Why anime in general is frowned upon makes no sense frankly. I mean, can you seriously say Cowboy Bebop is a horrible show no matter what side of the Pacific Ocean you live on?
I never cared for the "anime." It took me years to figure out what that meant, by the way, as the word looks like a misspelling of a class of nitrogen-containing compounds. About 15 years ago I finally figured out that "anime" was that Japanese-style drawing with big creepy eyes and rounded faces and little pointy noses. Then it clicked. Speed Racer was anime. It was the only anime show that was on when I was little (very early 70s). I remember that I never enjoyed that show, but my brother loved it and it came on between other shows that I liked, so I always caught snippets. That monkey was far more scary than any of the monkeys on the Wizard of Oz. The whole thing strikes me as very fascist. (I had neither the words "fascist" nor "anime" in my vocabulary at the time, but I'm sure that it was how I felt. Tense and a bit frightening. Rigid. Big, scary eyes. Exceedingly large mouths--the head opens like a huge garbage can when they scream. Unrealistic body movements. And it's all so rigidly structured. Even the surrealistic creatures have a certain pattern that is strictly followed by all the artists.) I guess I can appreciate most other styles--the digitization style of The Critic, the sketchwork of the "Take on Me" video, stick figures, even Simpsonization--but anime is annoying.
Ah, to each his own. I never cared for Jackson Pollack's work either, although I understand that people pay millions of dollars for some of his paintings. Nowadays, I've learned to stomach a little of the "anime" because many of my son's favorite cartoon movies are the Hayao Miyazaki movies. They're actually pretty good stories, but the characters still look tense, rigid, stilted, and generally creepy to me.
Anime has essentially come to mean to any cartoon (with heavy skew towards teen and adult content) that was originally produced in Japan and then dubbed into English by Funimation (DBZ), ADV/Matt Greenfield (NGE), 4Kids (Yugioh) or Pioneer (bunch of 90's stuff mostly). The styles very greatly and there is a ton of crap out there. Most of my favorites are usually containing a lot of action with a heavy dark element or theme.
