Ask John: What Are The Different Anime Drawing Styles?

Question:
What are the different anime drawing styles? I gather that different styles are represented in art schools that specialize or teach animation in Japan. I have recognized at least two or three styles that are unique in anime, and I wonder if they have special names. For example, the “golden age” art style of Cyborg 009 and Kikaider are different than the styles most commonly used today.

Answer:
Generally Japanese anime and manga do not have formal, distinct varieties of character design or art style. Unlike classical art, which may be classified in stylistic periods including Baroque, Expressionist, Rococo, Modernist, and Post Modernist that were conscious reactions to political climates or other artistic movements, anime and manga typically aren’t categorized by period or movements (not to be confused with genres), nor does Japanese pop art have collective, intentional stylistic movements. Astute observers may recognize common characteristics in similar anime or manga. These observations are simply a recognition of the progressive graduated maturation of anime art.

Anime and manga creators don’t exist and work in a vacuum. They are fans of manga and anime and often see, and may be influenced by the artwork of their peers. It’s common for young, upcoming artists to work as assistants or apprentices to established artists. For example, in the mid 1950s Fujio A. Fujiko, Osamu Tezuka, Shotaro Ishinomori, Fujio Akatsuka and numerous other manga artists gathered and lived together and shared creative input and influences. More recently, for example, One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda is an acknowledged fan of Dragonball creator Akira Toriyama, so Oda’s One Piece exhibits design similarities with Dragonball. The tastes and design styles of artists and anime/manga fans are influenced by trends and the tastes of their contemporaries. In the same way that American comic books from the 1950s don’t look exactly like today’s comics, manga art from the 50s looks different from manga art from the 70s, and both are different from manga from the 90s.

Very loosely, it may be said that vintage anime and manga have more simplistic art design than recent anime; however there are always exceptions. Although the Lupin the 3rd: Cagliostro’s Castle movie was released in 1979, it still looks very contemporary. At the same time, an anime like Koi Koi 7, released in 2005, has art design and animation quality that wouldn’t be out of place in the early 1990s. And productions like Angel’s Egg and Dead Leaves have visual design that’s totally unique and doesn’t resemble at all what viewers typically think of as “anime.”

I must mention that shoujo manga is typically characterized by an airy, ethereal design style modeled after influences from early shoujo manga pioneers including Ryoko Ikeda and Moto Hagio, but this design style isn’t constantly applied to shoujo anime. Even in the case of conventional shoujo manga design style, the consistency in design style isn’t represented or taught by specific art schools. It’s an amorphous effect that propagates literally by osmosis. Artists that work with each other, for example Satoshi Urushihara and Koh Kawarajima, develop nearly identical drawing styles. And contemporary artists and the tastes of contemporary consumers influence contemporary artists. But these identifying, common artistic styles are largely just a case of circumstances and coincidence- not an intentional, formal agreement among artists to draw in a specific style.