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Nerd culture seems to lack interest in American-produced animation
I notice that anime holds most nerds' interest more than American stuff does. I've always wondered why, and from what I gather, the Japanese are better at catering to adult/adolescent sensibilities than the Americans are. (Though to be honest, I'm pretty sure that I don't HAVE what most people would consider to be adolescent/adult sensibilities)
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Avatar, MLP, Adventure Time, etc have large fandoms. It's not as though American cartoons are completely ignored by nerddom. Granted, they don't have their own conventions and things and there aren't really "American animation fans" the same way there are "anime fans" but I think that's mostly historical. (Anime conventions nowadays have plenty of non-anime-related stuff anyway.)
For what it's worth the main reason why I (used to) watch more anime than American stuff is just that I'd rather watch something short with a definitive ending than watch 24 episodes a year for an indefinite period of time.
Isn't an American TV season 22 episodes now?
Also the DC Animated Movie universe exists and has a fandom (albeit a very small one).
There's just no dedicated output of decent animated stuff (ie new anime every 13 weeks, but there's no equivalent to the Fall premiere season for live-action TV shows in the US), you can't be a dedicated fan if there's no material to fan over.
And in general a lot of American animated stuff is just ADD nonsense with no clear direction (Breadwinners, Clarence etc), nobody's going to stick around and care for that.
EDIT: Also the system is overly centralized, it's either Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon with a dash of Disney Channel (whose last work that managed a fandom for a while being Gravity Falls). If studios had more of a presence, this wouldn't be a problem. But they're mostly just commissioned to do whatever the channel wants, unlike with pitches and development programs for live-action TV.
I think there's also the fact that there's more internet "infrastructure" catering to English-language anime fans than there is to English-language American animation fans.
I think this is partly due to enforcement (or lack thereof) of copyright infringement takedowns, or the threat thereof. Not all of it, though -- and a good question would be whether this was the factor that allowed the English-speaking anime fandom to build a critical mass in the first place.
Isn't it so that American animation is made with children in mind, while Japanese animation is made with... well, children in mind, but nobody told that to American viewers and the older fanbase stuck?
There are actually a bunch of anime shows oriented toward older audiences.
There have been pitches and development programs for animation. If not for Hanna-Barbera and Cartoon Network's "What A Cartoon" program, your childhood cartoon experience would have played out quite differently, for instance. And its mastermind, Fred Seibert, got tapped by Nickelodeon to do "Oh Yeah! Cartoons", which spawned The Fairly OddParents and the unjustly short-lived ChalkZone and My Life as a Teenage Robot.
And Nick is so desperate for new ideas that they were accepting pitches from SDCC-goers.
I guess I just tend to prefer American stuff to Japanese stuff because, well, it strikes more of a nerve with me. I wish Japanese animation talent weren't so visually locksteppy, and, to be honest, the toyetic stuff that got brought over here in the late '90s and early 2000s never really appealed to me and I think it unfairly soured my perception of anime. I did like what I saw of Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt, which is infused with American influence, watched the whole of Madoka and enjoyed it, and I want to watch more Miyazaki (Spirited Away is great).
How many of those pitches would actually get made into anything, though? And they still need CN or Nick to actually get off the ground, so that doesn't contradict his "overly entralized" comment.
I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds like you should look at some anime with better animation.
I have never heard of cartoons from one particular country being harder to pirate than another, except maybe like, really unpopular stuff that just doesn't get uploaded to many places.
Visually locksteppy = similar aesthetic throughout things.
Also, I should expand on what I said. A lot of US animated shows ARE the result of pitches, and not just through incubators like WAC and OY!C either. The method of "we have the ideas, you have the hands" production isn't as dominant as it once was...
(It's also why TV animation studios don't have house styles anymore)
^^ That sounds like a good thing.
What's a good thing?
And pitches still need those major companies to get made, no?
That has basically nothing to do with the actual animation talent, though. And the thing I linked to is probably an exception anyway, considering that it looks distinct even from the previous adaptation of the same manga.
You can probably attribute this to the character designer's preference, but the guy who designed the 2013 one was the character designer for like, three shows, so it doesn't look too similar to too many things.
Anonus might be talking about how anime character art style is more similar across the board than western animation art style, which is pretty much just a bunch of different styles with a common geographic origin.
That's probably generally accurate, I just like pointing something out using Yozakura.
And sometimes it's really "designer style" rather than "house style". Like how the Heartcatch Precure characters have Umakoshi's aesthetic instead of the aesthetic of other Precure's character designs.
Regarding "catering to adult/adolescent sensibilities", I think Young Justice getting randomly put on hiatus and it's schedule messed around before the network decided it wasn't popular enough to keep going or whatever might be relevant here. Anime rarely gets its broadcast schedule messed up like that, possibly since a lot of them are aired on multiple networks anyway, (the only sorta recent example I can think of was Madoka Magica getting delayed, and that was due to the earthquake and tsunami rather than the whims of executives). And the cancellation meant there were still unresolved plotlines, because Weisman is all "leave things hanging and hope we get another season", which from what I can tell is reflective of plot-heavy American television in general. I recall an image macro with a big group of cartoons that never got a conclusion, either because of cancellation, or writers who can't into resolution. Yeah, this happens with anime too, but those tend to be "go read the source material", and besides really long-running ones, there isn't as much "suspense" about how long a show will go.
(I didn't watch Young Jusitce, this is just from what I gather.
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That's a trend, that's not what I talk about when I say a "house style". The only animation studio in America that still seems to have one is Walt Disney Animation Studios.
What about Dreamworks and the "Dreamworks face"?
They switched to CG and have only done four super-eclectic movies since (Rapunzel one, Frozen, Wreck-It-Ralph and Big Hero 6).
Life would be better without Fairly Odd-Parents, then and now.
I actually kind of disagree with this, similarly to what you've said there's a thick-line doughy character archetype that's pretty popular right now (Clarence, The 7D, Steven Universe*, Uncle Grandpa, Gravity Falls) but it's really popular to just create lots of characters who look nothing alike and are just in the same show (Gumball being the most annoying example considering how decent the material can be).
*I actually liked Steven Universe and I have no idea why I dropped it now
That's a stock facial expression, not a house style. A house style is a unified style of character designs and, depending on the studio, backgrounds too. DreamWorks Animation has no one house style.
Walt Disney Animation Studios does have a house style. It's an evolution of the Glen Keane/Disney Renaissance look. It's not as obvious because they stick to CGI now, but it's there.
FOP or no FOP, be glad that the days of the "cartoon mills" dominating American animation are over. (And, personally, I'm glad Hanna-Barbera was whipped back into shape, after so many years of malaise!)
To be honest, I don't see how having a "house style" is a negative the way you're suggesting. Not after experiencing some of IDW's Transformers comics and their "draw however you like" method.
(These are all from the same issue. Granted, the other issues I've read weren't as horribly inconsistent, but still.)
And having consistency amongst your own output is still better than aping trends, since with the former it's at least still people and groups doing their own thing.
It's not negative to me. I'm just saying that it is, for the most part, a thing of the past.
^^ That's kind of like if you were playing the NES Mega Man, and the sprites would randomly switch to match the pictures in the US box art and the Captain N show.