Previously on isoul.uk: When Renting a Movie Was an Event — the ritual, artwork and scarcity of rented VHS tapes made individual films matter in a way that streaming has made difficult to remember.
I watched anime before I really knew what anime was.
Like a lot of children growing up in the 1990s, Pokémon was simply a cartoon on television. Sailor Moon was another show. I wasn’t thinking about where they came from, how they were produced or whether they belonged to a separate medium.
Then Toonami came along and changed the way I looked at all of it. In the UK, it began as a Cartoon Network programming block in 2000 before becoming a standalone channel in 2003; my memory is of that broader Toonami era rather than every programme belonging to one schedule.
Before the label mattered #
As a child, the categories were simple.
If something was animated, it was a cartoon.
I didn’t need a taxonomy.
That meant Japanese shows could appear alongside everything else I watched without feeling particularly exotic. Pokémon became enormous culturally, but I still wasn’t sitting there thinking, “I am now an anime fan.”
The shift happened when I started seeing enough different shows to recognise that there was a whole world behind them.
Dragon Ball Z #
Dragon Ball Z was one of the obvious gateways.
It felt different from a lot of the animation I had grown up with. Stories stretched over episodes. Characters trained, failed, returned stronger and spent absurd amounts of time preparing for confrontations.
The scale kept increasing.
It also had the perfect school-age quality of giving everybody something to talk about afterwards.
You weren’t just watching a programme. You were keeping up.
Tenchi Muyo and Zoids #
What made the period important wasn’t only Dragon Ball Z.
Shows like Tenchi Muyo and Zoids showed me that this wasn’t one strange programme that had somehow made it onto television. There were completely different kinds of stories coming from the same broader culture.
That was the point where “anime” started becoming meaningful to me as its own thing.
I didn’t yet know how much there was.
The internet would eventually solve that problem.
Television was still the gatekeeper #
Even after I became interested, television decided what I could actually see.
If a channel licensed something, I could watch it.
If it didn’t, then as far as I was concerned the show might as well not exist.
Schedules mattered. Repeats mattered. Missing an episode mattered.
It is difficult to explain that to somebody growing up with entire seasons available instantly.
The frustration also created curiosity.
If these few programmes were reaching British television, what else was out there?
Then the gate moved online #
By around 2007, broadcasters were no longer my only guide. I went from watching anime that happened to appear on television to deliberately searching for it online. That next phase deserves its own story.
Looking back #
My path into anime wasn’t one big discovery.
It happened in stages.
First it was just cartoons.
Then Toonami showed me there were more.
Then the internet showed me there were far more than television had ever suggested.
For roughly the next decade, anime became one of my main hobbies.
Life changed later. Adult responsibilities grew and I stopped following new seasons as obsessively.
But I never really left it behind.
There are still shows I can return to years later and immediately remember why I loved them.
And it all started with television quietly showing me that cartoons could be something much bigger than I had assumed.