Anime Vs. American Animation
Memories of television programming from my youth consists mostly of great educational shows like Sesame Street and The Letter People, but also consists of classic 1980s cartoons like Transformers and Thundercats. Mention these two cartoons to anyone in their late teens or early twenties and their face will light up, reminiscing on the great fun they had growing up with these action and adventure shows. However, ask any adult in their forties or fifties about these shows and they'll answer with "All that violence on TV? What a shame." or "Sorry, I didn't watch any of those kiddie shows." These are typical responses in America, where animation has evolved into an industry aimed, more or less, at children. In Japan, an entirely different result has occurred in the evolution of the Japanese animation industry called anime, where the main audience consists of anyone aged from one to one hundred. Here the animation styles of American and Japanese culture will be compared and contrasted. While there is always much imagination involved in creating such stories, many anime storylines find their roots in the common Japanese religion
Character design is very different in anime is very different from American cartoons. Many characters are human in form, as opposed to animals or robots often present in cartoons. Japanese animation, however, commonly employs simplistic facial design to distinguish characters immediately. More emotional characters tend to have larger eyes, small noses, and small mouths. The "bad guy" of the story is often drawn with smaller eyes, and a larger mouth. Hair color is often wild in anime as well. Colors range from black to pink to blond to blue. This technique is used more to distinguish between characters than for personality traits, although very often characters with blonde hair are more "evil" in motives than the rest of the characters. This system of character development is not used in Western animation. Anime tends to use a style that has sharp and jagged lines, whereas Americans use a style that has smooth and curvy lines. Although these are differences, there are benefits to both of these styles. The most obvious benefit to using the Japanese method is that the sharp lines stand out very easily and so overcome the problem of having to be distin
Some common words found in the essay are:
Shinto Character, Japanese American, Thundercats Mention, It's Americans, Shinto Shinto, American Japanese, America Maybe, Nation Memories, Letter People, american animation, japanese animation, western animation, character design, distinguish characters, anime american,
Approximate Word count = 779
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
|
