Anime and Art

You'll have elitists everywhere. If you play D&D, a lot of people complained that Paizo's Pathfinder art were too anime looking, which I found absurd.

One of the animation schools near me ― iirc they're one of the top 10 in the world ― will look down at you if you draw anime-style characters, so a lot of the students do this stuff in secret. However, one or two art teachers at a college near me actually work for UDON. While they don't care if you do anime looking stuff, they want your drawings to look damn good because like Onion Knight said, majority of anime-style stuff is just the simplified version of the human body.

Edit zzzz
The West's take on caricatures is different than Japan. If you think about the usual JRPG vs WRPG debate, the West tends to be more expressive while the East focuses a lot on narrative.

Caricatures tend to go farther when exaggerating the human body language. Look at The Incredibles.

The point is, Onion said that anime is simplified, deformed and distorted. So are cartoons. If drawing anime straightaway causes bad habits to develop, the same can be said for cartooning straightaway. However, there is extreme hate for the former while the latter tends to be hand-waved. Obviously there must be some other reason behind things.

Anime also exaggerates human body language- however, the size of the eyes is there to bump up the aesthetic appeal. Unless you're trying to measure 'right or wrong' on a scale (which honestly isn't possible) then anime and cartooning fare pretty equally on that side of things. They both distort, exaggerate and deform for their own purposes, however different those purposes might be.

Just because those purposes are different doesn't make one inferior to the other.

Anime isn't Art just as pulp fiction isn't Literature and pop songs aren't Music.
Basically, if your average philistine enjoys it, it can't possibly have any artistic value.

Anyway, as long as you have an art teacher, it behooves you to learn whatever you can from them. Even if you intend to draw manga/anime for the rest of your life, it can't hurt to learn a much broader range of styles and techniques.

Look, I'm not centred on anime. I draw real people all the time, I sketch horizons, I digitally painted Hayley Williams in photoshop the other day. The point is not that I don't want to learn these other styles. Hell, the point isn't that I don't want to use what I know about these styles. The point is why do art people hate anime?