Reddit mentions of Anime Essentials: Every Thing a Fan Needs to Know

Wikipedia isn't a final authority on the subject and you shouldn't just take a quote like that at face value since it didn't even give a reason to accept the conclusion. Perhaps the original source material contains reasoning but, absent that (and absent any reason to believe the author is the definitive authority on the subject) I reject the conclusion for lack of the reasoning that lead to it.

If we analyze things ourselves, the definition of genre that Google gives is:

> a category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter.

Right off the bat you can see that a genre includes a style and the very Wikipedia section you quote says that dictionaries define anime as "a style of animation".

Thus, going only by some definitions of the words, we have justification to refer to anime as a genre.

Beyond that, even trying to argue that anime is only a medium fails on two fronts. For starters, animation being a medium doesn't preclude it from also being a genre: the very task of animating can affect the way that stories are told. In other words, the medium itself can change the style in a way that would affect the overall composition itself which could make it a useful genre.

The second (and most critical) failure is related to why we in the English-speaking world have the word "anime" in the first place: because it is linguistically useful to refer to a specific subset of animation influenced by Japanese history and culture. This on its own suggests that people are particularly interested in how the culture/history of Japan specifically affects animation, and when you get down to it "anime" as a genre specifically refers to this concept.

In summar, as far as I can tell there's far more reason to believe that "anime" is a genre than it is not. If you see it as shorthand for "Japanese animation" then you can easily realize that that it's a genre that simply indicates the combination of those two genres. "Japanese" would be a genre because it would indicate style/subject matter that is related to Japanese history and culture. "Animation" would be a genre because, by choosing to animate over use live action, the composition will have a different form, a markedly different style, and might even be able to encompass a larger subset of subject matters. Thus, "anime" as a genre informs us to expect the form of the composition to be approached from an animation perspective whose style is influenced by the development of animation in Japan with subject matter highly influenced by said history and by the culture in Japan.