What does アニメ Anime mean?

Anime is a shortening of the loanword animation. In Japanese it means animation, without qualification: a Japanese television series is anime, and so is a Pixar film, a Czech puppet short and a Saturday morning cartoon from Ohio.

How the word was made

English animation entered Japanese as アニメーション and was clipped, which is the standard fate of long borrowings. Japanese shortens loans constantly, usually to three or four syllables, and the results are ordinary words rather than slang.

There is nothing in the word about Japan, drawing style, target audience or medium. It is the same operation English performs when it shortens influenza, and carries about as much cultural freight.

The English narrowing

English took the word to mean animation made in Japan, which is a category Japanese has no particular use for, since from inside Japan that category is simply animation. Where a distinction is needed the language marks the foreign side instead, in the way any language does.

The English sense is not wrong for English. It names a real body of work with recognisable conventions, and it does so more conveniently than Japanese animation manages in a sentence. It is just not a translation.

The identical thing happened to manga

Both words are ordinary Japanese terms for a medium. Both were borrowed by English speakers who needed a name for the Japanese instance of that medium, and both came back one degree narrower than they left. Manga means comics; anime means animation; English hears Japanese comics and Japanese animation.

The pattern is worth naming because it recurs across this whole vocabulary. A word is borrowed to fill a gap the borrowing language has, and it arrives carrying the specificity of the situation it was borrowed in rather than the breadth it had at home.

The argument the narrowing causes

English-language fandom periodically debates whether a series made outside Japan can be anime. The debate is a product of the borrowing, not a question about Japanese: under the Japanese word the answer is trivially yes, and under the English word the answer is definitionally no.

Both sides are describing their own language correctly. Nothing about Japanese usage settles it, which is why the argument never ends.

One practical note

The stress pattern differs too. English tends to stress the first syllable; Japanese distributes it more evenly with a pitch pattern English does not reproduce. Neither is incorrect in its own language, and this is one of the rare cases where the borrowed pronunciation has not been mistaken for the original.