Quote:
Originally Posted by Chiibi
Excuse me, but I have a VERY broad taste in anime and manga.
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I think the context of Sheba's post is not just about anime, but international style. You may have a broad taste in anime, but all you have is a broad taste of Japanese style.
What TheFluff and Sheba as well as myself has been saying is that anime and manga styles are very narrow and limited compared to not just western comic styles, but also chinese manhwa styles.
In my previous post I attribute the narrow design range of anime/manga to targeting a niche audience and production time and cost constrains. The anime and manga styles are often drawn very simplistically, with little anatomical accuracy. For manga, this allows fast drawing of panels, for anime it allows more frames to be done faster, no need to animate muscles, no need for complex facial expression animations.
Female characters suffer the most from lack of detail and variety. Their jaws do not move when they talk, they hardly have a nose and more recently in moe styles, their big eyes are just either tapered inwards or outwards. And when was the last time there was a female character without a sharp chin? At least some bulkier male characters have a square jaw and some guys have tiny eyes.
Body proportions are even worse, if all characters were to wear the same clothes, except for height , males can only be distinguished by being fat or skinny and all females can only be distinguished by bust size. This is especially true when comparing within a single style.
The Madhouse adaptation of Wolverine is a prime bad example of anime design, he was given a bishie sharp chin and skinny look, completely taking away his rugged and wild original Marvel design, destroying his personality. Anime tend to go for such form first, function later designs. If you were to look at 10 different characters all in a static neutral standing pose, you won't be able to tell what kind of personality they have because their designs don't reflect their function much. If you were to put Wolverine, Clark Kent, Joker, Homer, side by side, you'd be able to tell who's wild, who's a good guy, who's insane or lazy even without them doing anything.
Of course there are still great character designers such as Hirohiko Araki, who could create designs that are badass all the way to downright insane and bizarre. Eiichiro Oda's designs for One Piece started out pretty generic but went exponentially creative by the years, characters literally come in all shapes and sizes.