Every industry has its own vocabulary, its own jargon. Speak the language well and everyone will know you've been around the industry for a while and respect you for your experience. Speak only in industry jargon and everyone will start to purposefully avoid you. You may feel as if you're being avoided by others because they see you as an annoying know-it-all, but believe me, its really out of respect and for fear that their feeble heads will explode with the concentrated stream of information you are spouting.
As an industry, animation is no different. At first glance, it may seem like child's play, but using a pencil to draw on paper is a very technical trade (once you become an adult) and therefore, by default, quite a few specialized words have developed. Because RIAP started as (and still is!) an American animation studio, many of the terms we use are standard in America. Many of the terms trace their origins back to Disney's Golden Age (30's and 40's), but when RIAP decided to specialize in anime style animation, we discovered that some techniques used in anime have no counterpart in the US. As a result, we were forced to invent our own English terms to describe these "non-standard" Japanese techniques. It's spooky, but as I talk with the other studios here in LA, some of these terms are being picked up! Study up on these definitions and if you string all of them into one long sentence, I'll swear that you had worked for RIAP before!

RIAP specific terms Slide-in, slide-out: Why spend all that time, effort, and money animating the legs of your character walking onto and off of the screen? Just move the camera in closer so that their legs are cut-off and just slide them on and off the screen! Great solution for those tight budgets and short deadlines. Explosion background: Isn't it enough that some poor villain's head exploded in a big, fiery plume of flame? It would be enough if it was animated in America, but not in Japan! In anime, all that blood, and bits of brain and bone and light have to be painted on, and in most cases, onto another background as well! Emotional Japanese Wind: We could be in a submarine 20,000 leagues under the sea (e.g. NADIA) but there will always be the divine wind that ruffles the hair and clothes of our hero if anything dramatic ever happens. (The Wind also blows a lot in video games.) Recycle: In the US, when a character is doing the exact same motion over and over in a scene (e.g. waving a flag), this is known as a "cycle". When an anime character is doing the exact same motion over and over, but in two separate episodes, this is known as "recycle". Kenardian particles: RIAP once had an animator who would animate a single speck of dust if he thought it would make it look more "realistic like "AKIRA" (in his words). These sub-atomic particles are nearly impossible to paint and often just got lost among the other, neighboring atoms. Not yet officially recognized by physicists because of the controversy surrounding their existence (no one has actually seen one of these yet), these particles are named after him. Streaming (or Speeding) Background: It's always good to have your anime characters run fast or be able to fly. That way, the background painter doesn't have to paint out such dull things as walls, random buildings, telephone poles, etc. Instead, he can just paint a smear of colors on a long board which zips past in the background! Animate off-screen: Animate off-screen? What the point?! Who'll ever see it? The real cool thing about animating off-screen, as opposed to on-screen, is that it looks like you've done animation, but you haven't lifted your pencil! For example, say you have any mech from GUNDAM. That's pretty hard to draw, much less animate! Now suppose that mech has to turn around. Better yet, suppose you are the animator and this has to be done in the next hour. What would you rather do? 1) Have someone build the plastic kit, hold it up and spin it at 10 degree rotations while you frantically sketch what it looks like at each rotation? or 2) Fire a stabilizing lateral thruster causing the mech to drift off screen and then, a few seconds later, have it drift back in again only now its completely turned around? The choice is obvious: Save your sanity! Do the "work" off-screen! Emotional speed lines: Regular speed lines are used to indicate something zipping around. These were invented by comic strip artists who have to work with still frames only. Say that a baseball is traveling from right to left across a comic strip panel. The artist draws a baseball in the middle of the panel, but without the speed lines, the reader has no idea which direction the ball is going. To show that the ball is moving from right to left, a few horizontal lines are drawn to the right of the ball making the ball look like it might have hair (but no one seems to see it that way). When used to accent extreme shock or fear in anime, these lines are usually very thin, straight, long and vibrating. I suppose one is to "feel" the intensity of the emotion being projected by the character by actually seeing it streaming out of him. Emotional background: Did you ever notice how many backgrounds aren't real in anime? There's a lot of them! Here's a case of fanboys claiming anime is more "realistic" when, in general, that's just not true. The more exaggerated the show, the fewer realistic backgrounds there are! Don't believe me? Just ask yourself what happens when an anime character experiences "love-at-first-sight": the background suddenly changes to flowers or big shimmering balls start floating in mid-air. This is NOT realistic! Neither are lighting bolts of shock, flocks of flying birds or kanji or Cup Ramen (as in CITYHUNTER) floating behind a character's head. Maybe I'm speaking out of turn here, but none of these things has ever happened to me. Although amazingly effective, emotional backgrounds still have not caught on in America! I really think its because people "feel" them rather than "see" them. (continued on next page)