Ask John: Why Do Anime Characters Never Seem to Grow Up?

Question:
I’ve read some manga and seen some animes. To my amazement, the characters never seem to grow up. The time might just fly by in weeks and months but they never grow up! One example is in Card Captor Sakura. I was reading the manga when I noticed something very wrong. Sakura just gave a birthday present to Yukito. His birthday is December 25, Christmas Day. Okay. The next thing was, time flew by quickly which I really don’t mind. The time stopped at Valentine’s Day. But CLAMP never mentions anything about Sakura going up by one grade in the school! One year should have passed but nothing was mentioned about it. I wonder what’s going on?

Answer:
Two words: creative license. One of the natural advantages of fiction is the ability to completely control the universe. An author, or in this case manga/anime creator, can keep a character perpetually young in order to maintain the fantasy of the fictional world. In the same way Peter Parker ages with the speed of Dick Clark and Bart Simpson seems permanently destined to remain in grade school, some anime characters never seem to grow up. A mature, teenage or adult Shinnosuke simply wouldn’t be the same loveable, mischievous Crayon Shin-chan.

On the other hand, anime can be said to take great care in presenting anime characters that do age and mature. The most significant example being Son Goku of Dragonball, who begins the original Dragonball series as a young boy and ends the series as a grandfather. In fact, the entire Dragonball story is little more than the story of Son Goku’s life. Another noteworthy example are Amuro Rei and Char Aznable of Mobile Suit Gundam. They both appear first in the original Gundam series in their teens, then come to their ends in the Char’s Counterattack movie when they’re both in the early 40s.

In regard to the movement of time in anime and manga, specifically regarding Card Captor Sakura, the TV series does present a slightly more obvious passage of time by focusing on Sakura progressing to a new grade in school and getting a new home room and new teacher. The manga may have taken this liberty because CLAMP never noticed or thought about the discrepancy. In general, though, a non-linear progression of time, or the tendency to move forward in time without presenting visual clues to the shift, is a trademark of traditional Asian cinema that appears often in traditional Japanese cinema. It’s not uncommon in films from Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and Ozu, for example, for the narrative to leap forward in time without any overt suggestion of time passing. It’s left up to the intuitiveness of the viewer to recognize the passage of time from visual cues.