Japanimation (Laws of Japanese Animation) – Part 2
Skwigly
In the first part of this article (PART 1 here), I initiated describing the concepts and rules of the Japanese animation, the difference between manga and anime, and the incredible possibilities of this billionaire market. In this second part, we are going to continue with the rules of anime, new points of the market and the themes that influenced the industry of games and films as Matrix.
The Japanese animation is certainly recognized by traces and fine finishing with charismatic characters and rich psychological content. That’s the way the anime won the world and established a huge community of fans.
The first time that I saw an anime, was 30 years ago. At this time, I was a child and my father surprised my family with the first color TV. At the beginning, I found so strange those drawings with big-eyed characters and strong psychological profile, so different content from the already habitual drawings of Walt Disney and Max Fleischer.
While in the western animation there is the predominance of the muscle “super-hero”, in the Japanese animations, simple citizens, children and teenagers predominate. Concerning the big eyes, there is nothing about the influence of the western aesthetics, but the reason is that the Japanese understand that “The eyes are the window of the soul”. But the biggest difference between those two animations, according to the author of manga Yabô no Mure (Ambitious Gang), Kei Tsukasa, it is the duration of the story, where the designers use more drawings and pages and less text to illustrate and describe an action or thought.
This difference defines a style that some authors call subtractive and additive. Historically, in Japan there is an emphasis on silence, in the blank space and in the static elements. In part, the subtraction of the Japanese style comes from the language. The Japanese use so much the insinuation, that many things are not told directly and that becomes a personal style. Particularly, I think that it is much more interesting to talk to a person who subtracts the subjects. In the western world, we have a very bad habit of talking things as if they are an absolute truth. That only makes us block the imagination and limit the vision of the reality we are living in.
The Japanese cartoons are audacious and intelligent. The Japanese aesthetics influences the world of animation, in such a serious way, that several American drawings have been animated in Japan. For example, we have the first seasons of Thunder Cats, Animaniacs, Tiny Toons, lots of episodes of the second season of Batman and more recently the second season of the gloomy Spawn. I also cannot forget that Disney was inspired by “Kimba, The White Lion” of Osamu Tezuka on the Lion King.
But animes did not influence only the drawings. To accomplish the trilogy Matrix and videogame, the directors went to Japan and visited several videogame studios, directors of animes and the studios that developed them. The matrix uses camera angles, fights with Hong Kong’s Thread (the one that allows to fly and to jump freely) animating the actors as if they were characters. In search of a direction on Japanese style, Matrix innovated technologically with the camera that stops before the action and walks by the scenery showing all angles.
Let’s go back for concepts and describe the last rules that an anime or manga should contain:
14. Before a shot or explosion, an anticipation of the energetic power should be shown, generally using sound and protuberances in the surface.
15. The size of the weapon does not have relation with its potential of destruction, once small weapons can be more destructive.
16. The ammunition only finishes when the characters are cornered or unconscious.
17. The shot precision of the hero increases with the difficulty while the villain decreases.
18. The more villains there are, the smaller the probability of killing the hero.
19. Whenever the villain is cornered and without ammunition, an explosion will occur so that he can run away.
20. Whenever the hero gets hurt in battles, generally in the arm, he loses his fight and shot qualities, but he can still drive.
21. The characters in general are insecure with love.
22. The blood quantity is almost infinite, it will only exhaust with the character’s death.
23. Supernatural creatures have at least three eyes and can only be killed by cutting objects like swords.
24. People take too long to notice that they got hurt.
25. The children are smarter than the adults.
26. The more beautiful, the dumber is the character.
27. The more the character talks, the larger the size of his mouth.
28. Any weapon able to annihilate the enemy, can only be used at the end and only once.
29. Training is not necessary to operate any kind of machine or vehicle.
30. Strong emotions emit a golden blue color for heros and red for the villains.
31. Everything that is not human is ugly and dangerous.
32. When the anime has over 30 minutes, all the rules should be applied.
We heard several times that in Hollywood the themes for new films are starting to show signs of exhaustion. The cultures of other countries seem to be the solution for this problem. In Brazil, the characters of our folklore were recently used on a massive game called Erynia.
PART 1 – https://www.skwigly.co.uk/japanimation-laws-of-japanese-animation-part-1/