What is Anime?

Having a little brother means there was always a lot of cartoons playing on the television in my house. Most of these were Japanese anime shows that I hated watching. I had always thought that the style of animation looked cheap and most times there would not be good stories. It seemed like a giant waste of time watching.

For the purpose of this blog, I watched a newer episode of Pokémon and noticed that not much has changed in the 10 years since I had last seen it. The characters still looked the same, the animation was still not crisp, and the story was still the same as it always was. This type of animation is known in Japanese anime. Each artist has there own style that is portrayed through subtle differences. It is very difficult to find two anime cartoons that have the same visual styles.

Most of the characters carry human like proportions but have exaggerated eyes and facial expressions. Anime eyes are usually much larger then the normal human eye and their facial expressions are always exaggerated. This can be seen through the use of veins, stress marks, sweat marks, sigh poofs, etc. By using these techniques they are changing less of the actual face expressions themselves. It is almost an easy way out of doing extra animation work.

I see no resemebleance to Disney/Pixar AT ALL. Disney has always prided its animations are take extra care when making them. One thing that Disney always has is a great story and anime stories tend to be weak and lack character emotion. Pixar movies especially carry this trait. Having only one produced movie a year means that it needs to be a great one. It takes years and years to animate a Pixar a movie (and you can bet their characters facial expressions don’t include stress and sweat marks) so the story needs to be good enough to draw in the audience so all those years are not put to waste.

To apply this to my own techniques I need a good story. Without a good story there is not way to save the animation, no matter how great the animating is. Due to the lack of animating skills I have I may want to use some techniques that anime uses for facial expressions. It is much easier to add in a mark or action to a facial expression because then there is less you need to change on the face. While it does not look as good on screen; I, sadly, do not possess the ability to animate on Pixar’s level.