Anime is roughly said Japanese cartoon. Originally based on manga drawing style, now anime is everything that is animated and Japanese. It's also everything animated in manga style.

The first anime I have ever seen was the Pokémon TV series (year ~2000), which is absolutely horrible and a very bad example of anime. I didn't care back then.

Anyway, when I was in ~7th class (year ~2002), I was in a TV talk show "Sauna" in an episode about intelligent people. I met Marek14 (who is AFAIK an important person for Czech otaku and also is a former student of the gymnasium I'm attending) there and he has shown me some manga.

About the same time, a group of weird people who were part of Mensa, probably were satanists and were otakus, used to go to my school's building. I got the movie Ghost in the Shell from them, but only watched it in 2006.

All around, added together with my affinity to Japan that originated in 3rd class (when we had a week long project about Japanese culture and went to some exhibition), I was fated to become an otaku.

In February 2006, I was playing a freeware fighting game Little Fighter 2. I got some custom characters from the Internets and took interest in two of them - Mahoro and Minawa. I Googled and figured out they're anime characters from anime Mahoromatic.

Meanwhile, they aired Princess Mononoke in TV. It was on of the best movies I ever saw.

So I went and downloaded the anime. It took more than a month to get both series. About a week later, a friend asked me to get him Hellsing anime (probably because he likes vampires).

Since that time, I watch anime. I started watching some new series this year. The first series I watched in realtime (a day or two after it's aired in Japan - depending on the speed of the fansubber groups) was Claymore, aired April through October 2007.

I'm learning Japanese now. Anime is also a reason for it. Who knows - maybe someday I will translate animes to Czech and English.



John Beak, 16.11.2007
Edit (few days later): Thanks Satori and myself for correcting the English a lil bit. Still not as good as it could be :3