Having worked with vendors in the print industry, I’m wondering if at least some of this is a scaling issue in the edit. Because the “tall and thin” type is exactly the same height as the rest.
Maybe there was a version that was more distinct, and a layout guy standardized them without seeing or reading the copy.
Maybe that’s too much benefit of the doubt.
At that point, the layout person is either a dumbass or doesn’t read English.
Or maybe can’t even see the copy. They may be looking at lorem ipsum.
Also fat, fatter, fatass, fatterass, full zipcode, city size, state size, continental, hemispherical, planetary, solar, black hole-like, Galactical, interstatial, universal and beyond luminal.
These can be combined for yo momma jokes.
Anime girl with d cup breaststroke slightly thick thighs most chubby anime person peops can handle before they start getting scared
“well-balanced propotions” that’s comic.
2 big sized heads and 2 enormous heads
I never noticed before that all girls are knock-kneed.
It’s somehow preferred in Japan.
Is this from the book: The Incel’s Guide On Recognising Women?
Choose your Waifu
Ewww…
Just take those exact characters, give them different hair colors, match the personality to the hair color, boom you got a slice of life show that has a strong first season but then fades in quality and takes a weird turn in season 2+3 before a mediocre season 4 that fans try to justify but everyone really hates.
I really wish there was more evolution in anime. I used to like it a lot but I’ve grown to really dislike the art style because it’s so homogenous. I’m sure I’m missing out on great stories but I’m so damn bored of cookie cutter kawaii characters
I know that’s not every anime so no need to reply with the exceptions to the rule. The two most popular styles are “generic anime” (this) and “chibi anime” (creepy/gross)
If you’re looking for more unique styles of anime, try out jojo’s bizarre adventure or dorohedoro. Both have quite a unique drawing style (for anime) and world building
Mahou shoujo Madoka magika is one fantastic story. And only 12 episodes or 2 movies (they are the same, just less OP/EDs).
I googled it and visually it looks like…everything else
Well it’s kinda half meant to, it’s a magical girl genre subversion
Go in blind, push through the first movie. It is worth it.
I love how many anime recommendations begin with “It’s really hard to get through the first episodes/season/series, but it really picks up about 140 hours in!”
Guys. You can learn a new language in the time it takes to get to the “good parts.” You can learn to draw. You can take a hike every day for a week. You can write a short story. You can call someone and have a conversation. You can make a paper-mache volcano for your nephew’s science project. You can take a box of food and socks to your local food bank.
Let’s stop grinding slop for desperate distraction from the anxiety in our heads.
It’s 4 hours total, so you could not pick worse time to write all that.
The entire show is very purposeful, and it reveals the meanings slowly. That’s why you need to push through the first hour.
I almost gave up, many of my friends gave up, but those who gave it a serious try, were rewarded.
I went from ‘wtf is this shit’ to my absolute most favourite piece of media ever.
you could not pick worse time to write all that.
This isn’t a “me” problem. I’ve already moved on.
Yeah but that’s what I’m saying, I dislike the generic aesthetic enough that it takes away most of the enjoyment. If I was neutral on that it’d be no big deal, but the story is only part of visual media
It’s weird. It gets even weirder. But it’s purposeful, and it grows on you.
Yeah, also, it’s my favourite anime ever.
There is a third original movie and they are making a 4th original. They’re was also a size anime loosely based on the mobile game.
Third movie was really weird.
Maybe it was the crazy subtitles I had when it came out, but I didn’t like it as much as the original.
Afaik the manga art style evolved in the first place because it’s very economic, particularly with facial expressions, and allows pumping out thick volumes of comics every week.
those hair colors, is this a DV-i reference or something
edit: the personalities match as well wtf
This is every generic anime.
They are all the same
Strikes me as the same girl drawn once for every year in high school, from left to right junior, senior, sophomore, freshman.
The second doesn’t have the coveted “thigh gap”, signaling that you are sufficiently anorexic. The third has the faintest shadow of muscle definition in her biceps and calves. The fourth remembered to wear socks, a thing only tall people do
Frigging tall girls and their (checks notes) socks. Why do they ALWAYS wear them.
The fourth remembered to wear socks, a thing only tall people do
she’s wearing socks because she has so little fat on her body, she’s cold all the time. so she needs extra clothing.
One is missing an eye. Sucks to be her.
Check the tits
Not entirely. But when you live in an ethnically homogeneous society you notice more subtle differences in people.
when you live in an ethnically homogeneous society
Japan isn’t ethnically homogeneous. Westerners simply aren’t interested in learning the history and social makeup of the island, or even acknowledge anyone lives outside Tokyo.
The Ainu, the Ryukyuans, and the Yamato are all distinct cohorts. And that’s before you get into the post-Meiji cultural divergences.
The ainu and ryukyuan are a tiny fraction of the population, and there are only 2% of foreigners living in Japan, with half of those being Korean. There arent many countries with a lower diversity of population than that.
The ainu and ryukyuan are a tiny fraction of the population
When you count mixed-race Japanese residents as Yamato by default, sure. When you deliberately blot out the historical genealogies as part of the fascist project of the post-Meiji Era, absolutely.
There arent many countries with a lower diversity of population than that.
In the same way that somewhere north of 30% of the population in Vietnam has the last name Nguyen, we can pretend at homogeneity to salve the prickly attitudes people who desire the appearance of a uniform population. Ralphiel Cruz changes his name to Ted. Robert Francis O’Rourke changes his name to Beto. It has nothing to do with their racial composition and everything to do with their efforts to appear to fit in.
But if you believe Japan’s 189M people all came out of the same petri dish, you’re simply buying into a eugenics myth.
… and people get mad at me when I say this now bog standard, seemingly literally standardized anime art style is uninspired, boring, and fundamentally problematic.
I don’t hate anime, but it takes a really good story and unique characters to actually drag me in. The art style is an immediate turn off for me.
Same thing with some western animation. If it looks like the animator learned their art by tracing Family Guy, but with a slightly different nose, I won’t watch it.
Huh!
I mean, fair enough, you understand your own tastes, I just personally am not generally turned off by cartoons.
But yes you bring up another good point re Western Animation, which is that much of it has also homogenized, more or less around the Family Guy art style.
I find that to be even worse frankly, but that probably has more to do with my visceral disdain for the entire show.
Out of curiosity, do you have a preferred art style in video games? Or like, a set of acceptable ones, and then a set of ‘nope’ styles?
I am of course also presuming you play a fair number of video games, which could also be incorrect.
Anyway, I totally understand what you mean in the sense of… some particular art styles are just so unappealing/off-putting, that whatever media it is that they are in, it would have to outperform a similar bit of media in a different style, in other aspects, to roughly be counted as equivalently enjoyable.
I guess we just have different sets or categories of those styles that are off-putting to each of us.
Funny you bring that up, as I avoided expounding too much.
It will sound terribly xenophobic, but I also avoid JRPGs and interactive novels for the most part. I played a few back in the nes/SNES era but found them all to be kind of copy/paste jobs. It could also be that I find turn based combat boring. I’m sure there are plenty of good ones out there, but I don’t really have the time.
I’m somewhat of a Luddite and enjoy low res pixel graphics, or hand drawn painterly stuff (think Disco Elysium).
I also mostly play puzzle/mystery oriented stuff. Old school style point and clicks, Myst-likes.
Honestly, I find the gameplay of older JRPGs generally insufferable as well.
Give me Chrono Trigger or at least Golden Sun, where we have a bit more complex and interesting actual game mechanics, as well as very very good plot lines, characters, soundtracks, etc.
But uh yeah, sounds like you are probably about 10 years older than me? And/or just … don’t really play too many games?
I dunno, thats the ‘vibe’ I’m getting, but hey I also think Disco is phenomenal.
I dunno uh, ever seen or played Windwaker?
That game was pretty controversial when it came out, for shifting Zelda into a very cartoony art style…
… but now its generally remembered as a very unique and basically timeless art style, that a lot of people sort of use as a foundation for their own styles, when trying to make a game.
Yeah, I’m an old bastard. I had a stretch from around 2000-2012 where I barely played anything aside from Counter Strike and Team Fortress.
Chrono Trigger was great, I’ll admit. As you said, great characters and engaging gameplay, not just tapping A and healing occasionally.
I played the first two gens of Pokemon when they came out, skipped a bunch and returned for Arceus and Scarlet. I’m sounding like more of a hypocrite with every sentence. Heh.
Maybe I’ll bite the bullet and try a Persona game or a Final Fantasy that was released this millennium.
Hey you know Chrono Trigger!
Ever heard of maybe… Dragon Ball (Z)?
Same artist, at least for the concept and promotional art, character portraits.
RIP Akira Toriyama.
DBZ was definitely a thing when I was a kid. I liked the character design, and the huge attacks were cool, but the way that they stretched out thin scripts with repetitive, pointless, easy to animate dialogue. I understand that they did this because they had to crank out an episode every week or so. I gave up on it the third time half the episode was a hero sweating in a rocky canyon with minutes of internal dialog with the only animation being eye twitches and the occasional camera shift.
I probably would have been more into it if I was a year or two younger. I also briefly got into Power Rangers the first season it aired, but aged out of it immediately. Like I said, I’m old.
I get the fandom for the various things I’ve nit-picked on, and don’t judge those that enjoy them.
In conclusion, Parasite Eve was rad as hell and should have had two sequels and a remaster.
everything is fundamentally problematic if you want to see a problem in everything.
Are you implying my tastes are a result of intentional cyncism?
They are not.
I just get bored of looking at the same thing all the time.
Thats not like, an active choice I am making.
yeah ok but boring and problematic are two different things.
when you say “anime art style is […] fundamentally problematic” i assume you mean “it caters too much to the male gaze”.
i’m sick of people saying “anime is creepy because it displays women in a way that are attractive to men”. typically, it gets connected to “patriarchy” and “creepiness” through the lens of mainstream social discourse today.
i say the only damage done by creeps is if they are in real life and pester other people around them. people are not gonna change their nature. creeps are gonna be creeps. but at least you can shift them to the internet, to fictional and non-personal media, away from real life. and that’s a good thing, and only possible if anime continues to exist.
Ah ok.
So, I don’t think that it ‘centers the male gaze’.
I barely even know what that actually means, these days.
I’m not generally worried by the idea of trying to convey people who are attractive, in their own right, when viewed by men or women or anything else.
You can do that in a bad way via characterization or plot or whatever, but I’m just talking about the art style of the drawing.
I do find a lot of the relationship archetypes/dynamics in a lot of anime problematic, but I’m again trying to just talk about the art style.
I’m also not saying that like, “all anime presents bad socialization examples and standards.”
Sure, some kinda do, some really do, but there’s tons of great anime that doesn’t, that doesn’t showcase that, or if it does, that character is bsd because they do that, or its a flaw, where it is good when they overcome it.
It is just a fact of human beings that we basically all judge each other as beautiful or not, to some extent, so… it would be ridiculous to just completely eliminate that from shows.
What I do think this style does, for both boys and girls, though the effect is usually much worse on girls…
Is that it fundamentally promotes unrealistic beauty / self-image standards, if you don’t actually have a parent explaining some of this kind of stuff to them.
If you had an actual human being, approaching any of the body forms in OP image, well you are basically descibing an anorexic person.
Well ok, other than what is here labelled ‘full figured’, which, if you just replaced the head with a human proportioned head, would be probably what I’d call a skinny or skinnier person, but probably not so skinny that its like, de facto medically concerning.
But this is still bad, because now, if you are in reality skinny, you may think you are basically chubby.
Its exactly the same critique I’d have of older Barbie dolls.
Also, real people have noses, anime characters basically do not.
You should not be ashamed to have a nose.
I really do think that a lot of more vulnerable people get some kind of body dysmorphia complex from being overly immersed in this, if they don’t have a parent who like, checks in on them from time to time, actually explains that some elements of a characters style are reasonable to try and emulate, others are very unrealistic and unreasonable to try and emulate.
Girls compete so, so much amongst themselves over who is the prettiest, most desirable, and if you have unrealistic standards for that, it can create self image problems, especially in households that already are not doing a great job of raising their kids.
There, that’s the angle by which I find this style ‘fundamentally problematic’.
Not really even a feminist, social dynamics angle, more of just a healthy young mind / child development angle.
True, my favorite manga all have a distinct art stile. But also a unique style in story telling and pacing.
Yeah, as I’ve said elsewhere in this thread that is now too complex for me to keep track of:
An actually distinct art style is usually, not always, but usually, an indicator that many other aspects of the manga or anime will be of higher quality, try to do something more unique, or less common.
Makes sense. If one is run-of-the-mill budget production, then the other is too. Right?
And at least in most of the better ones, you can feel that the story writer and/or mangaka are with the heart behind it.
Well, I would say this does not work in reverse (converse?).
Show has a fairly standard style?
Total crapshoot, could be great in many ways other than style, could be awful, could be mid.
If all A are also B…
That is not the same as ‘all Not A are also Not B.’
So, if you see a unique style (A), decent chance it is also good in other ways (B).
But, if you don’t see A… that just tells you nothing, really, about B.
It does not mean that B is less likely to be present, simply because A is not present.
That has been my problem with many Animes for many years. There is a boring sameness in many designs that just drive me away.
Unrelated: did you know that the term “bog standard” comes from the term “box standard” which means, essentially, vanilla. No modifications or additions, just the basic version in the box. This used to be on the boxes for things people bought.
Now it basically means the same thing but to a none native speaker bog standard would likely not make much sense, where box standard has the context in the term.
BOG: “Board of Government”. Apparently the durability and other characteristics of toilet seats had to be standardized by a board, otherwise people would suffer accidents while on the throne. Thus, we got the BOG Standard.
At least, that I what I heard anecdotally.
I genuinely did not know that.
Makes complete sense though!
… and yes, English is a ridiculous nonsense language, we can and routinely do things like verb(ify) nouns, we have tons of idioms and slang that well… barely even make sense to many native speakers… we have tons of homophones like threw through, their there they’re… etc…
I don’t think “people get mad” at that, so much as they get mad at you saying “turn off the anime, I hate the anime, don’t you realize everything in anime looks the same” when someone else is trying to enjoy something.
I mean, I don’t broadly say ‘all anime is bad, i hate all anime’.
I very much like a lot of anime, some of my favorite characters and plot lines in all of fiction are from animes and mangas.
It… just seems that a lot if anime has largely stylistically homogenized lately.
And a lot of that is because most anime is produced by a well oiled, unforgiving capitalist machine that optimizes for profit, not what I would call real creativity.
The exceptions where that is not the case… animes with more distinctive visual styles… tend to be a pretty decent indicator the overall show is better, in aspects beyond just art style.
Oh, and, I am always going to, on at least one level, judge people based on their taste in art, and also judge art based on itself.
Its fine, broadly speaking, for people to like things I don’t.
Its also fine, broadly speaking, for me to think that people who enjoy art that I find boring, uninteresting, … to themselves be boring and uninteresting, to having boring and uninteresting taste.
Its not really that hard to walk the line between objective critique and analysis, and subjective preference… if you are honest with yourself, and take care to deliniate these things when talking about them.
You are more than your consumer preferences.
animes and mangas
Tourist detected, opinion rejected.
Oh really? Have you ever seen a person in the shape of a rhomboid?
Eiichiro Oda: “hold my sake”
Your mother was a rhomboid
MY mother was a rhomboid, you insensitive clod
And your father smelt of irregular polyhedrons
Why are they all pigeon-toed?
You accidentally double posted, but yes, that is uh… odd.
Bent in knees are cutesy as a pose, but as a fundamental skeletal attribute, they’re … kinda problematic.
Ah whoops!
Just helping you from tripping over yourself.
Don’t forget to give the eyes 10x the surface area of what’s biologically possible
In a lot of Asia, youth is seen as attractive
Human eyeballs are generally all the same size, regardless of skull or body size.
Youth = small
Big eyes and small everything else therefore means cute
Art often exaggerates or interprets
Anime is art
Anime is also not a new medium at all in Japanese, and now global culture, and has had a lot of time to evolve
I’m not defending it, just explaining it, in case people don’t understand, because this is a long-standing and very common complaint/criticism
But we could have like, a whole anime done in the style of Ukiyo-E, for characters design style motifs, for facial and body proportions…
You could mock up a 3D model and cel shade these to work out how they’d work from different angles.
This is certainly an exaggerated interpretation of reality.
It is also certainly Japanese.
These were also largely seen as depictions of beautiful, desirable people.
Here, this one’s from 1932,
The eyes are getting bigger, but noses still exist, the facial proportions are actually pretty close to realistic, if not just completely realistic, unlike in the modern standard anime style.
I dunno, I guess the modern standard anime style is just much much more neotenous (oversized heads, relatively oversized eyes, relatively undersized/unemphaszed noses) because it is meant to appeal primarily to small children, who are themselves neotenous?
Whereas the consumer base for Ukiyo-E would have been primarily adults?
But we could have like, a whole anime done in the style of Ukiyo-E, for characters design style motifs, for facial and body proportions…
What you’re forgetting is that anime (and art in general) is typically not done to please the critics, but to please the fans.
I’m a fan. I am displeased by stylistic homogenization.
Like, I get that this is, on some level or to whatever extent, a … marketing to whichever demographic kind of problem or process.
Either I am in the minority of fans, or, they’re targetting market demos inefficiently.
… it would be very difficult to say which of those is closer to ‘true’, with anything approaching objectivity, unless people were literally polled/surveyed on this.
But, the other element here is that just is what capitalism does to art. It smushes everything down into generic, familiar, safe, with as much broad appeal as possible.
Because its churning this stuff out on an assembly line, anime is a mass market product, like spam or canned soup or plastic plates.
I simpler terms, broader appeal means less complexity.
If you want more people to “get” a piece of music, by definition it must be less complex.
For example a current pop song will be more approachable by more people than Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue”, simply because everyone can get the former, but only some people can grok Miles’ music (and those people also get the pop stuff, even if they don’t listen to it much, or if the listen to it a lot).
It’s not a free market thing, it’s simply the old distribution curve applied to art. Marketing just utilizes the nature of people.
I “get” Miles stuff much more than the average person, but when it comes to visual arts I know fuck all, so only the most fundamental stuff has any appeal to me.
I’m essentially the same in visual arts as someone who only listens to pop music.
Capitalism != Free Market.
Arguably, the entire, main problem with capitalism at a basic conceptual level is its natural tendency toward oligopoly and monopoly.
You can also have free markets in many kinds of different social paradigms that differently allocate or control capital than our modern paradigm of essentially ‘capitalists get to do whatever they want, everyone else is at the mercy of their whim, and mercy is not profitable’.
You basically always have to have regulation, anti-trust laws, various sorts of mechanisms to actually maintain anything resembling a free and competetive market, in most categories of goods and services.
IE, “Free Markets” can only exist for a short time by essentially random circumstance; to prevent them from stratifying and consolidating, you need some kind of system that exists outside of and around said market, to actually maintain it as a competetive market.
You’re not wrong that a good deal of the homogenization effect is just basic marketing, just how appeal works across a population…
… but capitalism overemphasizes this, exaggerates it, as the relentless pursuit of maximum profit, in the short term, changes business strategy toward monopolist rent seeking.
Now, combine that with… well this literally is media we are talking about, so, this directly changes broader social and psychological norms of what is socially acceptable to be expected.
Were the production and distribution of art more distributed, more varied, less highly concentrated into a small number of huge orgs/systems, wasn’t gatekept so hard, was easier for smaller players to not get drowned out by bigger players… you woukd find a consumer market closer to a free and competetive market, with more diversity, as it would be easier for studios that take artistic risks to come and go, to exist, to cater to a specific niche or set of niches.
because it is meant to appeal primarily to small children
That notion is Disneys fault. East-asians usually see comic juat as a distinct art type, for grown-ups too.
One of the earliest “modern” manga artists got influenced by the large eyes of disney and other western comics and shows
And others adapted itAh, thats a very good point!
And the stylistic intermingling has certainly gone both ways a bit, and then more recently, quite a lot.
Now we have like, basically hyperrealism done on anime proportions, the kind of AI autogen art style, that I would basically call ‘uncanny valley with high production value.’
Manga’s and therefore anime’s art style evolved to be drawn quickly and cheaply. A ukiyo-e anime would be expensive as hell.
Well, if you did the exact same production process, yes, but as I posited, you could just 3d render the whole thing, or speed up production with basically 3d blocked out scenes and then basically do rotoscoping off of that, to add more flair or details where its worth it.
Its… not like cel shaded video games have not been a thing for a while, its not like 3d rendered animes have not been a thing for a while.
I’m vaguely sure the face expressions would still require a lot of redrawing, for which the manga style is particularly optimized. Plus, the detailed clothing would require plenty of animation of its own.
Basically, if it were feasible, someone would probably have already made it.
Basically, if it were feasible, someone would probably have already made it.
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya by Isao Takahata. The most expensive Japanese film ever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_the_Princess_Kaguya_(film)
I don’t know why but your link doesn’t work for me
Well, I’d say you’d be surprised by what you can pull off with a sufficiently solid and detailed facerig or set or blendshapes, just in Blender, which is free to use.
You do have a good point with clothes, thats more complex, but uh, again even in Blender, detailed clothes physics are entirely possible, and its also not too hard to make custom clothes rapidly.
You can do that with VROID + Blender pretty darn fast, and you can throw whatever base model you want into VROID for it to be a sort of digital tailor for, and then export it to Blender.
VROID’s tool for this is also free.
Beyond that, there are other freely available plugins for Blender that do or enable the same kind of rapid design and fitting of physics enabled clothes.
Then you just animate skeletons, generate your frames to potentially rotoscope or what not.
Basically, I am saying the tools for this do already exist, and many of them actually are already used in 3D anime, just… to my knowledge, not yet with anything resembling Ukiyo-E.
I’m 100% sure many studios have their own proprietary software and toolsets and pipelines for this.
Btw: Ghibli’s ‘The Tale of the Princess Kaguya’ is perhaps the closest to that genre, though of course it’s comparatively simplistic and also has Ghibli’s trademark style.
Additionally, asia has the focus more on the eyes, why westerners more on the mouth. Is what they say.
Upsetting.
Aliita, Battle Angel.
Oh gosh, my bad. I totally forgot that I need to post a transcript of my Art History coursework before making this kind of joke on Lemmy.
“Biologically possible”, I mean, quite a few animals have eyes taking up a ton of their headspace. Owls for starters.
… Unless you are planning on hybridizing an owl and a human, in pursuit of growing your own GMO Waifu…
I think we can safely assume the scope of the context is ‘a human being’.
Jokes on you, artist “GeGeGek” nearly perfected that already.
Well shit.
… ahem.
Ain’t that a hoot.
Hahahahaha, take my upvote!
You’re not?
No, unfortunately I lack the requisite knowledge expertise and mad scientist lair level of funding, and I also possess a moral compass.
I wonder which of those issues is the biggest obstacle.
For me, the last one.
You coukd give me the other two and I’d rather try to cure cancer or something like that.
Of course, I guessed that. As with many lemmings, I assumed you had a strong moral compass - respect!
It would have been funnier if you had answered one of the others, though.
The word was, “biology”, not, “human biology”.
That’s the rule for anime boobs
I think this would be incrementally less ridiculous if they hadn’t, presumably, scaled the images causing them all to be the same size/height on the page.
But those are the same picture…
No. They are very much not. All are rather fit though.
If by “fit” you mean slim. None of these women look like they work out
It’s British slang for sexy/hot
Thry’re like 3% different.
I feel like they are actually different body types as opposed to weight differences. That being said they are still narrow. But that’s not my point.
Yep, I’m afraid Gladaed is right; definitely different pictures. When she posed for the sketches, she did something different with her arms each time. She sometimes changed her expression too. Oh, and one day she wore a shorter shirt.
They all seem to be suffering from the same rather pronounced internal hip rotation.
Yes, what we rudely used to call knock-kneed
Good job, Creed. Corporate has a new assignment for you, though.
that’s what “athletic” means?
