3/01/2014

Western animation VS Japanese animation

Spoilers: there is no winner.

There are just as many good "Western" animations as there are bad animes, and vise versa, yet for some reason most people consider anime/manga to be the "perfect art". Never mind that the Japanese do have other forms of animation, besides what we consider "anime".

Nearly everybody draws it at Deviantart; it's even considered realism by some, and people scream bloody murder when you dare to note them on the fact it's all big eyes and pointy chins on a pair of booby legs with short skirts.
It always gets a free pass, while our animators, who all bothered to develope their own original style, get shat upon by these people.

What a way to compliment Walt Disney, Don Bluth, or even our regular tv-show animators.
You can hate on Spongebob all you want, but at least it doesn't look exactly like anything else you've ever seen.

It's strange, because whenever a studio tries to be like Disney, or just happens to bring out an animated musical, people get their torches ready. This happened with Dreamwork's "Quest for Camelot" and even Don Bluth's "Anastasia". But in the meantime Japan shits out all kinds of shows with the exact same drawing style, or even the same "demons-in-high-school"-plot. Where are the torches on that.

I realise it's a stretch to say anime "always" looks exactly the same and that anime lovers automatically dislike other animation styles, but I've come across enough people to make the assumption. Or at least they're easier in saying it's "crappy", because anime characters are so sexy and perfect.
I'd rather have a character with personality, than a character you're supposed to connect with but has the same big eyelashes as the next guy.

I always found this to be strange in Inuyasha; where the character, Kagome, supposedly looks like this other character, Kikyo, and is in fact the reincarnation, but nearly every other character in the series looks just like her. Even Inuyasha, when given the right hairdo and eye colour, would look like his ex-girlfriend.
You cannot compare two characters with each other, or call one more beautiful than the other, if all of them have the same face.


Manga was once interesting, but it stopped being so after a while. It's overused. There are different forms of manga, which are always nice to see, but nearly not enough.

Yet, I stand by what I announced at the beginning of this article; there are no winners. It just wouldn't be fair to say one is better than the other, especially if one form's only flaw is repetition, really.
But I have yet to discover the crime committed by Western animation. Why are there even people throwing shit at it? What has it done to deserve that?

1 comment:

  1. I love this. No, I do. I myself am a anime fan and I agree with what you have written. When I draw I give my own OC big eyes and all the usual jazz but when it comes to drawing the second and etc xharacters why not try to give them all a different look besides hair and clothes? If you have a female with big round eyes and blonde hair, why not draw the other female with sharp eyes, maybe a different nose and mouth shape? Like in cartoons where all characters are different and unique.

    I often do struggle with this myself and I throw huge fits when two characters end up looking the same. GAH.

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