My Anime Phase Deserved More Respect

It didn’t just teach me stories. It taught me how to feel the spaces between words.

Anime was never about trends for me.

It wasn’t about being quirky.
It wasn’t about joining a fanbase or trying to be the cool, cultural hybrid.
It was about language… and the things language could never fully hold.

I grew up in Saudi, and we had our own anime diet ... dubbed beautifully into Arabic, stitched with values and heart. Grendizer. Future Boy Conan. Treasure Island. They weren’t just adventures ... they were moral stories, slower, richer, and more emotional than the loud Western cartoons people in the States grew up with.

So years later, when I was living abroad and found a tiny shop that sold Japanese anime with subtitles…
I walked in, and it felt like I had stepped into a candy store for the soul.

I still remember the first movie I saw: Akira.
It melted my brain.
Then Robotech. Sol Bianca. Wolf’s Rain. The list kept growing. But it wasn’t the action or even the visuals that hooked me. It was the feeling.
The way they spoke.

Because for the first time, I was hearing Japanese characters speak… in Japanese.

And suddenly I realized…
All those dubbed versions?
They were missing everything.

You see, Arabic dubs had soul. I was raised on them ... that was my entry point. But English dubs?
They stripped the spirit.

Because Japanese isn’t just words.
It’s breaths.
It’s tone.
It’s “nnn” and “souka” and “so da ne…”
It’s the silence between phrases. The way someone says “un” with a downturned heart, or “hai” when they’re not fully sure.
The emotion is the word.

In English, a character might scream, “I’m scared!”
In Japanese, they just scream.
“Aaaaaaah...bikkurishita…”
And that sigh at the end? That’s the entire scene’s emotional resolution.

It’s nuance.
It’s subtext.
And that’s what I fell in love with.

Not the genre. The respect.

Because understanding anime meant understanding how different cultures express fear. Humor. Shame. Love.
It taught me how to pay attention to what isn’t said ... how to hear the emotion before the word lands.

And years later, when I was performing at Universal, I played a character that had both an English and a Japanese voice.
And without thinking, I found myself switching tone, timing, rhythm ... not just translating… but inhabiting both voices differently.

Because the Japanese version wasn’t just a translation.
It was a feeling.

That’s what anime gave me.
A cultural education through animation.
A love of storytelling not because it was loud… but because it was layered.

But people didn’t see that.

They saw a grown man watching cartoons.
They saw a phase.
They saw a white-passing Saudi with Shakespeare quotes in one pocket and Naruto clips in the other.

They didn’t see the threads of language, culture, emotion… weaving me into someone fuller.

So eventually, I went quiet about it.
Because explaining joy is exhausting.
Because I didn’t want to keep justifying something that had already justified me.

But let me say it now:
My anime phase wasn’t a phase.
It was a portal.

And it deserves more respect.

Because some of the deepest lessons in empathy, performance, and even identity…
I didn’t learn from a lecture.
I learned from a sigh, a pause, a whispered “nnn…”
in a language I didn’t grow up speaking ... but somehow always understood.