THE PROBLEM WITH ANIME ART STYLES

The problem with the typical anime art style

INTRODUCTION

Anime is a lovely piece of media that makes good use of its 2D animation and was very unappreciated over the years. But a fatal flaw has occurred, the “anime art style” but you may think, whats so wrong about it?

The anime art style is iconic with its semi-realistic bodies, colorful hair, and those huge eyes! Even some western shows such as RWBY and Avatar the Last Airbender have anime inspired art styles! But this art style has an enemy of its own.

LACK OF CREATIVITY

Thanks to the art style, many studios started to use this art style more and more in their anime. Some companies now rely on how appealing the characters are and are not focusing how expressive some characters are. If you notice, some scenes in anime show characters standing still and just moving their hands.

Another problem with anime art styles is a artist term called same face syndrome. Same face syndrome is a artist habit where characters noticeably have the same face or body shapes. There are many examples of this such as..

THEY ARE SEXTUPLETS THEY DON’T COUNT

Sword Art Online! As you can see here, literally only one character looks different from this group.

THE APPEAL

In my opinion, anime watchers have a somewhat “standard” on what anime should look like. I would say this as many anime have almost the same styles such as same size or shape of eye, same shape of head, and other kids of similarities.

If you look at this art style challenge, you can see some art styles that are very similar to each other. For example, you can see how To Love, K-ON, Suzumiya Haruhi, and The Idolmaster have very similar art styles. This gives people a invisible expectation on what an good anime should look like. And while a lot of very good anime that have the “standard” art style, its repetition has tired out some anime fans.

But this also drives some fans away from certain shows for its “ugly,” “not ordinary” or “weird” art styles. This is really is a shame as many “ugly looking” shows can be very cool to watch. These shows are known to have different looking characters, cool designs, and very expressive movements.

Look at this clip of the character Reigen Arataka from Mob Psycho 100. As you can see, this man is moving a quite lot! I don’t even think this man can go 5 seconds without moving. Even without audio I know what he feels right now. Just from his movements and facial expressions, I can tell hes caught, stressed, and sweaty.

Here’s Taiga from Toradora. While I could also make a conclusion that she is in stress, There are not many signals of her being stressed other than the shade and small lines on their head. If we were to remove them, we can make other conclusions like she is tired or shes mad.

TL;DR: More studios need to put more variety into art styles and animation.

Stay safe!

-Maxx