There are 2 ways to do it.

The easiest is just add a new source, call it Cartoons, add the cartoons directories to it and then assign it as TV Shows. It will add them all however it will mix them in with everything else under the TV tab.

The other one is using smart playlists. The last time I did this it required you to create something like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<smartplaylist type="tvshows">
    <name>Anime</name>
    <match>one</match>
   <rule field="path" operator="startswith">smb://LEON-SERVER/anime/</rule>
    <order direction="ascending">tvshow</order>
</smartplaylist>

and play around in the skin to get it to display correctly however I think you can how do it much easier in XBMC itself. I'm downloading and installing XBMC on this machine so I can take a look, grab some screenshots and I'll get back to you later today

Haha well I've been spending the last 30min playing with smart playlists in XBMC 11 and they don't work for me lol. The idea is sound but they aren't finding the media I'm pointing to... will update once I know why

Ok Solved it! Quick and dirty guide but will hopefully help.

The problem with this is its VERY skin specific. Most skins support smart playlists but only some allow you to configure the home screen as much as the one I'm using. The following screenshots are using the Aeon Nox skin (downloadable in appearance settings).

Step One: TV Shows & Anime (or whatever) must be in different folders! - On my main setup I have them on different drives. D: for TV Shows, E: for Anime, F&G for Movies however for this I have a temp folder with 2 folders... 1 TV Shows and 1 Anime.

Add your shows to XBMC as normal, both as TV shows... once this has been done you will notice that all your shows combine with 'TV Shows' on the homepage.



2. Hit the .. to go up a folder to get into Playlists and New Smart playlist...


3. Select type as TV Shows, call it TV Shows (or whatever it is) and under Find Items Where you want to ADD


4. Select Path and Starts with - Important you change it from 'is' to 'starts with' ... that was the mistake I was doing 
Type or Browse to the correct location.


5. Create a 2nd playlist for the Anime/Cartoons, point it to the correct folder etc.


6. Congrats you now have 2 smart playlists.


Now here is where it gets a bit confusing and this is where the skin specific stuff comes into play.

Go into Settings > Skin


Customizers > Main menu item customizer (backgrounds,widgets)


On the main bar scroll over to CUSTOM1 and hit Enter. When customising it you want to turn off Disabled, change type to Video Playlist, Choose the TV shows playlist, label it as TV Shows and Choose yourself a nice background.


Do the same with CUSTOM2 for your anime/cartoons.


DISABLE the default main TV shows otherwise you will have 2 TV Shows on your homepage (1 with everything, 1 with just TV shows)


Done! You now have 2 playlists on your homepage and your TV shows & Anime/Cartoons are separated!

Very nice. Good addition.

Had it on my 'to do list' for the revise but someone had to come along and ask the question before I did it hehe.

wow ! great guide !
Thanks a lot, that's exactly what i needed 

I've just done this, happy days indeed ... but where do I get decent backgrounds from? I need one for TV and one for Standup comedy ... any ideas?

I did a search of my TV shows folder for 'fanart.jpg' copied all of them into a single folder called TV Show backdrop and did the same for my anime folder. Then when selecting background in XBMC select multi image and point it to either the TV backdrop folder or Anime folder

Genius.

Just noticed my home videos and standup wont add to library under TV shows :-/ Need to rethink ...

Is there a way to add category in couchpotato so when you download a cartoon it goes automatically in the cartoons folder and otherwise in the movies folder ?

Not currently in the version of couch potato I'm using in the guide. V2 beta is running now and may have more options like that but I've yet to try it out

edit: If its something you really wanted to do there is nothing stopping you running 2 instances of CouchPotato. Install it again in a 2nd folder, set it to open on a different port and then you would have 1 CP list for movies and 1 CP list for cartoons.

Personally I think its too messy but it would work

Doesnt look like that method is going to work for me annoyingly.

- I'd have to create NFO files for each of my stand-ups and home videos for them to be added to the library
- When using  this method you can use the 'recently added' widget that I use a lot.

Is there a way to add a link on the home screen to a folder of video files? Not in library mode?

There is a thread somewhere on XBMC.org forums about getting home videos added to XBMC without issues. I've had quite a few pints at this point so can't find it for you now but bit of googling should help you out otherwise I'll look tomorrow

If you didn't find it before there is some useful info on the wiki: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Adding_videos_to_the_library/Home_videos/custom_videos

Basically installing a scraper that uses filenames instead of internet lookup and making sure to select that when adding a homemoive / random vidoe folder does the job and would create the NFO's for you if you exported after.

I ended up just adding the video folders to my favourites, then linking directly to them from the home screen. It's not a library view but it doesnt really need to be. Setting up the custom scraper looked like a bit of a faff.

I've just ordered a RaspberryPi to run XBMC on. The plan is for it to sit in the kitchen attached to the back of a monitor and be exclusively by XBMCremote.