satisfy my degree requirements and be better able to enjoy raw anime at the same time. My friends and I ended up becoming on a first-name basis with the staff at Planet Anime in Houston, which was one of the few dedicated anime stores at the time, though they are now defunct. They had a retail store, but they also let us wander around their mail-order warehouse which was normally off-limits to the public; we started "subscribing" to new releases, and maintained a waiting list with the owner. Every few months he'd fly to Japan, hit up all the collector's shops, and bring the haul back to the states. We'd buy a few discs off our list each time we stopped by.

Ironically, I actually missed seeing most of the famous "Gateway Titles" you hear people talk about today. I was already a hardcore fan before anime started airing on Cartoon network. I wrongly looked down on shows like Pokemon, Bleach, DBZ, and Naruto because I assumed those were kid's shows; and it also bothered me that so many shows were edited for domestic broadcast as well so I made it a matter of principle to avoid that sort of thing. Editing out all the lesbian references from Sailor Moon, the abomination that was Cardcaptors, Tenchi Muyo's digipaint swimsuits, etc...that was enough to turn me off from was airing on TV domestically, period.

Thankfully, the domestic industry now does a great job bringing titles over so I haven't imported anything from Japan other than music in a few years, and it's really nice to be able to check out shows on streaming before committing the money to purchase them. Not to mention that today's translations are a lot better than the ones that literally drove me to learn Japanese 20 years ago. These days I tend to buy domestic releases.

I can divide my anime fan life into two phases: from the age of 5 to the age of 15 and from 23 to 31 (my current age). When I was a kid in Brazil in the 1990s I watched the same stuff other kids at school watched like Saint Seya and Dragonball. But I also watched some more "sophisticated" hyperviolent stuff like M.D. Geist and Genocyber which for some reason was shown on Brazilian public TV (while it wasn't shown in Japanese TV at the time), as well as shows like Patlabor. Then I watched Evangelion and my perception of the artform changed, by the time I was 14-15 I was watching stuff like Ghost in the Shell, Lain, Hellsing, Agent Aika, Oh My Goddess, Saber J, and Vandread. I also read manga like Love Hina and Battle Angel Alita.

Then, I suddenly stopped watching anime and at the same time Brazilian TV also stopped airing it. Then, 8 years later I was bored and wanted to watch a movie and I had watched all the highest rated Western movies on the IMDB, so I noticed Spirited Away was ranked highly there and I decided to watch it. Boom! By the way, I remember watching Spirited Away for the first time like it was yestersay: it was in August 25-26 2012, I watched Spirited Away on a Saturday and the next day I watched Princess Mononoke. A couple weeks later I had watched Miyazaki's filmmography twice and I had read the whole timeless masterpiece that is Nausicaa manga. I also started watching classic Japanese live action films like Ozu's and Kurosawa's, and I began watching anime shows again. The first one I decided to watch was Evangelion which I re-watched about 5 weeks after first watching Spirited Away.

Then, after being slightly disappointed at other anime besides Miyazaki about a year after watching Spirited Away I convinced myself that "anime" was not special, only Miyazaki and Evangelion were. Then, on another fateful Saturday I watched Madoka and it's cutting edge 21st century sensibilities turned my world inside out, the third time it happened thanks to anime/manga. After Madoka I haven't looked back: I only watched 4-5 seasons of Western TV shows over the last 6 years while I watched over 500 seasons of anime shows. It is true that I am now desensitized so I cannot experience the same feeling of watching Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Evangelion, and Madoka for the first time. It is also true that there are not substantially many anime and manga titles of comparable quality to these titles that are masterpieces among masterpieces.

Anime is a great thing, it is kind of a mix between art and enjoyable junk food: it combines the best elements of a Hollywood blockbuster special effects fantasy movie with the best elements of artistic works of literature, music and the visual arts. It is perhaps the synthesis and ultimate expression of 21st century globalized pop culture.

As an 80's child in a tiny TV market I DIDN'T watch the daytime anime of the day, maybe a bit of Transformers and Go-Bots (if that counts). No Battle of the Planets, no Robotech, no Speed Racer until my teens. Anime was still barely a thing to me in my teens. Speed Racer was rerun on some stations but it was just campy silliness. I saw little bits and pieces on things like MTV's Liquid Television ("The Running Man", and the sensibility of Aeon Flux).

In the great experience of discovering new things in college I finally got around to watching anime as "anime." I honestly cannot remember if it was Akira or Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend that I saw first. Both certainly leave an impression. But my friends that were big enough fans of anime to pay ridiculous amounts of money for OVA's or 2-episode tapes were all about action, fantasy, and sci-fi pretention. I saw some good stuff, Black Magic M-66, Battle Angel Alita, Vampire Hunter D, Record of the Lodoss Wars (My god did my friends love the dragon designs) but somehow I resisted with the Bubblegum franchise. The only thing I really loved at first watch that others were less enthused about was some random tapes of Ranma 1/2. So in my late teens and early 20's I liked anime and appreciated it but was no great fan.

Next was Toonami. I didn't care for Sailor Moon much and it was only in later runs that I begun enjoying the fun that was Dragonball Z but I loved Tenchi Muyo and really liked Outlaw Star. Once Adult Swim began airing Cowboy Bebop and FLCL and others I was hooked- I watched everything they showed until I couldn't take Blue Gender any more. First anime I bought was a used Complete Collection of Tenchi Muyo (well, sorta- years before I bought a $2 "Dragonball Z:World's Strongest" from a Pawn Shop to test out the DVD player on my new TEN GB! PC) and by that time I was living in a major city that stores that sold and rented anime. There was a short bit of time when I was a bit burned out (once again a case of only serious action stuff with diminishing returns getting on TV) but I ended up revitalizing my interest by watching School Rumble via Youtube and was introduced to Torrents and this new thing called Crunchyroll (when it was just getting out of its early bootlegging phase and went completely legit). Once I could supplement the serious action stuff with dramas, experimerntal stuff, comedies and my harem drug of choice, It's been my main form of entertainment since.

I always love answering this question, so forgive me if I get way too long-winded. Very Happy

Well before I knew what anime was, I was a fan of animation in general. I probably have my paternal grandmother to thank for that: she had a bunch of dollar-store VHS collections of Looney Tunes and other studios' shorts from the golden age of American animation, and I watched those religiously when I visited her. She was also probably the only grandmother ever who had a copy of Fantasia. Very Happy

In addition, like pretty much every kid my age, we had a big library of the Disney classics on VHS, and I was raised on a steady diet of Saturday morning cartoons and the Disney Afternoon block. A huge favorite of mine from my first time seeing it was Batman: The Animated Series, which I'll still hold up as one of the finest pieces of American TV animation ever produced. Looking back, there were a few things I watched like then that would qualify as anime: my grandmother had a tape of Scamper the Penguin, and I know I caught bits of a few of the kid-targeted anime series Nickelodeon aired at the time, and at least some of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz series that HBO aired a long time ago. Of course I had no idea where those shows were from, though.

The first thing I can distinctly remember recognizing as "a cartoon from Japan" was, maybe predictably, Pokemon. Like pretty much everyone under the age of 15 or so when Pokemon hit it big, I was all over the original Kanto episodes. I enjoyed it well enough, but at the same time I remember cringing at the elements that felt too "Japanese": things I'd later learn to call face-faults or super-deformed moments. It took me a long while to get over those. Around the same time, I caught an episode or two of DBZ on Cartoon Network, and perhaps surprisingly, I haaaaated it. It felt like 20 minutes straight of two ugly characters yelling at the top of their lungs at each other, and it just seemed incredibly stupid. I still partially blame my visceral reaction to DBZ to negatively coloring my impression of what "anime" was for many years later; it made me miss out on a lot of shows I probably would have greatly enjoyed at the time.

Even so, there were a few shows that managed to slip through the cracks of the wall I'd constructed. I distinctly remember catching random episodes of Rurouni Kenshin and Yu Yu Hakusho during their Toonami runs, as well as parts of whatever Zoids series was airing then. But what really grabbed my attention was a humble show by the name of .hack//SIGN. I had very little idea what was going on, but what I did see was that it largely consisted of people...standing around and talking. About serious and important topics! All while absolutely gorgeous music played in the background. I'd never thought of animation being used in this way, and it totally blew my mind. If DBZ slammed the door shut, then SIGN managed to crack it open at least a little bit, and even though I didn't follow up on it at the time, it stuck with me in the back of my mind.

Fast-forward a bit to my freshman year of college. My roommate and I used to watch [adult swim] on weeknights, which meant tons of reruns of Family Guy (when it was good!), Futurama, and Aqua Teen Hunger Force. I was aware there were other types of shows that [as] aired, but I never delved any further. Then as luck would have it, one weekend when I had the dorm room to myself, I happened to tune in on Saturday nights...and I was hit with a barrage of titles that, to this day, form a who's who of my all-time favorites. Cowboy Bebop. Big O. Wolf's Rain. GITS: Stand-Alone Complex. Fullmetal Alchemist. I had no idea what was going on during them (in fact I'd happen to tune in right near a bunch of season/series finales, which if you know some of those shows is a hell of a place to start), but it was a kaleidoscope of animation and music and emotions I'd never seen before. That was it, I was hooked. I started watching [as]'s anime offerings regularly, with Trigun being the first series I ever saw in its proper order start-to-finish. I joined the [as] forums and met a fantastic group of fellow anime fans. Eventually we started a discussion group to watch through fansubs of Monster, a group which we've kept up through the present day. Fast-forward 15 years and, well, I've watched...a lot. And I've probably bought even more. No one warned me this hobby would be so damn expensive. Very Happy

Even as a fairly young child, I remember being a bit frustrated by the fact that every Disney movie seemingly needed to be a musical. My favorites were usually a bit more off the beaten path, things like The Great Mouse Detective, or later on Atlantis and The Emperor's New Groove. So I think right from the get-go I sought something "different" than what most Western animation offered, and anime provided that outlet for me. I've often thought that, if American animation was a more diverse medium that told a wider variety of stories, I may never have "needed" to seek out anime in the first place. I guess I should be grateful it didn't, because I wound up being introduced to an amazing new world and meeting some of my best friends as a result. Over fifteen years in and I'm still going strong. Smile

Errinundra wrote:

The breakthrough came thanks to a friend of mine who was a subscriber to the Melbourne International Film Festival. I'd told her about the two Ghibli movies so she took me to see Paprika the same year (2007) as it was screening at the festival. Watching it was an epiphany: the visual brilliance and the dream game playing mesmerised me. I remember settling into my seat even before the prelude and the OP were finished, realising I was in for the cinema experience of a lifetime.

So jealous! I would love to watch Paprika at a movie theater.

^
I'll be forever grateful to my friend for dragging me along.

I grew up on US cartoons from the 30s & 40s, with the occasional Czechoslovak and Hungarian cartoons thrown in for good measure (Soviet cartoons were unwatchable). When I got to the US in the early 80s, it was in the middle of the "cartoons must be educational" era which allied to the remnants of the 60s/70s "wacky races" era meant that there were no good cartoons for anyone with my tastes (OK "Thundarr the Barbarian" was good)[for adults the "New York" era was in full swing, but most of those were as unwatchable as the Soviet ones - "Heavy Metal" being the great exception]. In this desert, I stumbled into two cartoons with story and somewhat realistic violence: "Speed Racer" and "Star Blazers" (remember, at that time in "GI Joe" shells would explode on top of people and they would just stagger away). By the early 90s I had found out that they were Japanese and in cable there were others ("Project Ako", "Venus Wars", "Dominion Tank Police" (the only one that has aged well), "Vampire Hunter D", etc.). When those disappeared in the mid 90s, replaced by the Gundams, DBZs and Sailor Moons of the world (e.g. Shonen/Shoujo) which are not to my taste, I figured anime had gone the route of US cartoons in the 60s-80s, so I dropped it.
Years later, in 2003 (I think) I was channel surfing and stumbled into "Blue Gender", I first thought, another Gundam show...pass, but there was nothing else on so I stuck around and found that 1) There was nothing Gundam about "Blue Gender" and 2) there were still anime to my taste ("FLCL", "Cowboy Bebop", "Trigun", etc.). I have not looked back since, I still follow 2 to 3 shows per season ("Darwin's Game", "In/Spectre", and "Dorohedoro" this season).

^^^
That was an interesting take and your first comment about unwatchable Soviet cartoons confused me a little, until you mentioned that you compared it to "New York" adult cartoons. It's not like I've seen much, just clips really, but I have found the experimental and artistic soviet cartoons to be fascinating- like "The LIttle Mermaid" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zvyt2fdWJAQ

But I can certainly understand NOT liking them.

Before I had even heard of anime, I had been watching Japanese monster movies and Japanese science fiction movies as a kid and teenager. I had watched Speed Racer and Battle of the Planets, but didn't know they were Japanese. Though I did know Ultraman was Japanese.

My first real encounter with anime was seeing in ad in the Starlog magazine for a VHS tape of Robotech. It wasn't the TV series Robotech. The best description would be a Pilot episode of what would become the Robotech TV series. The characters still had Japanese last names. I ordered the VHS tape from the ad in Starlog, and loved it. So it got me looking for more.

Iczer One movie, Dirty Pair movies, and Johji Manabe's Outlanders OVA started the fire, and the Gallforce Eternal Story movie sealed the deal.

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How did you get into anime? I'd love to hear your stories!