Re: why are there so few asian anime characters?

On Fri, 21 Nov 2003, Fata Morgana wrote:

>
> "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.

... has this guy ever talked to japanese people?  my sources note that the
Japanese are well aware that thge cartoons they watch don't look asian.
(quoting from japanese lessons again).

Lena

I identify much more with the black characters in the sunday comics htan I
do with the ones from Wizard of Id