- Understanding Anime:
- Why does it matter?
- Manga Hair color
- Anime Hair color
- Emotions
- Eyes
- Super Deformation
- Hand Gestures
- Why does it matter to understand anime?
- It is to be able to determine the characteristics of the anime character you are watching. Every character differ in one way or the other.It is also important to understand the anime we are watching to be able to relate and to be able to avoid confusion. It is also to understand the context of the story or the anime itself.
- Manga hair color
- Back when artists were just starting to draw what we would consider "manga" today, they only had three options for hair color: black, white and grey. It would seem that, when trying to draw Japanese characters, only black could be used, but shoujo manga artists started to leave the hair of their Japanese characters un-inked. Doing this allowed the reader to distinguish between characters easily, and it also helped balance the page and make it more artistic. However, the Japanese characters were still presented as looking traditionally Japanese, and the reader accepted them as Japanese. Even though a character may have beautiful, wavy, seemingly blonde hair, the manga reader knows that in reality, the character's hair is beautiful, wavy and black - even though the character might be directly portrayed otherwise. "In recent years," writes Frederick Schodt in Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics, "on the covers and initial color pages of the magazines, what can only be Japanese girls are often drawn with distinctly blonde hair and blue eyes." For a westerner this can lead to some odd situations. In the section from Tomoko Taniguchi's Aquarium below, Suzuki tells Koko that he went to church when he was young because seeing a foreigner was such a novel experience. Yet Koko, with her apparently blonde and wavy hair, seems just as Western as the priest must have been!
- Anime hair color
- Hair color in anime is a different beast altogether. Even traditionally Japanese anime characters can have hair of any color, even colors that don't traditionally appear on any real human! Like with manga, assigning different hair colors to different characters allows the viewer to recognize which character is which. Hair color has also traditionally been used to indicate some part of the character's personality. A character who is feisty and hotheaded may be given red hair to emphasize these aspects of his or her personality; red hair can also indicate spirit possession, as it does with Ranma's female form. Many male main-characters will have black hair to emphasize their traditional nature, distinguishing them from their friends who have many colors of hair; Tenchi, Ranma and Ash are good examples of this. Many blondes are either vain and conniving or completely airheaded. Serena from Sailor Moon would reflect the air-headed part of this, while Nanami from Revolutionary Girl Utena is completely spoiled and whiny. Characters with special powers or origins may have the oddest hair colors of all to reflect their extraordinary nature. Many of the women in Tenchi Muyo are powerful aliens; it would be odd for Ryoko, a bizarre and powerful character, to have hair like that of any real woman on Earth!
- It must be emphasized that the color of a character's hair doesn't necessarily mean that they will always behave like other characters with the same color of hair, or that they won't have completely contradictory aspects of their personality. Assigning Touga from Revolutionary Girl Utena the same personality as Asuka from Neon Genesis Evangelion would be a very simplistic mistake, even though they both have long, bright red hair. Hair color is not an accurate reflection of the person - it just indicates what color the creator thought best suited the character.
- Also, as the general cliches regarding hair color have settled and become more common, many anime creators have played with the sterotypes, using them to confuse and surprise viewers. For example, Tomoyo from Card Captor Sakura would seem to be a very traditional character; her hair is long and black, and she is unfailingly proper and polite. It would seem that there is nothing about her that would keep her from being a model young Japanese lady. However, she is in love with her friend Sakura - a very non-traditional feeling! There is no one set of rules for each color of hair, despite the valiant efforts of many fans to categorize them. Yet though there are no set meanings for each color of hair, it does have symbolic value and should be recognized as such.
- Emotions
- When a character gets extremely mad at something, a stylized vein might appear on their forehead or fist. These "anger veins" can be used liberally, though not necessarily realistically. Curtis Hoffman writes that "...this gets carried to extremes, as in the manga where an identical vein pops up three different places on the back of a guy's hand."
- A bloody nose doesn't mean that a character is actually injured - rather, it means that he (the afflicted character is seldom a she) is thinking lustful thoughts and/or looking at a beautiful woman. But what does the bloody nose have to do with lust? Gilles Portras, author of The Anime Companion, wondered the same thing: "So I asked a few Japanese and got a variety of pseudoscientific, and occasionally embarassed, explanations about humidity and blood pressure. But the best response I got was from one fellow who simply recounted that when he was a child he was told by his mother that if he stared at a pretty woman he would get a bloody nose."
- When anime and manga characters cry, they -cry- . One form of crying comes in "tear lines," where two wavy lines are drawn from each eye to the bottom of the face and filled with white to indicate that the character is crying. A more exaggerated form of crying takes the tear lines off the two-dimensional space of the face and arcs it out into the sky, making it seem as if the character is crying whole waterfalls. These forms of crying are not generally serious; in serious, dramatic situations, the crying is much more subdued.
- Eyes
- Tezuka Osamu, the father of anime and manga, drew the eyes of his characters large so that they could express more emotion; to this day, the eyes are the most expressive parts of an anime character.
Facts about Anime eyes:- The eyes of someone good and innocent are large and childlike.
- Someone who is more conniving and sneaky will have smaller eyes. Evil characters have the smallest eyes of all.
- When an anime character is expressing emotion, the eyes can do several different things to reflect their mood.
- A normal anime character can get "evil eyes" when thinking evil thoughts or reacting angrily to a situation. The evil eyes are often accompanied by a blue blush, an anger vein or a sweatdrop, depending more specifically on the case.
- Happy eyes, however, are much more common. The anime character's eyes turn into two thick half-circles, giving him or her an extremely cute, delighted look. Both male and female characters can have that form of "happy eyes"; peculiar to females are the starry-eyes. Females with otherwise normal eyes will suddenly have their pupils grow to huge sizes, and stars and dozens of little white spots will appear. This signifies extreme happiness, and is also a parody of eyes in some shoujo manga and anime, where the eyes of all the girls are drawn like that, all the time!
- A normal anime character can get "evil eyes" when thinking evil thoughts or reacting angrily to a situation. The evil eyes are often accompanied by a blue blush, an anger vein or a sweatdrop, depending more specifically on the case.
- Super-deformation
- Super-deformation, when a character is drawn "deformed," with much less detail and much more cuteness, has no real catch-all meaning. It might be done to make the characters seem cute, or to indicate that they're not being serious. It might be used when they're embarassed, or when they're happy. If one had to assign a specific meaning to super-deformation, one could say that it means the characters are being playful and not all that serious, but it is impossible to pin it down completely.
- Hand gestures
- .When Americans are indicating themselves, they generally gesture towards their chest. Japanese point at their noses instead.
- To signify embarassment, people will put one hand to their head; scratching is optional.
- The "OK" gesture, the thumb and first finger touched together with the other three fingers spread out, has come to mean the same thing in Japan. However, the same gesture has traditionally referred to money and has only recently been associated with "good."
- Quickly waving one's hand is a gesture used to mean "no," with connotations of embarassment.
- Having one's mouth open is considered rude, so women especially will cover their mouths while laughing.
- People bow when they meet each other. In many anime and manga scenes, bowing is part of a very heartfelt apology.
- The V sign Americans asssociate with "victory" is widely used in manga, generally associated with success or good fortune. It's also used just to strike a cool pose.
- .When Americans are indicating themselves, they generally gesture towards their chest. Japanese point at their noses instead.
- It is to be able to determine the characteristics of the anime character you are watching. Every character differ in one way or the other.It is also important to understand the anime we are watching to be able to relate and to be able to avoid confusion. It is also to understand the context of the story or the anime itself.
Note: If you have any information or correction regarding this matter, please e-mail me about it. Thank you!