You can easily identify manga from non-Japanese comics and anime from non-Japanese animation by looking at the styles of their presentations. You can spot some conventional styles used which are common to different manga and Japanese animation. In this article where are going to talk about these conventional styles and what they represent.

One of the most significant styles can be noticed in the characters. Usually, anime and manga characters have large eyes. This was a style started by Dr. Osamu Tezuka, a manga artist considered by many as the Father of Anime and Manga. He used this style in his first pieces as influenced by American cartoons namely Betty Boop and Mickey Mouse. Now, manga and anime artists use this style on their works no matter what the genre. Sometimes, this facial feature represents happy and friendly characters while relatively smaller eyes represent snob personality and sometimes evil.

The eyes of the character are used often to indicate his/her emotion and mood. For example, when a character’s eyes looks like a swollen half circle and twinkles no matter where the light sources are, this indicates that the character is feeling extreme happiness or excitement. When a character’s eyes reflect shadow on his face (around the eye area and above the cheeks), this indicate evil intention such as revenge. Another trick that is often seen on Rurouni Kenshin is the swirly eyes. This happens when the character falls or turn dizzy. The eyes turn into gray and all the light reflections disappear whenever a character is unconscious or dead.

Another facial feature are the spikey hairs. It is said that they use this type of hair styles among characters to give each character their identity. Without these significantly large and spikey hair, its hard to tell which character is which since the way they are drawn are very similar to each character. Let’s take Goku and Gohan (grown-up) for example. Imagine, if these two characters have the same hairstyle or at least similar, it would be very hard to tell which one’s Goku and which one’s Gohan if they’re not wearing their usual outfit.

You might also see the use of abstract background in various scenes. This style is present in both anime and manga. This style is used to emphasize the mood of the character or the situation. Some anime and manga are a mix of action, drama and comedy. Sometimes, to indicate a humorous scene, they turn the characters into their chibi-versions. The characters would have bigger heads and small bodies and they often look like little kids.

There are a lot more symbols used to indicate different situations. When a character has a baloon in his or her nose, that means he/she is asleep. Nose bleed occurs whenever a male character sees a sexy (or naked) woman. Another symbol is when a character suddenly falls to ground, turns up-side-down with his/her feet in the air. This happens as a reaction to someting unusual, often funny. Whenever a character is embarrassed, a giant sweat drop somewhere in his/her head appears.

There’s a whole lot of symbols used in anime and manga and I wasn’t able to mention a lot in this article. You can check out the page in Wikipedia about Manga. There you can find a lot more symbols described used in manga and anime. By using these hints and symbols, the audience can easily understand and relate to the situation described in a scene or by the characters.

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Category: Manga & Comics

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