Animated series

An animated series (or a cartoon series or an animated show) is a set of animated films with a common title, usually related to one another. These episodes typically share the same main heroes, some different secondary characters and a basic theme. Series can either have a finite number of episodes like, for example, miniseries, a definite end, or be open-ended, without a predetermined number of episodes. They can be released on television or the internet, in movie theaters or direct-to-video. Like other creative works, cartoon series can be of a wide variety of genres and have different target audiences: both males and females, both children and adults.

Television

Animated television series are aired daily or on certain days of the week during a prescribed time slot, including, for example, saturday-morning cartoons, prime time cartoons, late night anime, and weekday cartoons; series broadcast only on weekends.

The duration of an episode also varies. Traditionally, they are produced as half-hour or nearly half-hour cartoons; however, many are animated shorts of 10–11 minutes, which can be combined for filling a set time period in "segments" including several such shorts. When advertising is taken into account, the cartoon itself may be only 15–20 minutes of the half hour, although Netflix and many other streaming services do not show commercials. There are also series with very short episodes lasting approximately five minutes; they have recently become more common in Japanese animation.