Ask John: Can You Explain Anime Visual Gags?

Question:
What is the implication of the big teardrop that appears behind anime character’s heads. It seams that it’s just when someone is exasperated but there also seems to be other occasions when they appear. The second question I have is why do some boys in anime get a nosebleed when they see a girl’s panties? I have never personally seen this occur and I wonder about it. Is this a purely Japanese thing? Is this something they think happens to boys occasionally?

Answer:
If you’d don’t mind, while I’m at it, I’ll also address to other common anime conventions, the “falling down” and the distinctive Japanese taunt with the eyelid, tongue and “V.”

The explanation for most of these actions is not rooted in the actions themselves but rather in the fundmental artistic style of manga. The “sweat drop” as it’s commonly referred to, is a visual symbol of anxiety or embarrassment. The nosebleed is a representation of sexual arousal, and characters suddenly falling down represents shock over something unexpected or ignorant done or said. Because all of these conditions occur so frequently in manga and anime, it’s easy for Westerners to assume that there must be some deeper significance to these events, but the their significance actually isn’t in the conventions themselves. One of the fundmental artistic goals of manga, and its extension, anime, is to tell a visual story. While American comic books often rely on text and dialogue to establish action and setting, manga, under ideal conditions, should be able to tell its story without dialogue. In order to do this, and do it quickly, manga artists needed visual cues to represent conditions that may not be immediately obvious to a reader. It’s difficult to express embarrassment without the character speaking, so the idea of a character breaking into a cold sweat was simplified to a single large sweat drop.

Since it’s difficult to express sexual stimulation in an immediately recognizeable manner without being rude, the nosebleed represents blood rushing to the head from shock, and acts as a visual pun for one’s emotions overflowing. The suggestion of sex literally gets the blood boiling over the edge of the pot, in a manner of speaking.

Naturally, Japanese people don’t swoon and collapse when someone says something foolish, but in manga, seeing a crowd of people suddenly keel over around a central character immediately alerts the reader that the clueless focal character has said or revealed something shocking or more likely embarrassing or ignorant. Thus, the visual gag of people falling over expresses the joke without the need for a reader to actually read what was said. The humor of the sequence is immediately expressed to the reader through these visual cues, even before the dialogue has a chance to instigate the same effect. In effect, in the same way a light bulb over the head represents a bright idea in Western comics, a nosebleed, swooning or the sweat drop provide similar visual clues.

Along the same lines, another common event seen in manga that may seem odd to Westerners is the distinctly Japanese taunt of one eyelid pulled down and the tongue wagging. This can simply be explained by Japanese culture. In Western culture, we may taunt by sticking out a tongue and wiggling both open hands at the temples, as though the person taunting has antlers like a deer. There’s no cultural explanation for the exact placement of the hands or why that particular motion is used to taunt another. It’s simply natural that a foreign culture would develop a similar gesture performed differently.

The “V” symbol made with the index and middle finger is really the only manga visual pun that has a cultural background. Clearly the “V” is the Japanese version of the American “thumbs up,” sign for “positive,” yet its roots are oddly negative. The unabashed British Prime Minister Winston Churchill used the “V” as a British version of what Americans would consider giving Adolf Hitler “the finger.” Americans interpreted and transposed this gesture to mean “victory.” After VJ Day, Japan adopted the American use of “V for victory” and merged it with the American “thumbs up” to create their own distinct sign language for “good.”