Personally I don't see the point of saying which one is better. First of all, who cares? Anime is anime and other animation is other animation. Even if one was better than the other what difference does that make? Nothing, nothing at all . . . so personally I see no real purpose in this thread at all . . . secondly, animation is an artform and artforms are cannot be interpreted objectively since they always have an emotional/psychological/biase influence on the viewer there is no real way to access a piece of art without asserting some sort of biase (whether minute or large) towards or against the artwork and therefore there is no real objective way to compare two artforms on the basis of which one is better. Yes, you can stress the strong and weak points of the different art forms but you can't really say which one is better. Finally it is too general an assertion to say that you would rather watch "anime" than "american cartoons" since both categories are enormously broad and contain many works that are very good and very bad, so you can't just say that it's better "in general" anyway. It's important that today we look at artwork as exactly that an artform. And even though the artform of animation is usually used to entertain, they do have their own artistic purposes and messages so it's really unfair to judge an animation just based on it's entertainment value anyway. Japanese anime and American animation are both types of art and both have their own merits, and though I can say personally that I usually enjoy anime more than Western cartoons that is a very general statement and also opinionated. Let's make sure that we try not to simply say one is better than the other without mentioning that it is merely your opinion that it is better or that it is really impossible to say which is better . . .