Anime questions

Factual Questions
1

Why do most males in Japenese animated cartoons have spiky hair? A lot of RPG heroes seem to go to the same salon as well. Is it just my imagination or are a lot of men in japanese comics/ cartoons named Akira? If so how come?

“Your bases to me belong!”

2

I am answering this question because it always bugged me when I was a kid. I still don’t know the answer, but I offer two possible and related reasons:

  1. It may be difficult and time-consuming to draw hair that looks half decent in any sort of detail in an animation. In fact, most animations --regardless of origin but particularly serials-- are actually pretty shoddy affairs from an artistic point of view. The hair is given a general shape for each character and just filled in with colour. Style elements such as braids, bangs, and the like are drawn as solid flexible appendages. The results look more like crazy collections of haute couture hats than anything else.

Which brings me to the second point

  1. It’s all about stylized recognition signals for the viewer. Most characters, especially in Japanese animation, have no distinguishing features. A looks like B, which looks like C, etc. Most physiques are the same. The noses, eyes, and mouths are often indistinguishable. Clothing (costumes!) are of no help either–for the most part we are treated to skin-tight clothing, armour of some kind, uniforms, plain clothes that look really polain because they are cartoons, etc.

So the solution is to identify characters primarily by their hair, so that you can hardly find animation characters with real-looking hair anymore. There’s an infinite number of (slight) variations on the themes of flanges, whips, tentacles, and other objects not normally worn on the head that are supposed to be hair. Because it is so difficult to recognize animation characters (especially in motion) every animation character designer wants a shot at the Medusa On Amphetamine Award. A certain crazy hairstyle will thus allow you to distinguish between characters that are otherwise identical.

Those are my guesses, although I am sure there’s more to the story.

3

Uh, I’d venture to guess that it’s because Akira is a common Japanese name.

4

I’ve always assumed that it depended on what was perceived as stereotypically rugged and “cool” in japanese teen culture at the moment.

If you look at anime across a broad period of time, you’ll notice trends in male protagonist hair.

For example, spiky male hair was common in the late 80’s and was generally phased out in favor of the “pony tail plus fringe of hair hanging down in front of face” look.

5

The movie *Akira * was the movie that put anime permanently into the foreront of the collective consciousness of all selective movie watchers. Without it, we wouldn’t have known about *Dragon Ball *, Sailor Moon, Gundam, the Miyazaki classics and all of the rest. Of course many an anime writer want to name a character in homage to the one who started it all.

6

Um, you’re crediting Akira with WAY more influence than it really has.

Even if Akira were ‘the one who started it all’ in the west (it’s not[sup]*[/sup]), it’s not nearly as influential as you imply in Japan. While some recent fictional (or even real) Akiras are probaby named for Otomo’s, trying to plug the common manga/anime use of an exceptionally common Japanese name on it is laughable. Frankly, I’d guess a more likely reference would be to either Akira Kurosawa or Akira Toriyama. (There’s probably an even more likely one that I can’t think of just this moment.)

[sup]*[/sup] Akira is a LATECOMER on the anime radar screen, even in the west. It wasn’t released until 1988. By that point, Starblazers and Robotech had already brought anime to a large audience in the west. Anime known as such that is, as Speed Racer, Astroboy and others had already become cultural phenomena before that. Akira is a newbie anime - someone who’s familiar with the medium will be sure to watch it, but it’s not a gateway anime, like Starblazers or Robotech, or, more recently, DBZ or Sailor Moon.

7

I’ve seen the “Ponytail look”, I didn’t realize that was from more recent anime. The strange thing is ALL the even most recent RPG heroes STILL have spiky hair. Has this become an artistic convention? Are software companies afraid to innovate or are they merely behind the times?

8

Squall, from FFVIII, escaped the spike hairdo so common among RPG heroes. He’s a bit shaggy, but not spiky (my desktop wallpaper is a shot of Rinoa and Squall dancing).

I can’t think of any others with normal hair, though.