I My Me Strawberry Eggs is great for the cross dressing crowd to laugh at. How far would you go to get a job basically.
Kashi Mashi, for the gender changing, what would you do if you woke up after near dying to find out they rebuilt you as the opposite sex?
Tenshi na Konamaiki, what if some outside force changed you into the other gender with you never knowing if you could go back?
Kampfer, what if you were altered by an alien force to fight in some manner of elimination contest, and your 'power' converted you to the other gender, and you had no ability to control the moments of transformation?
Kamen no Maid Guy is hillarious. A guy that is incredibly strong, a body guard and also a maid.
Ran the Samurai girl, feudal Japan, and everything is as normal with the exception the lead person is a samurai that is female.
Doujin Work, where the lead is a girl that likes writing perverted doujins.
B Gata H Kei, all about a girl that is dedicated to something more like what a lot think most teen boys might dream about.
Ore no Imouto, basically about a guy's sister and her obsession with playing hentai games meant for boys.
Yep, the nice thing about anime, is it is not afraid to go anywhere if it can be made funny.
Homosexuals, no problem, transgender, no problem, sex changes and cross dressing, no problem. They willingly will exploit religion if it makes for an interesting plot notion. And they don't worry about the details being accurate as they clearly are just using the parts that are fun. They willingly push buttons most will not go anywhere near. Age range differences are not an issue.
I recall the trouble that was caused by a 500 year old vampire drawn to look like a loli in half dressed scenes acting like a randy adult.
Hey she's not a minor, she's 500 years old eh.
One show has a girl, she's very loli looking, and yet she is also sharing her soul with a tree. So she's not 100% human, and she is not from earth and she's hundreds of years old. But she's drawn like a loli.
One girl is a tree spirit that comes into physical form as a young girl in a carving an art student had made. She knows nothing about being a human, or how to behave, and just happens to look like a school girl.
I have seen it all. The most outrageous, was a pop can, that when you drink from it, becomes a young girl.
North American cartoons simply have absolutely NOTHING worth interesting me. South Park, crudely drawn chibi humans that are rude and crude and spouting dated humour. PASS. The Simpsons, trendy humour and the usual lame themes, father figure that is a doofus, under achieving son, not noticed daughter, weird wife, and dated gags. PASS. Cartoons have sucked since the 70s.
If not for Pixar and well made feature films, non anime based animation would be utterly without value.
You can compare anime and cartoons by saying anime is to theatre, what cartoons are to YouTube.
But so much of what makes cartoons what they are is cultural, or rather the culture cartoons are made in is basically so full of ->-bleeped-<-.
In North America, it is ok to state homosexuality is something you can be openly and not suffer from, we don't want it in our cartoons, because 'think of the children'. Ok, so if homosexuality reality isn't something society should be beating up, then why the sudden turn around in cartoons? It's because, the reality is mainstream hetero society does NOT accept the homosexual crowd in spirit. They do it because they were made to legally accept it.
That's probably the harshest truth of all. All the acceptance we often like to claim is there, is a thin veneer facade at best in a lot of cases.
In Sailor Moon, Sailor Uranus is a dyke lesbian and Sailor Neptune is her girlie lesbian lover. In North America though, they translated her to be 'a cousin'. The never got aired in North America season 5 the Sailor Star lights are GUYS that transform into female scouts wearing very provocative hot pants. I guess they just couldn't come up with anything to sort that one out in the 90s.
Times do change though. Today you can find an increasing number of anime where girls apparently have nipples.
They are no longer using pantie shots for fan service, now the girls spend plenty of time on the show with nothing on at all.
But I am sure most of the content is limited to the DVD retail sales. And because of the internet, your capacity to buy items not routinely on sale or broadcast on North American channels has meant the anime fan is not forced to care what is culturally accepted in North America.