So. Everyone.
Why do you like anime?
What sets it apart from other mediums for you?
I enjoy the stories that seem like they would never be told in any other medium.
In anime, you can get away with things you can't in live-action, either due to budget constraints or technology or other difficulties. It opens up new possibilities in genre.
In anime, your series generally run 11-13 or 22-26 episodes. It means writers and directors are more willing to experiment. I don't think anime on a while is more "original" than any other medium, but on the whole, it's far more open to the possibility of creativity and original than live-action shows or movies. And if you don't like what your favorite directors or writers or seiyuus are doing one season, they'll probably doing something completely different the next season.
Along the same lines, because most series are so short (compared to Western series), they're often made to be wrapped up in the same amount of time. You get full stories that deliver a satisfying conclusion in one or two cours. I find this (not as a rule, but more often than not) results in tighter writing than Western TV series, which can drag out for far more seasons than the writers have ideas.
I enjoy the themes. I'm not sure if it's the culture of Japan or the possible aforementioned more "open"-ness to new and crazy ideas, but anime seems to conquer a lot of themes that I care about that is often ignored in Western media. Particularly around growing up. A lot of these themes are probably addressed in YA novels in the rest, but seem to be ignored in media and movies, and even then, they're often ignored as far as their extension to adults.
One major such theme is loneliness, isolation, and the struggle to connect with other people. Even in literary fiction in the West, I've rarely seen the simple battle to relate to and understand one another tackled in the same way as anime like
Neon Genesis Evangelion and
Serial Experiments Lain handle it. And it's not just those, but so many anime seem to deal with this theme that seems to me to be so missing from Western fiction, or at least not expressed to the extent that I wish.
Few Western directors or authors seem to delve into surrealism and magical realism so much as anime makers do, and these are genres I love. Stuff like
Mawaru Penguindrum or
FLCL. Where else would you possibly find fiction like this? Maybe in Latin American fiction by Marquez or something like that, but who, outside of David Lynch, directs such things in the West? There's a reason he's such a popular director in Japan.
Overall, I think, to me, it's just the kinds of stories I value in anime feel like stories that no Western media are telling. Maybe a lot of that is a cultural thing, and a disconnect between my own values and Western culture and the stories it likes to tell. Many of the things that appeal to me, and to which I connect, it seems, are unique to anime. Many of these things are themes I want to write about myself. So I'm thankful to directors and writers like Hideaki Anno and Kunihiko Ikuhara and Yoji Enokido and Akiyuki Shinbo.
To this day, the only work of fiction that has truly and completely changed my life is an anime. I know for certain that prose, too, is capable of such stories. I just can't seem to find them. And I've certainly been looking.