what got you interested in anime?
 

How did you start watching anime? Here's my story :
I was just bored and started looking for a good show. And I saw an anime series. I was just amazed at the show. My first anime series that I ever watched was Inuyasha. I was 8 years old.

Mm, for me, my cousin was responsible pretty much AND technology. I remember I went to my cousin's house when I was like 10 and he was watching anime (well what I thought just another cartoon). Thought it looked better than regular American cartoons and wanted to watch more. My cousin gave me CDs of Inuyasha every time I saw him. It basically turned into crack for me at that age lolz...always wanting to go to my cousin's house hoping he would have the next few episodes of Inuyasha ready for me.

The other reason that got me into anime was technology. I didn't have the technology to obtain anime so I always relied on my cousin. But when I got older bit by bit, I got my own PC and DSL and became able to get my own anime.

Moe... Girls and panty shots... and good drawing...;)

I started my anime watching "career" when I was 9 years old. My first series were Pokemon, Sailor Moon, InuYasha, and Gundam Wing etc. I was intrigued by the story, characters, the relationships they had with each other, and the incredible feeling of watching their adventures, struggles, and mishaps each episode. This was when I was watching anime on TV at the time. Years later in my late teens, I got my own computer and started getting into subs more than dubs and I watch anime on my comp now.

It's the elements of story, combined with great characters, and the lessons/message you learn from them is what made me stick with anime all these years. Art is great and everything but an interesting story added with amazing connectable characters are what drew me to anime.

Well I all ways like sat. morning cartoons and then late one night of the sysf channel there was Iira and was hooked ever since

I'm sure everyone watched an anime or two on TV when they were little, and I'm also sure a lot of people didn't even register the origin of the show.

As for me, when I was around 13 I started reading the manga of DBZ on my own because I heard the anime was horrendous compared to it, and DBZ being basically half my childhood I was interested. That pretty much got me into contact with manga and made me aware of the japanese origin of these shows.
After that I just jumped from show to show, first I read the big 3, then I started watching less mainstream anime, and when I wanted to realize it I was already watching anime seasonally.

I still have a fuckhuge backlog though.

Was looking for something different from American cartoons and movies and anything else.

Came to Japanese anime.

I believe it was the action scenes, and the unique animation style that was different from the american cartoons that got me hooked. That was when I was around 5 or 6 years old so it was a very long time.

I grew up with Dragon Ball, Doraemon, and several other localized Japanese animation. I grew conscious of the genre around the time I went to junior high. After that, I started watching a Singaporean chinese dub Evangelion despite not knowing a single word that is said (though I kind of can tell that it's not your average action mecha). Looking back now, that was the first time I was introduced to my first waifu Rei (I believe a lot others share similar story to this :p). So you could say it's the heavy-themed Evangelion that got me interested in anime.

The first time I deliberately decide to go and seek out an anime to watch I ended up watching Chobits and Ai Yori Aoshi. From there, I grew to know the existence of fansubs but only able to attain them through proxy (my friend) because I was such a noob of internet (see my join date? that hasn't even been 4 years since I started to lvl up my internet mastery).

I grew to like a lot of the other genres, but I since I have my roots on both servicey and heavy-themed anime, I don't hate on most shows I watch.

My anime origins are pretty similar to a lot of people here, started watching pokemon when I was about 8 on Sky One before school. It got me quite interested since the animation style and story was so different to the other cartoons airing at the time. Shortly afterwards I discovered Sailor Moon and watched that too before it stopped airing.

A few years later in my early teens I discovered the wonders of the Internet! And that opened a whole load of doors to different anime! Haven't looked back since :D

Not everyone had that experience. I started watching anime in my fifties when my daughter brought home a borrowed copy of Princess Mononoke. I had watched Disney, Looney Tunes, and Rocky & Bullwinkle in my youth (1950s and 1960s) and the occasional animated feature like Allegro non Troppo as an adult. i came back to animation when I had a child. We watched the usual mix of Disney features like The Lion King (still the most beautiful animated work I've ever seen), Pokemon, and Nicktoons. But it was my introduction to Japanese animation through Mononoke Hime that led to watching anime.

Almost all my first anime are mecha oriented, anime such as Robotech, Lezarion, Voltes V, Astroboy (the 1980's version), it's mostly the action that I liked. My change of pace probably came with Little Princess Sarah - an anime I enjoyed for the story alone, and I liked Sarah too of course. :)

My anime interests are already varied (Rozen Maiden, Fate Stay Night, Higurashi) by the time I joined this forum.

when i was young, always watched cartoons and English-dubbed animes on TV, then started to watch subbed ones by borrowing tapes, vcd and dvd from friends

later came the invention of internet, finally get to watch the ones i like :)

my earliest animes should be Robotech, Doraemon, Thundercats etc from TV

What drawn me to anime, might be either Sailermoon (morning show, Eng dub) or DragonballZ (Sunday).

Pretty much the 1990's anime hook me in.

Anime was more interesting than the stuff on T.V. so easy choice for me.

A combinations of things got me interested in anime.

I'm part of the Toonami generation who watched shows like Dragon Ball Z growing up. The first anime I watched without knowing it was a foreign work was Pokemon while the first series I saw that I knew was from Japan was either Naruto or Inuyasha. For a while I thought that's all there was to anime until someone showed me Negima!; my impressionable mid-teenage self didn't get a good opinion of anime because of all the "girly" fanservice. However, at this point I knew I liked anime even if it was limited only to the action genre. Or to be more accurate, I thought action was all there was to anime (because my feeble mind equated Negima! with cartoon porn and I didn't know what hentai was. No seriously, I didn't!).

However, it was still an interest in anime nonetheless. Yet it wasn't until I watched the Japanese version of Cardcaptor Sakura where my tastes finally started to resemble what they look like today (and part of my namesake. The other half of my name being from Fruits Basket).

So yeah. A slew of things about anime got me interested in it.

While I was watching cartoons as a kid, I was suddenly captivated by the intricate character designs. So I switched that change and anime grows on stories that were more interesting over the course of years.

I was 11 or 12 when I watched my first anime, Fushigi Yuugi. My friends were commenting how handsome the characters are and were practically fangirling over them. So I joined in and I got addicted to Fushigi Yuugi because of the bishies. Then I started to watch other animes. For several years, I watched animes solely to watch those beautiful faces. It's kind of funny now that I looked back...Has been a decade since then. In those days, I even watched animes with bloody awful plot just to satisfy my hunger for bishies.

I was a child in the 1970ies in Austria. The children's programme of that time included barely any domestic series; most of them were foreign. Two countries dominated: the USA and Japan. I was always interested where the shows I watched came from, and the Japanese ones had a very recognisible style. Thigs I watched: World Masterpiece Series shows, Kimba the White Lion, Sindbad, Captain Future...

I wonder if you notice a trend? That's right: none of them were set in Japan. The first series that was set in Japan I remember seeing in the children's programme was Attaku no. 1, a show about a female volleyball team. It aired in the early nineties - by the time it was over 20 years old. So was I. Yes, I was still watching anime in the children's programme in the nineties (when I could). They changed some of the first names (e.g. Kozue --> Mila), but not others. The last names remained in tact, as far as I can recall.

By that time, I was already watching any anime I could. That involved: late night airings, airings on music channels (MTV, Viva), airings on cultural channels, cinema and buying VHS movies. The late night airings were the only ones that would often be subbed. I loved that. My first anime in the Japanese original was the TV-series (not the movies) of Silent Möbius. I have a soft spot for that series for that reason. (They also showed Dragon Knight... CAN. NOT. UNSEE.)

In 2009 I discovered fansubs. I've never watched (and bought) that much anime in my life!

Fanservice.

Well, not really. It's more like... I enjoy picturing myself as the main protagonist. I enjoy my life a lot, but the life in anime seems better and mure fun. For example, Code Geass.