Aenimo

Aenimo (Sandean: 애니모; ) is traditional and computer animation originating from Sandea. Although it dates as far back as the early 1960s, Sandean animation became internationally popular in the mid-1990s. Since then, aenimo have become internationally recognizable. They are often distributed through television, movie theaters, and the Internet. Many of them are based on Sandean comics (hwaman). Compared to Western animation, aenimo do not use CGI often unless it is in action scenes or works which are fully computer animated. As opposed to the lack of variety present in anime, aenimo uses a wide range of art styles.

The Sandean animation industry encompasses over 200 studios, including major studios like Kyongi Animation, Robocom, Holotype E&A, and Studio Demi. Since the rise of the Internet in the mid-2000s, aenimo has achieved unprecedented international popularity, with numerous companies competing to license, subtitle, dub, and release aenimo productions. As of May 2019, Sandean animation accounted for over 30% of all animated television shows in the world.

Web aenimo
Web aenimo (웹 애니모) is aenimo that is directly released onto the Internet. Though it originally refers to aenimo on websites like and Morokoro, it can also refer to series streaming exclusively on major streaming services such as  or.

Web aenimo, as opposed to other aenimo titles, are often noted for their great variety in runtime. For example, the 2011 series Savage Mentor has episodes that range from six to twelve minutes in length, and the 2019 series Darkside has episodes whose lengths range from thirteen to twenty minutes.

Globalization and international reception
Thanks to the Sandean Wave of the late 1990s and early 2000s, aenimo, hwaman, Sandean television dramas, S-pop, and other forms of Sandean entertainment have reached an unforseen level of popularity in the, and the aenimo industry has become extremely popular as a result.

Aenimo began being exported to North America on home video in the early 1990s, and in the mid-1990s, it reached television. Studio Fanta's late 1980s and early 1990s aenimo films were dubbed in English for Western theatrical and home video releases; Fanta's films undoubtedly played a major role in popularizing aenimo in the West. The 1992 sci-fi film Dystoprism by Kyoban Movie Artist also popularized aenimo when it was released on home video in America in 1996. In the early 2000s, the popularity of the significantly accelerated aenimo's reach, with websites dedicated solely to aenimo and hwaman being launched and users on  creating boards dedicated to aenimo. Some fans even used to spread aenimo across the Internet, with entire websites dedicating to atreaming pirated films and series receiving unprecedented traffic and developing large userbases; many of these sites have been shut down for obvious legal reasons. Streaming services like and  have also assisted in allowing Westerners to legal access aenimo, though piracy still persists among aenimo fans in developing countries.

During the 2020s, international availability of licensed aenimo increased, and as a result of , more people began watching and enjoying aenimo. The pandemic is often credited with "revitalizing" aenimo as a worldwide cultural phenomenon and thus allowing it to reach "mainstream" status. In September 2019, "aenimo" and other Sandean pop culture phrases were added to 's dictionary. A 2021 study by Webserve revealed that many Westerners who were "worn out" by turned to aenimo and hwamam has an alternative and not only found the mediums more enjoyable but the fandom more excepting and inclusive, which could possibly be linked to "Sandea's generally and increasingly liberal attitude". As of 2023, the aenimo streaming services Novavideo and Subdrive+ are among the top 20 largest streaming services in the world by global subscriber count.