Read new episodes of “So, You’re A Cartoonist?” here: [link]

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When I was a young adult I stumbled upon this wondrously new form of entertainment known as Japanimation. It was cartoons, but they were gritty, dark, sexy, ultra violent, and pretty much everything that American cartoons were not. At that point in my development I had been yearning for more “mature” content and was frustrated that American cartoons never really dealt with those themes. Anime also wasn’t popular at the time, so it was like being personally entitled to things others weren’t.

I quickly began mimicking Anime and Manga styles and adapting it into my very Disney-esque one. I drew that way for a long time, trying very hard to mimic Japanese comics right down to using a lot of their “unique” symbols such as snot bubbles and giant sweat drops, which were all new and unusual to us.

Then suddenly Anime and Manga hit a BOOM in America with the introduction of the Pokemon TV series and the Pokemon game phenomenon. TV stations quickly tried to pick up as many new Anime as possible, and before long almost all kids shows here were Anime, even if they weren’t meant to be for kids (like Escaflowne). Suddenly, my style didn’t look as unique anymore and I didn’t feel “special” for drawing Anime.

As I began re-experiencing more western comics and cartoons in college, I came to realize a lot of the problems with Anime and Manga. The lack of variety in facial features, the tendency to draw gritty-tough-as-nails-bad-ass men as efeminine “bishonen,” the need to have every girl have rainbow colored hair and giant eye pools you could drown in, the stereotypical cuteness and desire to be “innocent” slightly sexualized, etc etc. The more I looked at Anime and all the people around me imitating it, the more I realized that there are other styles and ways to draw things which are just as effective.

But try as I might, changing my style proved to be VERY difficult. I had been drawing Anime for so long that I didn’t know how to alter it without completely ruining the stuff I liked about all my characters. I realized that rather than learning the tools of the trade, I had forgone a lot of the technical knowledge I needed to draw in my efforts to copy a foreign style. Anime had, in fact, corrupted my ability to draw anything.

And it’s worse now than I ever dreamed it would be. Just take a peek at the frontpage of DA and see how much Anime and Manga influenced artwork gets attention and praise from everyone. It’s almost impossible to find artwork in a style which HASN’T in some way been influenced by Anime and Manga. I’m not trying to say that Anime and Manga is EVIL, but I do feel that we’ve become over-saturated with it to the point that it’s actually becoming detrimental to our collective growth as artists.

So yes... There is a bit of a hypocrisy going on here. Having me complain about Anime and Manga is hypocritical because I, too, was influenced by it (although I think you can see other styles in my work Anime and Manga was probably the biggest influence I had as a kid). But that doesn’t mean that I can’t recognize my own shortcomings and realize how much we desperately need to move away from Anime and Manga and create more individualized and personal drawing styles instead of just copying the norm.

And just for the record, if this were hypothetically reversed and Disney was more popular than Anime, I would be saying the same thing only about moving away from Disney. Its not specifically Anime and Manga I hate, it’s the over saturation effect it’s had on us and our artwork.