"Anime has the courage to be derivative."  Sounds quotable, and I do mean that as a compliment.  We have a bias in the west to think that taking ideas from other works of fiction is bad or "uncreative".  But anime freely does variations on someone else's themes.  And so did the great composers in the classical and baroque eras of music.  Instead, we have a lawyer's concept of creativity today, dead and barren as it often turns out to be.  In anime, the question to ask is not whether something is original, but instead how successful the authors were with the idea.