I just mentioned something similar to this in another thread :P But animation in general has changed my life on more than one occasion.

I honestly can't remember the first time I saw a Disney movie, but whatever it was it was the beginning spark of my creativity. Disney movies back then were so different from the stuff that was on TV it was mindblowing at the time. Ninja Turtles was my first exposure to an action show, and Inspector Gadget is another of my childhood favourites.

After I got a little older and entered high school at 11, this was around the time when the internet was starting to become mainstream. I was exposed to Dragon Ball Z. I had never seen the show before then, but friends of mine would always talk about it. In later years, my friends and I would go on to download every single Dragonball/Z/GT episode onto the school's computers, and we watched every one of them.

Soon after graduating and starting college, I was exposed to fansubs. And this really expanded my animation horizons to a much wider range of what's out there.

So my growing-by-the-gigabyte anime collection, and even some of the non-Japanese animated shows on TV are really fascinating with their quality and the range of emotions/genres they stretch across. If I didn't have the exposure that I had now, I would probably think that animation could never be as deep or emotionally involving as watching real people or reading something, but I know from experience that is not the case at all.