Re: why are there so few asian anime characters?

"Jeffo Swarthmore" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Is it because it's more exciting with characters that look different
> than the audience?
>
> Of course some of the characters are fantasy characters, with super
> powers and green hair. But even the animes with natural looking
> characters very seldom have characters that look like asians.
>
> Compare with cartoons made in the western world where it is common to
> use characters that look like the people who live where the cartoon
> was made.

The very best explaination I've ever seen for this is on a website that
transcribes a lecture from the University of Dallas about anime and manga.
http://utd500.utdallas.edu/~hairston/nausicaa_lecture_1_p2.html

"And all this talk about the styles in anime and manga leads to the one
question that everyone asks or comments on when they first see Japanese
animation: 'why don't the characters look Japanese?' Now I find this is a
very interesting question, not just for what it asks, but what it doesn't
ask. Stop and think for a minute. How many of you have ever asked or heard
someone ask the question 'why doesn't Bart Simpson look anglo?'
Look at Bart. How many anglo people do you know who are yellow have square
heads and eyes that bug out like that? If you do, they should probably get
to a doctor immediately, they've probably got something very fatal!"

"...who do you know that really has a nose as pointed as Mike Doonesbury or
a jaw as square as Dick Tracy? And no matter how simple or complex, how
realistic or caricatured the faces are, we interpret all of them as looking
"just like us" in other words, anglos. [Even if you're not anglo, if you
grew up in the US, you still interpret them as part of the dominant culture,
in other words, anglo.] In fact in American comics and cartoons, the artist
must go to extreme lengths in the caricatures to denote that a character is
anything other than anglo. We just assume that anglo is the "default
setting" for any cartoon characters we see. Let me give you an example of
this. As I was putting this lecture together I started thinking about the
current animated series Arthur on PBS. Arthur is an anthropomorphic aardvark
in a middle class neighborhood and all his friends are other anthropomorphic
animals (rats, rabbits, chimps, dogs, etc.). One of the main underlying
themes of the show is diversity, and the fact that all these different
species can live together and get along. But as I started thinking about it,
I realized that I still thought of all these characters as anglo animals. I
started watching the show and tried to image any of the characters as black,
or asian, or hispanic, and I just couldn't . Underneath all that fur, they'
re still just a bunch of white middle class suburban kids.

Now we swing around to the other side of the planet, to a place called Japan
where several generations have grown up looking at cartoon figures who look
like this: http://utd500.utdallas.edu/~hairston/manga_faces.gif

Now while these faces look different in style from what we're used to
seeing, they're still recognizably human faces. We still see that they run
the gamut from the realistic looking to the ones with a very cartoony
styling or even to the grotesque. So a Japanese growing up looks at all
these characters and interprets them as looking "just like us", in other
words, asian.

So the problem comes along when you have a character who looks like this:
http://utd500.utdallas.edu/~hairston/satsuki03.JPG

This is the character Satsuki from Miyazaki's film My Neighbor Totoro. If
you show this image to a native Japanese, they immediately assume she is
asian. She looks just like all the cartoon characters they have grown up
watching, so it's obvious she must be asian. But if you show this picture to
someone who grew up in the US, they'll see that while the styling is
slightly unusual, it's not that far in styling from all the cartoons and
comic characters they've grown up with, so obviously she must be anglo. To
the US viewer, 'she just doesn't look Japanese'.

One picture, two viewers, each one bringing with them to the image their own
cultural backgrounds and baggage and each one coming away with two
completely different conclusion.

Now you begin to see what I was talking about at the beginning of this
lecture about how you have to be careful in reading graphical text? Contrary
to popular belief, graphical images are not obvious to us. Not only can you
misread graphical text just as you can misread written text, it's easier to
do that because people assume that the interpretation they are making is
obvious, and therefore must be absolutely true.

So the answer to the question of 'why don't they look Japanese?' is another
question: 'Why should they?' They're not supposed to look Japanese, they're
supposed to look like cartoon characters."

Fata Morgana
-- 
http://www.jazzmess.com - a veiwers' guide to Cowboy Bebop
http://www.cowboybebop.org - archive of CowboyBebop.com