RANT ALERT: Because someone has to say something!

[eonen]

Okay, here's the deal: if I had the power to enforce this, I would decree that for, say, the next two-to-five years, unless you were raised in Japan or are of recent Japanese descent, you are NOT allowed to draw in that anime/manga style

Comments

[luchog]

The proliferation of styles in American comics is a very recent thing, and primarly indie and small press. The mainstream stuff still pretty much all looks the same, all uses the same conventions.

There was a lot less of that when I was growing up in the '70s and '80s. What you're complaining about with manga styles today is exactly the same complaints I heard back then with regard to the "Marvel Style". Back then, nearly everyone was trying to be like the big commercial artists, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and Milo Manara; and there was just as much complaining about lack of originality. The truly original stuff, truly original artists like R. Crumb, Roberta Gregory, Vaughn Bode, or Bill Griffiths, weren't well-known or commercially successful in the way that the mainstream artists were. The same is true for Japanese styles today. People see mostly the big commercial stuff, and emulate that.

And there are far more than three distinct styles of anime; and many more than that of manga styles. Even if you're talking strictly about the stuff that gets licensed and imported into the US; and far more so if you include a lot of the "indie" Japanese productions, which are just as varied as the indie US stuff. Certainly far more than there were of American animation when Americans dominated the industry. Back then, it was pretty much Disney, Avery, Warner, and Ward; and maybe a handful of smaller artists that were nowhere near as commercially successful. Loose rough styles, tight clean styles, heavily abstacted, gross realism, splatter, minimalist, and so on. It's not all the same "big eyes small mouth". That's just what the drooling fanboys focus on, just like they focussed on the luciriously muscled and back-breakingly busty American comic styles in the '70s and '80s. No one is ever going to mistake Shou Tajima or Range Murata for Masume Shirow or Hayao Miyazaki.

There's never been much variation in the big-name commercial productions; regardless of where it's from. And there are always far more imitators than there are originals.

[eonen]

What you're saying doesn't match my own experience.

I mean, I've seen plenty of American artists from before when anime was popular, and many of them did not follow American comic book artists' styles, even though they were clearly comic book style bits of art. Hell, you have only to open up your average newspaper comics page to see radically different styles of cartoon art.

And it's those imported anime styles that the fans are drawing. And maybe you're judging on different criteria than I, but I can identify three distinct styles that only have marginal variations from artist to artist.

I'm not sure we're looking at this from the same perspective, but from where I sit, anime art doesn't have a lot of variation in it already, and it seems like everybody is drawing it these days in place of coming up with something original.

[luchog]

Comic strips are a completely different art form from comic books, and not remotely comperable. Similarly wide variation exists in Japanese comic strips; but almost none of that gets imported into the US. If you're limiting your comparison to major commercial Japanese imports and the full range of American offerings, mainstream and indie/underground, then of course the Japanese are going to appear more limited. Very little of the non-mainstream stuff gets imported into the US, just like very little of the non-mainstream American stuff makes it to Japan.

Even among the bigger names, there's still a lot of variation. Walt Disney and Warner Brothers were far more similar to each other than, say, Studio Ghibli and Madhouse are. Hell, there's more variation among just Madhouse's work than there is between Disney and Warner; but a lot of their stuff hasn't made it out of the Japanese market. Even a low-volume production house like Gainax has more internal variation than there was between Disney and Warner or Avery.

And the fanboys focussed just as much on the big commercial stuff when I was growing up, just like they do now. Maybe one in twenty wasn't mimicking mainstream Marvel or DC; and one in 10 of those weren't aping Heavy Metal. I think you're creating an artificial arbitrary distinction.

As for different experiences, it's very likely that we do have dramatically different experiences, seeing that I've got about a decade on you; and grew up in a rather different enviroment. Anime was almost non-existent in the US when I was a child; and I was an adult well before it really began flooding in. American underground comics were still pretty hard to find even when I was in my teens. The indie industry wasn't nearly as big as it was even ten years later.

[eonen]

Art it art, no matter what style you choose to go for; the principle is the same.
You say to yourself, "I want to tell a story through a series of static pictures," and you start drawing. The style in which you draw is entirely up to you.

It's the folks who say to themselves, "I want to tell a story through a series of static pictures that are done in a style that looks just like a style that's gotten popular," that I object to.
And it has been my personal experience that this is FAR more common with anime.

And I have to disagree with your comparison of Warner and Disney and other American animation. I, for one, can totally tell the difference between, say, Looney Tunes, Disney, and Tex Avery just at a glance...and NONE of them look like GI Joe or the Transformers. And none of those look quite like The Smurfs or Muppet Babies. And even those don't look all that similar to each other.
But sit me down in front of, say, Azumanga Daiyo or Ranma 1/2 or FuriKuri and the only differences I'll see are in subject matter. Sit me down in front of Akira and GunBuster and, sure, I'll se difference in how things are shaded, maybe, but the shape and form of the characters...? The lines, the features, and how they're drawn? Pretty damn similar to each other. Same with just about every other anime I've ever seen.
Iria, Legend of Galactic Heroes, The Mysterious Cities of Gold, Record of Lodoss War, Gunsmith Cats, Cutey Honey, Devil Hunter Yohko, The Guyver, Irresponsible Captain Tailor, and so on...the clothes may change, the technology may be different, the plots might vary, but they still all fall into one of those three categories that I don't have names for.
By comparison, American animation and comics are radically different from each other.
And for that matter, the kids I knew who were good at drawing...? They tended to have their own styles; I could point to similarities in their work to other things, but none of them were out-and-out copies the way all these anime fangeeks are now doing.

So, like I say, my experience is apparently way different from yours. It's also possible that my criteria for judging is also quite different. I had a similar argument with someone once before, and it wasn't until we decided to really define our terms that we realized we were talking about totally different things.