Anime Recognition Thread

[Dark Shikari]

This idea has been floating around a number of chan-style boards for a while and I've seen some really great threads on it.

The brain, with sufficient conditioning, has a tendency to immediately recognize certain patterns despite having never seen the pattern in that exact form before.

An example:



If you've seen the anime, you know this one. I doubt it'll take anymore more than a few seconds! But if you're still stumped, its

Spoiler for :

Haruhi Suzumiya

.

Now that you see how it works--make your own and see how well you can summarize an anime character in a couple colored lines of various widths Bonus points for as few colors as possible, and extra points if its as easy to recognize as the above one.

[ReAn]

Originally Posted by Dark Shikari

This idea has been floating around a number of chan-style boards for a while and I've seen some really great threads on it.

The brain, with sufficient conditioning, has a tendency to immediately recognize certain patterns despite having never seen the pattern in that exact form before.

An example:



If you've seen the anime, you know this one. I doubt it'll take anymore more than a few seconds!

Now that you see how it works--make your own and see how well you can summarize an anime character in a couple colored lines of various widths

Somehow I think that this only is as recognizable as you think it is because the show is:

1) Stupidly popular
2) The 'outfit' is extremely unique in colors. Give me an hour to come up with some examples.

[Klashikari]

whoa... i'm quite unsure, but the first thing which flashed in my mind as

Spoiler:

Haruhi

If it IS that, quite amusing how such pattern can be that effective.

EDIT:bleh, answer wasn't given as a start

Originally Posted by ReAn

Somehow I think that this only is as recognizable as you think it is because the show is:
1) Stupidly popular
2) The 'outfit' is extremely unique in colors. Give me an hour to come up with some examples.

I'm not exactly sure if popularity really works here.
And such colors aren't exactly unique. I guess it is rather the brown/yellow which kick in the process.

[Dark Shikari]

Originally Posted by ReAn

Somehow I think that this only is as recognizable as you think it is because the show is:

1) Stupidly popular
2) The 'outfit' is extremely unique in colors. Give me an hour to come up with some examples.

You'd think that, but after a few hundred-post *chan threads, I've come to learn that it works for pretty much any character with distinctive coloring.

A whole bunch of Touhou character ones were done by /jp/. Its a challenge for both the creators and the viewers--the creators have to come up with the easiest to recognize image possible for a possibly obscure character, while the viewers have to recognize that obscure character.

Here's another, though not as distinctive:

Spoiler for :

Code Geass: C.C.

And another:

Spoiler for :

MOU IKKAI

[ReAn]

Originally Posted by Klashikari

Spoiler:

Haruhi

Yes

Originally Posted by Klashikari

I'm not exactly sure if popularity really works here.
And such colors aren't exactly unique. I guess it is rather the brown/yellow which kick in the process.

Well, im not saying popularity affects the individuals findings, but if you run a mass survey, then you will probably find more people who recognize colors from popular anime than unpopular based on the soul fact that they're more likely to have actually seen it.

As for the OP's blotch, it's actually that EXACT shade of blue that gives it all away, hell, i bet his block could have been all that BLUE and 5/10 fans would recognize it.

Example: I've seen the 1st show (color blotch) in the OP's 2nd post, but not the 2nd show.

Anyway, I'm still compiling my example blotches & sources to make my argument, so more on this in a bit.

Edit: I'd like to point out, while I do seem negative, im not trying to blatantly bash the OP's idea. I'm just not satisfied the test is valid, there's many factors that need to be considdered, it has some merit, obviously, but I think we need to address some of the issues which can make the findings biased.

[Sorrow-K]

Originally Posted by Dark Shikari

If you've seen the anime, you know this one.

Not true, I couldn't figure this one out. I got the other two in this post, though:

Originally Posted by Dark Shikari

Spoiler for :

MOU IKKAI

(You must really hate us if you're posting

Spoiler:

Mou Ikkai.)

[ReAn]

1. Introduction

Firstly, sorry for the double post. Since this is more of it's own post, and the previous was a response, for clarity I'd prefer to have this one seperate. Edit: Was a double post when I began writing ~_^

2. Data

Firstly here's an index of examples, wrapped in spoiler tags as to not give away the previous examples:

Spoiler for Index, Look only if you dont care what answers are.:

S1. Haruhi (As represented by the original post.)
S2. C.C. from Code Geass (As represented by Shikari's 2nd post, first blotch)

Secondly, Here are MY Example blotches, with a spoiler tag telling you where they're from, for impact, please attempt to read my entire post before opening it.

R1:
R2.1: R2.2:
R3.1: R3.2: Revealed later...
R4:

Spoiler for Answers, dont click here unless you wanna spoil!:

R1. Mai HiME - Uniform Color
R2.1. Shuffle! - Uniform Color
R2.2. Shuffle! - Hair Color's of the Main Girls (Rather Unique)
R3.1. Full Metal Alchemist - Uniform of Registered State Alchemists
R3.2. Full Metal Alchemist - Clothing/Hair of Edward
R3. Dai Mahou Touge - Appearance of Main Character

3. Arguments

Let me first state that I'm genuinely interested in this topic you've brought up Shikari, It's definately interesting to study how some coloring patterns can be recognizable globally.

However, I think some shows would be generally more recognizable than others. Additionally, people may pattern thier color recognition differently.

In example S1, It was instant, I recognized the colors myself before I even read the post. In example S2 I didn't recognize the colors right away, it took some time, although arguably the character in question was a pivotal character to the shows plot, showed up often, and was probably the most uniquely recognizable character.

Other people may have recognized example S2 quicker than myself yes, but this becomes an issue of popularity and hype.

Example 1 - Global Conditioning

In the case of Ex. S1 the color & patterns we're probably emphasized a lot because not just one character exibited those colors, but all characters, this is likely one reason that one would recognize R1 quickly as well as the color & pattern is applied accross a lot of characters.

Example 2 - Color Uniqueness

The Exact shade of Blue in S1 and the exact shade of Orange in R1 are extremely unique shades. Our eyes/brain may just be making a connection from that single shade. When you look @ R2.1 none of the colors there "jump out" at you, they're not very unique at all, the pattern would come more in to play here, but I'd be willing to be almost nobody could guess the anime based on R2.1 alone. The unique shades (and combination) depicted in R2.2 is needed to filter out all the White/Brown combinations in one's head to identify the show. Even with R2.2 to the untrained eye, it looks like a rainbow.

Example 3 - Sampling location

Where would we sample from? As indicated by R2.1 and R2.2 you can get extremely different patterns & color blotches based on where we sample from.

Spoiler for Argument going into the details of R2's samples:

It's arguable that the uniform style of Shuffle! is extremely unique, but we're trying to map a 3D pattern into 2D, and since there's only 2-3 colors, it can lower the clarity. If someone was shown a cutout of a shuffle uniform:



It would be much more recognizable than the color blotch above.

Example 4 - General recognizability

Let's take R3.1 into view, the show is popular, the color combination is unique (we dont see it elsewhere a lot), it appears EVERYWHERE in the show, a lot, but to some, this may be tougher to pick out. My guess would be because it's not the main focus of the show, it's an exrtremely important aspect of the show, but not the focus.

Spoiler for More obvious example R3.2:

This blotch is likely to be recognized by others a lot more because this is the signiature color set of the main character, it's only worn by one character, and in about 1/2 his scenes he dosent even have the red component.

Why does this go against our previous argument in "Example 1 and Example 3" ?? It's not as conditioned, since it's not as frequent, and it's sampling location is the same (almost completely) as the previous example.

Example 5 - Pure popularity

If we look at R4 i'm willing to bet nobody will get this, if you do... you're insane. It's not because the sample was taken poorly, the sample is taken based off the main colors that the main character wears consistantly thoughtout the show. It has high contrast to the surroundings in the show, The colors are specific. Why would less people get this one?

This show is off in the nether regions of anime, people who totally and utterly loved this show, would probably have an easier time picking out the colors, those who have seen the show and didn't like it that much will have flushed this to the back of thier mind, even if they'd seen the show 40 times. If the show holds little appeal, people would likely not make an active effort to retain information about it (at least not details like color patterns).

4. Conclusion

So where am I going with all this? I think what it all really comes down to is the fact that how can we define "unique"? How can we define "obscure"? Where should we sample to be fair? I think that this idea is fascinating, but we can't just be arguing that we remember it because of conditioning, or because the colors are unique, i think it really comes down to a combination of all these things for each different show.

The game is cool, it's got a neat point to it, but some things are more obvious to others. I'm personally a Love Hina FREAK, i've seen the show over 40 times... things from LH will be more obvious to me, and less obvious to the majority of people in the anime community, so how do you gauge the difficulty?

Klashikari argued that the brown/yellow did it for him/her on S1 for me it was the blue. There's a lot of variables here to considder.

5. Sample Pictures

Here are the pictures used to sample my blotches.

Spoiler for Samples:

R1:
R2.1:
R2.2:
R3.1:
R3.2:
R4:

6. My challenges to you:

A. - Easy, Popular show, Lots of characters exibit this pattern


B. - Easy, Popular show, single character (main character)


C. - Hard (But im giving you 2 dimensions to work with), semi-popular show, lots exibit.

[KholdStare]

Blah, I didn't get it at first, granted I just woke up and spent 3 seconds on solving it. When I clicked on the spoiler it was like "Duh!"

[gabbytay]

Originally Posted by ReAn

1. Introduction


C. - Hard (But im giving you 2 dimensions to work with), semi-popular show, lots exibit.

This has to be

Spoiler for My answer:

heroic age

[james0246]

So the argument of this thread is not which patterns represent a show/character/theme/et cetera, but rather who can remember the clothing worn by the characters in a show. And then that clothing is arranged in a one-dimensional symmetrical pattern. I guess this is interesting, if somewhat simplistic since it only requires knowlede of the show to answer. But then again a more complex pattern that describes, say, the theme of isolation in Haruhi would be too subjective to answer. I guess it all comes back to Pictionary in the end .

But, this experiment is soley devoted to long-term memory. This would be a more interesting idea if you could test short-term vs. long-term (in fact there are allready many pattern based experiments that do this.) Maybe a moderator or the originator of the thread could showcase a character model; delete the character 15-30 minutes later; then present a pattern based on the character model. Based on who remembers and how they remember, discussion can be created.

Or, better yet, let us start a poll of women v. men. Women, generally, have a better long term memory in regards to clothing and overall apperance than men, but men have a better short-term memory.

Or, even more interesting, maybe we should, as ReAn has so elequently stated, provide a specific image and then let various different people create their own patterns based on the image. And then we can discuss the difference.

This is actually a very interesting idea, and I hope we can all add to it.

[Kaioshin Sama]

My first inclination here is to recognize Tetris block colours in all of these.

Oddly enough if you combine the colours Red, White, Yellow and Blue and Silver you'll cover lots of super robots. There's going to be a lot of right answers in that case.