Gonna start watching anime. Question, do you pay for it, or download torrents?
Content sources aside, anime is a pretty broad topic to dive into. For starters, there's cartoony stuff & then there's grown-up stuff. The Japanese do with artwork what we do with live action in the west...it's not just for kids. There are some really amazing concepts & ideas that can only be brought to life with artwork & not photography. And keep in mind, not everything is for everyone. I am personally not into heavy gore or adult content, but at the same time, not all of the anime I like is kid stuff. Like the new anime from Netflix, Blame!, explores the idea of a robotic city that disconnected from humans & now views them as intruders to be eliminated. Making with it graphics instead of film lets the director create different moods, different pacing, etc.
With anime, there are two things to keep in mind: first, and I forget the name for this, but there's like a national feeling in Japan of impending cultural doom, which you can see in a lot of anime films as a recurring them. Like in Blame, humanity is just about wiped out, there's not much hope for the future, etc. I think it's something that's been around for a long time & I can't find the article on it at the moment, although Gizmodo had a great article from a couple years ago discussing the impact of atomics on anime: (but what I'm referring to I think existed even before that...I'll update this post if I ever find it)
http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-deep-influence-of-the-a-bomb-on-anime-and-manga-1722447864
Second, a lot of anime gets into ultra-violence & is ultra-sexualized, so if you choose to limit your intake of those types of content, you'll have to be careful about what you randomly watch in the anime world. Probably the grossest I've been willing to get into is Attack on Titan, which can get pretty dang gory, but also has an oddly compelling storyline. They also like to stick in a lot of perverted stuff, which is unfortunate in a lot of cases because otherwise fairly clean stuff like Dragon Ball (the original one when Goku was a kid) that you would be able to watch with kids has little tidbits that aren't appropriate; at least stuff like Shrek covers it with things like double entendres, but the original Dragon Ball series started with stuff like that even back in the 80's, so that's something to be aware of, depending on what content you allow yourself to watch.
A good place to start is with Studio Ghibli films. I'd recommend watching Howl's Moving Castle to begin with...it's a good mix of great artwork, an interesting storyline, general weirdness, and, I don't know what you call it, some interesting emotions & experiences from the movie that you can't get from regular live-action shows. Plus a lot of anime tends to have really great soundtracks. Two of the biggest draws in anime for me are the weirdness & the artwork...you can just do things with art-based movies that you can't with regular movies. There's another one called Spirited Away that is kind of a strange coming-of-age story that is worth watching to get an idea of what I mean by "weirdness". Strange, but appealing! Like pre-2000's, you maybe got interesting films like the Iron Giant, but with anime, they really dive deep into emotional storytelling.
And yeah, artwork of anime movies are one of the best parts for me. I think it's one of those things you either really like or don't really care about at all. As a former wanna-be artist, I think anime art is really really cool. This is from Totoro, which is a kid's anime from Ghibli:
Now compare that with American cartoons, like Ed Edd & Eddy. Note that I'm not knocking the show, because that junk was pretty dang funny at times...but you can see the difference in the quality of the artwork. In this particular case, the artwork style supported the comedy of the show, but you see what I mean. The artwork in anime is just fun to look at if you're a person who enjoys hand-drawn art.
If you have access to Netflix, they actually have a bunch of anime available to watch. Here's a list:
http://animeonnetflix.com/anime-shows-on-netflix/
It really depends on what you're in the mood for because anime is all over the map in terms of genres & categories. I also like a lot of the older stuff thanks to the hand-drawn artwork, there's a ranked list here of old-school anime to browse through:
http://www.ranker.com/list/best-old-school-anime/ranker-anime
I'm sure the recommendations of what to watch will be all over the map, but a few to check out to dip your toes into the waters are:
* Howl's Moving Castle
* Spirited Away
* One Punch Man
* Trigun
* Blame!
Watch some stuff & report back!
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