Chinese Anime?

 I do not know how people respond to the increasing prominence of Chinese animated works english subbed appearing somewhat to feature alongside Japanese ones. I do know that there is a polarisation over what the term anime means and whether it only means Japanese animation or anime  inspired animation in the english speaking world at least. I for once find these distinction rather flawed and I want to express here why even the idea of Chinese, Japanese anime itself are flawed.

My first and main criticism comes from how I think these claims that these shows are national in any way are simply false. These shows are very much a transnational effort and it would be wise to recognise that there are other people often outside these countries involved in the process. In Japanese animated works for instance almost always the in-between frames are outsourced work done by studios in South East Asia or Korea. 

If you are do know what in-between frames are, they are the frames in-between the key frames. They are in essence the most laborious work in animation as they are the frames that give motion to the series by padding the space between each key frame. Therefore, any anime episode will be made up of a majority of in-between frames. I believe you can see where I am getting at here, so in the Japanese anime we watch actually the majority of the frames we see were not drawn in Japan or by Japanese people at all. 

Outsourcing in the Japanese industry is also not a recent phenomenon. In fact, outsourcing to Korea and other particular South East Asian countries that has been ongoing since at least the 70s. So it therefore has been a thing since anime has expanded in Japan and it precedes by a lot the explosion of Japanese animated works popularity abroad. Initially the Japanese hid this fact by showing only Japanese names in the credits in an attempt to show anime works as an only Japanese work. 

This is likewise the case for Chinese animation as well, one notable case was the movie Big Fish and Begonia which is notably given as an example of Chinese animation. However, the studio in charge of the animation was Studio Mir, a Korean studio. Likewise many Chinese animated works are also outsourced like Japanese ones.  In fact, Korea also receives a lot of outsourced work by American animated works such as The Simpsons and the likes. We should acknowledge the work these people do instead of trying to simply brand these works as national projects and not what they really are; transnational projects. 

I want to pose a question now. Why would something like Avatar The Last Airbender not be considered anime? Is it simply because it was not produced by a Japanese Company or the characters original dub was not in Japanese? I say this because the animators behind the Avatar had worked doing outsourced work for Japanese animated works for most likely years. So why would their work not be considered anime as well? 

What I want to highlight with these questions is that anime exclusive definition as Japanese is simply a falsehood.  Most people seem to only think anime can only be Japanese because it is seen as something created solely for Japanese audiences and also that the dubs are in Japanese. However,  these frameworks for understanding it are simply poor since anime has a much wider audience than simply Japan and the rise of companies in the production committee from outside Japan prove that. The dubbing voice is also too simplistic and kind of implies only the voicing work matters and the work by animators from other countries do not matter.

I hope we can recognise how anime is transnational and not national and attempts to define it in national terms are simplistic and often mean work by many people are forgotten.