Ask John: Why Do Some Artists Reuse Character Designs?

Question:
I’ve noticed that some anime creators/producers keep using the same character designs over and over again. For example, the creator of Dragonball used a Goku character design on the hero of Chrono Trigger. I was wondering, why do some creators keep doing this? I thought that maybe it was a trademark or something, but then I saw some creators not do this. Some series creators that do this that I know of are the creators of: Dragonball, Ayashi No Ceres, and Astroboy.

Answer:
It’s simply a matter of personal artistic style. Some Japanese illustrators have a forte in drafting characters with great diversity. One of the best examples is animation character designer Nobuteru Yuuki. His personal, original character design style can be seen in Escaflowne and Heatguy J, but he also developed the animation character designs for Gunnm, X, Angel Cop, and Sukeban Dekka, among other titles- all of which have wildly different character design styles. But to a certain degree, nearly all character designers have certain distinctive characteristics that appear in all of their works. It’s just that some character designers prefer to use and re-use a more limited palate of character types than others. As you’ve noted, Akira Toriyama’s Son Goku is nearly reincarnated in the character design of Chrono. Both Osamu Tezuka and Leiji Matsumoto created characters tend to often have big, bulbous noses and short, squat older men. Yuu Watase’s razor thin line art character design style is similar in Fushigi Yuugi and Ayashi no Ceres, but not repeated in Alice 19th. I know that I’m not the only person to notice that Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa is virtually reborn in Porco Rosso’s Fio. And I’ve always believed that Rumiko Takahashi’s Kasumi Tendo from Ranma 1/2 and Kyoko Otonashi from Maison Ikkoku were twin sisters separated at birth.

Of course I’d be disrespectful to say that similar character design styles is a symptom of limited artistic ability. I imagine that’s probably the instinctive first thought of an observer like ourselves, though. Without anything more to base a theory on than personal speculation, I’ll present the theory that certain artists often use similar character designs because they’re familiar and easy to draw. With the tight schedules mandated by the Japanese industry, complex, difficult or time consuming character designs cause missed deadlines and cost publishers money. And ultimately, artists in the anime industry are involved in the industry out of choice. The anime industry generally doesn’t pay that well and required long hours and hard work. Anime and manga illustrators draw what they do because they love doing it, so it’s only natural that they would want to draw the character types they most enjoy drawing.

Addendum August 26, 2003
The Great JD sent in the following very logical additional possible reason which I never thought of:

All of Picasso’s [paintings of] people have the same style of face and such to them. Other artists such as van Gogh and Monet always painted in a similar style. I think the reason artists create characters that look similar is because they [the artists] have defined a style for themselves and want to make their work recognizable by that style.