Is Anime Still in Favour among University Students?

Anime is widely known and has a numerous army of admirers all over the world. It originated in Japan almost 70 years ago, but, as time went by, this style of animation has won the audience, become recognised worldwide and still has not lost its appeal. The authors of the article aim to discover whether it continues to be popular today among the students of one particular Russian university and indicate the reasons for that. The methodology used in the paper involves literature analysis and synthesis, generalization, comparative analysis, statistical analysis, and a survey. The sample of the study consisted of 170 undergraduate students aged 17 to 20 from the Northern (Arctic) Federal University named after M.V. Lomonosov (Arkhangelsk, Russia). The received results demonstrated that most students got acquainted with this genre while being at school but hitherto favour it. Anime, being an incentive for many young people, inspires them to study the history, traditions and culture of Japan and compare it with other countries, thus, being a part of the global anime community. The survey also revealed the main reasons of anime popularity such as a fascinating plot, variety of genres, bright images of the characters and identified the filmmaker with the highest number of votes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]