Looney Tunes uses these exaggerations for comic effect and to get the point across quickly and unambiguously in a very small time slot. In a more 'serious' cartoon, these kinds of exaggerations are out of place.

And I would say the anime which does the same is mostly on the same level (they do have an 'odd' mix of serious and exaggeration in some shows, Bleach springs to mind). On the flipside there are things like Vampire Hunter D, Appleseed or Vexille which are totally devoid of the heart-eye effect and relies on typical methods of getting emotion across.

The point being there is a wide range of 'anime' as much as there is a wide range of 'western' animation as well.

It's got nothing to do with being 'biased or egocentric' - now you're simply insulting anyone who disagrees with you.

Being biased or egocentric (someone's inability to put himself in someone else's shoes) it does have to do with anime (and everything else as a matter of fact), but nope, I wasn't insulting those who disagree, you got it wrong. I was insulting those who judge and condamn too quickly and never look back - the ignorants.

I know how they feel, because I was raised watching "looney tooney" too, and meeting anime was like meeting some alien, if I didn't actually forced myself to watch some I would be on their side. So I'm calling myself lucky for not being on the anime haters' side cause I would have lost so many hours of fun that I can't even imagine it. Western stuff never managed to give me such a rainbow of emotions as anime did, so for me anime is a true art.

Later on, I found out about the enormous amount of competion that exists in Japan, it's not really a country of all possibilites, you need huge amount of talent, work and luck just not to be lost in the mobs. When you see an anime, yes, it is created by a genius artist that managed to get his/her manga accepted to be made into an anime, beating literaly hundreds if not thousands of other artists, all with their hopes and dreams to succeed. Not everyone is published, and those who get published have to fight hard to keep their position, as the underdogs push harder and harder with each generation. Someone overlooking all these is obviously an ignorant, and ignorants allways deserve a bit of insulting.

The so called "big eyes" are the perfect example of that, the eyes are the mirror of the soul and making them bigger allows them to express emotions much easier.

This might be as much of a cultural thing as it's a style thing, more than one would think. I believe there was a study that suggested that asian people put more emphasis on the eyes when reading expressions compared to white people. So enlarging the eyes would make sense.

I read about this study on Wikipedia, but I can't for the life of me find that article today!