Can we please kill the “anime side-mouths were created as a budget-saving technique and have no other purpose and artists who use it without that excuse are wrong and shit” meme right here and now?
First we’ll start with FLCL, generally considered one of the best-animated OVAs of all time by anyone who’s not being contrarian for the sake of it. It… doesn’t have the budget-per-episode of Kill la Kill, to say the least, and yet, behold! Side-mouths aplenty.
But it doesn’t end here. As you probably already knew or could at least predicted if you thought, the low-budget 60s Astro Boy anime used plenty of side-mouths, as did the manga:
So… it’s quite obvious what happened here, right? Tezuka simply incorporated side-mouths into his own drawing style to fit with the animated adaptations more.
Except… no, not really. Because Tezuka always used side-mouths in Astro Boy, years before the anime existed.
I don’t know exactly what the first TV anime was, but multiple sources say it was
Otogi Manga Calendar, which started in 1961.
Tezuka drew the above Astro Boy manga arc, The Hot Dog Corps (good arc with fun comedy and adventure and drama btw; go read it, it’s the first thing in volume 1)
And then he drew THIS Astro Boy panel in 1955:
Not enough for ya? Well then it’s time to get some vintage 40s Tezuka up in this bitch, back when the inking was done by someone else and looked horrible because of the primitive printing methods of the time (though that’s another story for another time):
HOLY SIDEMOUTHS SON!
So where could Tezuka have come up with this very, very WACKY ZANY JAPAN artistic choice that is so alien to and bizarre us westerners? This bad art thing that pseudoanime-drawing hacks who need to read some Loomis should stop using, gosh darn it?
Could it be that he got it from…
NO.
That can’t be! All of the expert anime scholars taught me that Tezuka just copied Disney! He couldn’t possibly have had Popeye as a colossal influence; despite his character designs being far more Fleischer-like than Disney feature film-like, it has to have been a simple coincidence… right? It’s not like Tezuka actually included Popeye as an engrishy cameo in one of his comics as a way to confirm to the audience that “yes, I really love Fleischer cartoons” or anything weird like that, r-
Okay, okay, so Popeye was Christopher Hart How To Draw Manga degeneracy. It’s not like other classic American cartoons Tezuka loved used side-mouths too, right?
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
You know what? Draw all the side-mouths that you freaking want; as long as you do it thoughtfully and truly feel that it benefits the drawing, there is no form of stylization that is bad. There are many artistic justifications for utilizing side-mouths including but not limited to keeping a character’s head shape rounder for cuteness purposes, making sure a character’s mouth is always facing the audience to make drawings funnier or simply making your art look a little intentionally off-kilter.
It’s true that it’s very, very helpful to know the fundamentals if you want more control over your drawings, but the keyword here is “control”. You shouldn’t let those fundamentals hold you back either.
“There are no rules, only tools.” - Glen Vilppu
I like how this started off as ‘Side mouths are bad’ to ‘Wow, side mouths have been done for ages by both western and eastern artist!’.
But it’s a wonderful point to at last bring towards a close, and i do love that ending phrase: “There are no Rules, only Tools”
Side mouths are indefensible shits that make everything look bad, especially moe anime.
http://cladbeetle.tumblr.com/ that face drawing you did actually shows good aesthetic sense, sad that you have absolutely no retort to everything I said beyond a 4chan shitpost-caliber brain fart.
If you can’t see it’s bad, you just can’t. Tezuka did tens of thousands of drawings in his life time, having a side mouth could have very well be a way to save time, considering how simplistic most of his stuff is. The point is, there’s no reason for side mouths in this day and age, they look like aberrations. You keep defending them as tools but they’re old and outdated tools that reflect just how low budget most of the industry is. Draw a sidemouth and a normal mouth and see how much time one takes you over the other. It’s all done to simply save time, like drawing anime at 7 frames per second or re-using scenes a la gundam SEED. Or having long shots of characters staring at each other to pad out episodes like in dragon ball super. It just makes the product lesser in this humble 4channer shitposter’s opinion.
“Draw a sidemouth and a normal mouth and see how much time one takes you over the other“
It’s pretty clear from your reblogs that you’re someone who values detail a hell of a lot and whose favorite art is of the highly shaded digital painting variety, hence your lack of thought about less *overtly* complicated forms of drawing. You can make this “effort” comment about literally any form of stylized simplification, like “it’s wrong to take artistic inspiration from The Powerpuff Girls or Dexter’s Lab because they’re simple styles made to pump out cartoons quick and have no appeal of their own. I mean what’s with the anatomy on Dexter? Why do the Powerpuffs have no fingers???”
Because really, where exactly do you draw the line at this stuff? Drawing a photo-realistic hand is much harder than drawing a cartoon one; Glenn Vilppu actually recommends starting with cartoony ones first. And yet, would Peanuts or Calvin & Hobbes look better if everyone had realistic hands? And why should the amount of time spent on a drawing matter more than the artistic understanding and technique behind it? Or better yet the controlled emotional impact it has on the viewer.
“Tezuka did tens of thousands of drawings in his life time, having a side mouth could have very well be a way to save time, considering how simplistic most of his stuff is.“
Tezuka was smug enough about his drawings that he once told Katsuhiro Otomo “if you could draw like me, you would”. He clearly put work into them. The way to make stuff fast in manga is working with assistants, and some of them that were hand-picked by Tezuka for their special talent later became iconic creators in their own right like Leiji Matsumoto and Shotaro Ishinomori.
They only seem “simplistic” to you because you have an extremely narrow definition of what constitutes artistic technique and skill. You just look at the characters and see they’re not very anatomical and don’t have a lot of lines while ignoring things like composition and use of body language.
To help you understand what I mean, here’s a shitty drawing lacking solid drawing and proper posing vs. the original Tezuka drawing it was adapting:
The guy’s particualrly dynamic scenes showed some incredibly good use of lines, where the direction and curvature of every stroke of ink served to benefit the pose as a whole. His stuff just had a great flow to it:
But if you want detail that bad then ok, here’s your detail:
You’re treating the man’s work as if it were just a primitive first step towards bigger, better things, when he’s to this day idolized by modern, highly technically trained artists like Naoki Urasawa and Yoh Yoshinari https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfMxXQqz_38
How many artists can you name that are as good at being straight-up CARTOONISTS as Tezuka still working in manga today? There’s plenty of well-drawn manga but very few of it that is legitimately cartoony reaches Tezuka or Monkey Punch levels of quality.I can sure as hell name far more artists that took Tezuka’s building blocks and stacked piles of shit on top of it, misunderstanding the western cartoon/comic principles he mastered and then shifted into his own style. Akira Toriyama used to do it pretty well, but then he threw it away and made his art increasingly angular, partly as a petty “I DO WHAT I WANT, FUCK WHAT THE FANS THINK” reaction to letters telling him they preferred his old art.
I’ve asked this question to a large amount of people before and the only answers of top-notch modern manga CARTOONISTS that came up were Eiichiro Oda and Hiroyuki Imaishi; and hell, the latter doesn’t even draw manga that often.
These comments also apply to Popeye. The art and animation in those 30s shorts is highly worked; everything is constructed very solidly out of believable shapes and the movement is consistently fluid and well-timed. And sometimes it even attempts some crazily tricky background animation, like in this short: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJoT5Wp4o8w#t=3m44s
Do you really think they’d put all this effort animating super-elaborate stuff but then think decide “we’re gonna always give Popeye and other characters side-mouths to make our jobs easier”? No, both Tezuka and Fleischer staff did it because often, a side-view drawing just works better if the viewers can see the mouth more head-on. For Astro it’s a matter of keeping his head into a cute spherical shape while still giving him exaggerated expressions. If you gave him a jaw that opened and closed in an organic way, the look of the character would change drastically into something the creator did not intend. For Popeye and other Tezuka characters it’s that a lot of the expressiveness of the characters comes from almost always having a clear view of their mouth, which becomes a particularly large problem if they also have a large nose that would often cover a good chunk of it. Imagine how horrible this drawing would be if his mouth was “anatomically correct”. Popeye would almost be gobbling up his own nose:
Also: FLCL is a high-budget production with top-notch staff. Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure TV doesn’t use side-mouths and neither does Fist of the North Star TV because their styles are less about being cute or funny in a cartoony way; you can’t seriously say, with a straight face, that the last 2 have better animation & art than FLCL. Can you?
I’m pretty sure this is 100% intentional; Glenn Danzig published Shin Devilman chapters and has a fucking Devilman tramp stamp. Google “danzig devilman” if you don’t believe me.
Further, undeniable proof that Hayao Miyazaki is disgusted with fanservice and the sexualization of young anime girls.
Anno: Still concerning the face, I love Mazinger Z in profile towards the first episode in the pre-publication. It’s his first appearance and Kouji discovers it with a stunning cry. Nagai: The scene in the house of the grandpa, is that it ? Anno: Yes, it really marked me. That must be why I gave the same kind of eyes to the first version of EVA. When I brought these rectifications on the original drawings, I couldn’t prevent myself from drawing the eyes in the style of Master Nagai. Nagai: And in the first episode of Evangelion, the first appearance of EVA is a big shot on his face, right ? Anno: Euh yes, that’s it. (Laugh) Sorry. Nagai: Fancy that? (Laugh)
The Tokyo Destruction Chapter of Violence Jack has some of the best horror I’ve seen from Nagai outside of Devilman. The rest of the the manga doesn’t really recapture this except for a few intense scenes later on (which I’m not sure if I’ll post here since they’re NSFL). While the manga is practically page-to-page brutality most of the later violence feels like it’s meant to be cool and viscerally entertaining, or is too over-the-top to get that gut reaction of terror from. And that’s fine, if Nagai decided he wanted to switch gears like that then I won’t blame him for not doing something he never intended to do. I’d just like to have seen more that is like this.
Ode to Kirihito きりひと讃歌 (1966)
Artist: Osamu Tezuka
Normally not a fan of biblical imagery in comics (it’s used wrong by so many writers/artists) but Tezuka really nailed it here. One of my favourite scenes.
Ode to Kirihito きりひと讃歌 (1966)
Artist: Osamu Tezuka
One of the most basic comics techniques in the world (passage of time in one drawing by splitting it into smaller panels) but I never get tired of seeing or using it.
Go Nagai during an interview with Egypt Today: “I was particularly saddened when I found out that in many countries I was considered to be an author who loves to depict battles and destruction just for the fun of it. The reason why I depict the effects of war in my comics is because I strongly believe that a person should learn from childhood how war can be destructive and how much people and societies may suffer from it, just the same way I learned it from the stories of adults around me when I was a little child.”
Go Nagai being interviewed at Naples Comic Con: "I was born three weeks after Japanese capitulation, so I lived the horror of the war only through the testimonies and the stories of people around me, but I was affected by for sure, so all my works were: the fear of the war is clear in every story of mine and I’m often misunderstood because I prefer not to express explicitly pacific messages, but I rather show what would happen if we come to a new world war. I also think that some characters I created share a hippie soul, because I started working just in 1968, so they were inevitably influenced by those years”
Go Nagai having a conversation with Hideaki Anno: ”I told myself that it was a good idea to create a hero who wasn’t necessarily good, that we could have a bad hero, that’s where the inspiration came. At that time I was watching movies like Godzilla and I was really identifying myself to him. Without knowing why, through the eyes of Godzilla, I felt the need to crush tanks or to disperse crowds of people with kicks, I found that entertaining… It’s in the same state of mind that I started writing Mao Dante.”
Go Nagai seems more sincere about the obvious fun he’s had drawing over-the-top violence over the years when speaking in his home country compared to what he says when he addresses that sort of material in foreign lands. I wonder if this had anything to do with the dumb “NAGAI IS A CANCEROUS MORALLY BANKRUPT PSYCHO EDGELORD RUINING OUR PURE ARTFUL MEDIUM OF ANIME” nonsense that a lot of people push.
For the record, I’m not saying Nagai’s works don’t exhibit messages that are taking a stance against war and violent, animalistic groupthink, because they clearly do. It’s just that you don’t have to be a war-promoter to have fun drawing crazy stylized violence.
It’s a strange one. There’s an essay that’s been floating around on the net for years that was allegedly written by Go Nagai and is featured in the English translated Kodansha volumes of the Devilman manga. I’ve never seen those volumes in person so I can’t verify if it’s real. It states that Devilman is anti-war.
“The theme of Devilman is antiwar. When humans transform into devils and demons, what they really are doing is taking up murder weapons and embarking on war. The ‘indiscriminate melding of demons with humans’ that we see in Devilman refers to the draft system, while the death of Akira Fudo’s beloved Miki symbolizes the death of peace.
I am the author of Devilman yet throughout it’s creation, I felt as though I were being pushed by an invisible power. There is no justice in war, any war, nor is there any justification for human beings killing one another. Devilman carries a message of warning, as we step toward a bright future.“
But then at the same time you have the interview from the Naples comic con you posted where he flatly says:
“Q: Do you often deal with social and political issues in your comics? Has Devilman, for example, a “political” ending? A: No, I don’t, I prefer to avoid a political connotation for my manga. I might be misunderstood and I’d risk to offend anyone. Devilman does not have a political ending. I just wanted to underline human stupidity.“
Is Nagai just inconsistent?
EDIT: So we talked about this on twitter and I think the Naples interview just has a wonky translation. The blog owner who posted the interview admits as much themselves. Devilman is pretty explicit about mass hysteria and human cruelty and so on so I don’t think you can deny its themes. It’s likely the interviewer asked Nagai about specific social or political causes or affiliations and those are what he doesn’t like to take a stance on.
Makai Tensho/Tensei 魔界転生 (1998)
Artist: Ishikawa Ken
I love how Brocken just straight up walks into Kouji’s house to attack him. Kouji Kabuto is chillin’ and eating breakfast with Sayaka and his little bro and this guy just walks into his kitchen and slaps his bitch face.
Context: Jakioh has the soul of a dog. There’s this scene where this guy is terrorising a bunch of kids with his big dog, he’s being an asshole. So this little girl calls over Jakioh (I think she’s the protag’s sister) and has him scare the guy shitless. This manga is gruesome and horrifying but it has its moments of great comedy.
Manga is Skull Killer Jakiō スカルキラー邪鬼王 (1990)
Artist: Ishikawa Ken
Many of the Invaders in Armageddon are based on creatures from Ishikawa’s body of work. For example, this invader is clearly based on Jakioh from Skull Killer Jakiō/スカルキラー邪鬼王 (1990). I’d be interested to know where the other creatures came from or if they’re just generic ones made for the OVA.
Stinger and Cohen are lifted from Majū Sensen/魔獣戦線 (1975)
In Episode 7, Dr. Saotome summons a hideous Invader. This is actually based on an enemy mecha from Getter Robo Go/ゲッターロボ號 (1990)
If anyone’s spotted any more, please let me know! I’m sure there’s countless more. In particular, I’d like to know if the dormant form of Shin Dragon is lifted from anything (it’s awakened form is, rather lazily, just Getter Robo G’s upper half slapped on top of a dragon mecha-kaiju from the manga Getter Robo G/ゲッターロボG (1975).
Another “fun fact” although many have known this for years. Ryoma’s iconic outfit in Getter Robo: Armageddon/真ゲッターロボ~世界最後の日
(1998) is actually based on Shinichi, the protagonist of Ishikawa’s earlier manga Majū Sensen/魔獣戦線 (1975). Armageddon, like all the Getter Robo OVA’s, contain several references to other manga Ishikawa created.
