The comment about hentai was in response to a prior post. For most of us, it's unlikely to be seen much, if at all; but the "cartoon" form in earlier smutty stuff was probably much more common than many here are likely to have known about.

The "rise" of anime is most evident, for me, at the last few remaining book stores, where once one found occasional decent books about art and artists of various kinds. As a specific case, my nearest Barnes slowly cut the "art shelves" space about in half over a period of a few years, but in the past 3 -5 years has tripled what was left of it, replacing half of the little that remained with anime and then multiplying the "how to draw anime" by 5x or 6x so that now the offerings are pretty much reduced to only anime and a few "Dover clipart" books.

It is fairly obvious that the ambition to "learn how to make it" is common enough to make "how-to" books about anime profitable. My only other reference for how popular it may be is the existence of a couple of TV kid shows where the style is obvious; but since we only get our TV via a tiny antenna my only conclusion is that anime is "slightly less popular" than the "paid commercial announcement" art form.

The kid shows we can see are generally "wholesome with moral messages." One suspects that the fairly simple "stylization" of the form lends itself to fairly economical production of animated video, and of course it's the "message" that's important, rather than the style in which it's displayed. From the little that we see of it, it's being fairly decently used.

Reports are that it has been a strong influence in the design of some computer games, but I've had little exposure to that genre.

John