Anime is NOT cinema, and shouldn’t try to be. In short, animation’s real boon is that its base irreality — i.e., pictures — requires no real suspension of disbelief, since we know, right off the bat, that people don’t perceive the world in this way. This immediately puts the viewer into a curious and receptive state of mind. Lots can happen, now, such as great leaps of logic (as per Keats’s Negative Capability) with nary an issue, all the while animation’s traditional audience lets the director get away with archetypes (as opposed to fully fleshed-out characters) that would really drag on a standard film, thus opening up some fresh artistic routes. These include imagistic (as opposed to literary) narrative, pretense, meta-fiction, the ‘freeing’ up of characters to be less-than-deep, and other experimental fluff that, when turned outward, as opposed to being forced to subsist on these elements alone, can actually be done well, and point to the future not only of animation, but in the cross-currents of cinema, as well.