Even anime and manga databases don’t distinguish between these media lately…

I’ve mostly written this post for people who’ve stumbled here rather blindly, but with anime and manga databases such as AniList not really distinguishing between Japanese, Chinese and Korean works (plus – for existing anime and manga fans – all that self-deprecating joking about “those Chinese cartoons” when you’re actually talking about Japanese works), it can really help to have a refresher.

Note before we begin: These are my personal definitions, so other fans of these media may have a different understanding of these topics than I do.

What’s the difference between anime and manga?

I remember puzzling over this dichotomy when I was just starting out with manga. I’d seen anime at this point and contextualised it as “cartoons”, but didn’t know they were Japanese until this point. To be fair, even people who already have their own understanding of anime and manga mislabel it all the time (even as a joke), as noted earlier in the post.

So to put it simply, anime is animation at least partially attributable to Japanese creators whereas manga is the comic book format with the same style. Both come in a variety of styles, but typically people will point to things like “visual indicators of emotion, such as sweatdrops and popping veins” and “large eyes” as part of the anime style. (Note many anime and manga don’t have a lot of these indicators and some works not from Japan also have these, though, so they’re not guaranteed.) The two have a lot of crossover, due to a marketing strategy known as the “media mix”, but the two each have some unique works.

Sidenote: It should be apparent by now Animanga Spellbook comes from “anime” and “manga”. I’d like to talk about both equally, but I’ve found blogging about manga is much harder to do because 1) there’s less of an audience for it, traffic and search engine optimisation-wise, and 2) I tend to read several chapters of manga at a time and promptly forget about what I was reading if I wasn’t taking notes along the way…

The reason why the first note exists is some people use “anime” to encompass the entire style…This might work in some cases, but in other cases, such as when they include “manga” as a subset of “anime”...that really gets my goat!

“Cartoons”, in the Anglophone (i.e. English-speaking) world, tends to imply a target audience of children to some, but both Anglophone works which would be considered “cartoons” and anime have wide audiences ranging from children to adults. Also note cartoons influence anime and vice versa – early Disney, particularly Mickey Mouse, is said to have influenced the overall anime style that is known today and on the flip side, you have, say, Star Versus the Forces of Evil, a Disney show which can be classified under the magical girl genre (a genre which used to be endemic to anime and manga before people started categorising things like Miraculous Ladybug and whatnot under it too – as a magical girl fan myself, I’m not complaining).

Generally, manga storylines form the basis of anime, although there are many exceptions of the reverse and series with a source not from an anime or a manga (e.g. an anime may be a novel adaption) also exist, and manga doesn’t always appear in a proper “book” format (see, for example, web manga).

As an example, take One Punch Man.

It goes from this as a web manga:

…to another manga (reworked by Yusuke Murata) and then, with Murata’s redesigns, it goes to this as an anime (for season 1):

What’s the difference between manga, manhua and manhwa?

Manga are the Japanese version of comic books, whereas manhua are the Chinese version and manhwa are the Korean version.

Notably, some Korean works, such as God of High School, have a notable presence as “webtoons” (as opposed to being called “web manhwa”). This is because they were…well, posted to a platform called Webtoon first.

Since I’ve studied simplified Chinese and Japanese for about 10 years each, plus grew up with traditional Chinese, I can tell which language is which – if I can’t parse what the title might mean, it’s Korean! (I’m half joking there.) With that said, manhua is merely the phonetic pronunciation of how one would say “manga” in Chinese (bar the tone marks you would need to pronounce it) and presumably that works the same way with Korean as well.

What’s the difference between anime, aeni and donghua?

Anime I explained earlier in the post, but donghua are actual “Chinese cartoons” and aeni are the Korean version.

Chinese animation used to have a reputation of being rather shoddy and “barely animated”, but there are also “barely animated” anime as well. On the flip side, Chinese animation has also gotten its own acclaim over the past few decades, enough to warrant Japanese dubs for some of them (such as Mo Dao Zu Shi/The Founder of Diabolism). Likewise, Chinese dubs – in both simplified and traditional – exist for some anime.

It can get to the point that when faced with an English-localised title you’ve never seen, you can’t tell the origin of the work…and that’s a double-edged sword. This is probably not helped by the fact when works get adapted for other audiences (including through translation), their names can be changed to something with little to no correlation to the original name.

Sidenote: If you’re wondering why things get changed in translation (e.g. in some extreme cases, some translated works are written as if the work is set in a completely different country to the original), someone…somewhere…must have decided the existing thing was difficult to handle for the new audience and so they get revamped accordingly. This is “localisation” and, if you’d like to learn more about this, I mention a bit about it in this post on a supposedly “untranslatable manga” here.

Note not every localisation choice is in the hands of the translator, so sometimes fingers get pointed in the wrong direction/s for localisation choices like this.

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So, was this eye-opening for you or not surprising? (Maybe I aimed too low in terms of audience…?)

Keep seeking the magic,

Aria.