Screenwriting - Comparison. American Animation Screenwriters vs. Japanese Anime Screenwriters

Pros and Cons

JAPAN:

Pro: In anime you're guaranteed a beautiful finished product.

Con: As a screenwriter, your creativity and imagination is limited, For in the words of Thomas Romain himself, as far as writing goes,

"putting the story in images is the work of the director, not the screenwriter. Japanese scripts are very light on description, only dialogue. You're not writing a novel. A script is a guideline for the director."

There you go. Literary description by screenwriters only exists in the good old US of A. What I write is a new American tradition. Description-Heavy, Novel-Like Scripts. Because the Japanese and French-Japanese do not bother. All the better reason to CONTINUE writing script WITH heavy description.

AMERICA:

Pro: You can write as much description and be as novelistic as you want, according to Jeffrey Scott, teacher of animation writing in the chapter of his book How to Write For Animation, about description.

Con: A lot of American Animation Looks overtly simple and not complex enough to match the literature of the script most of the time.

Con: Most American scripts don't use much description either, they cover the action and motion through storyboards and don't leave a lot of it up to the writers. Leave description to the novelists, right?