Having two children, I’ve had plenty of chances to observe animated characters reading documents. Wether you watch their eyes, see how they turn the pages of a book, or guide their finger over a line of text, they infallibly read from right to left.
Why is this? Is it an unspoken standard? Who started it, anyway? The more I see it, the curiouser I become. Surely there’s an answer?
I assume you mean that your POV is looking at the characters’ faces, not over their shoulders, and that they are reading “backwards” (from their left to their right).
The answer is simple: Continuity errors. Cartoons of all stripes (printed and animated) have, except in rare cases, been a very low-budget, usually hurried form of art. Careful proofreading/copy-editing of the animators’/cartoonists’ work does not usually take place. So no one notices when the animator draws things backwards, which seem the right away–you read from left to right, so therefore the front cover of the book should be on the left (when in fact, it’s to the right of the back cover), etc.
Interesting tidbit: I happen to have a certain Asterix book in both English and Hebrew. (Asterix and Cleopatra, to be specific.)
In the Hebrew edition, not only did they reverse the pages (so the pages go in Hebrew order) and the order of frames on each page (so each page flows in Hebrew order), but furthermore it reverses each individual frame, to be a mirror image of the English frames!
Many cartoons are created in the Orient.
That is probably so that speech bubble order is also preserved (i.e., in English comics, you read the leftmost bubble in a panel first, then proceed to the next one to the right, etc.). Also, there are often subtle issues with eyeline and direction of action (i.e., in English comics, if a character is peering at something/someone or running toward something/someone, you generally would put that eyeline/direction to the right, since that is the direction of reading/page turning, and the momentum/reader’s eye is headed that way already).
If that were the issue, surely they would be reading from top to bottom.
But I do wonder how many times nion has actually observed this. Maybe, once or twice an animator has made a mistake, but I very much doubt that it is “infallibly” (=invariably?), or even mostly true.
If the character who is reading is facing forward, towards the audience, the eyes should be moving from the audience’s right to their left, because the character is facing in the opposite direction to the audience members. If that is what we are talking about, the mistake is nion’s, not the animator’s.
This too. I was thinking old Warner Bros. cartoons, but if you’re watching Anime, then, for the Asian animators, the correct direction of reading IS right to left.
… and right to left.
It’s possible nion is overstating/has an inaccurate sample, but I do not doubt the observation. As a cartoonist, I can attest that it is damnably hard to keep this particular left-right orientation straight when you are drawing.
Moved to Cafe Society.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Just to clarify for everyone…
I mean observing a character reading in a manner that an English speaking observer would see as backwards. e.g. reading a newspaper back to front. For the most part I refer to non-anime fare.
I also may be wrong to say ALL reading is backwards, but it is definitely something I’ve seen time and time again. I’d almost classify it as a trope.
Not necessarily. Plenty of stuff is written horizontally in various asian languages. A lot of it comes down to stylistic choices, I think.