Anime is Japanese animation, and what we present here are anime coloring pages. It usually has a distinctive look, with anime characters showing round faces, straight hair, oversized eyes, tiny noses and wearing traditional (western) garb. Girls are almost always drawn wearing short skirts, shorts, or maybe bell-bottoms, while guys wear a lot of ties and usually a jacket of some sort. It is highly stylized, and anime can invariably be distinguished from animation in other countries, though that may not be the intent of the artist.
Almost as old as western animation, anime got its start in 1917 and proved to be an immediate hit. Today, anime appears everywhere in Japan, distributed both theatrically and on Japanese television. There are sites such as Crunchyroll where people outside Japan can view the latest anime, at about the same time as the Japanese themselves are first seeing it.
Anime is a highly prestigious occupation in Japan, and some of the top anime artists, such as Hayao Miyazaki, become virtual legends. However, talent is not restricted to the professional ranks, and kids can show astonishing anime talent.
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| A future anime artist |
There are over 430 anime production studios. Studio Ghibli and A-1 are leaders in theatrical and television anime, though there are plenty of contenders who would dispute that dominance. Studio Ghibli is often (to their chagrin) described as the 'Disney of Asia,' because that studio has cranked out animated feature films over the past few decades that are second to none in quality except, perhaps, in relation to some of Disney's own finest product.
Anime is no longer just a Japanese entertainment. There are now even non-Japanese studios that emulate the anime style, though they are better characterized as anime-influenced than as pure anime. Within Japane, television anime is exceedingly popular, and it is quite hard on the artists to crank out high quality product every week for weeks on end. Typically, there will be a production line, where one senior artist sketches in the first and last pictures of a scene, and then another artist fills in the interim pictures, and then those are worked up to television quality by a sequence of other artists layering on their talent. Anime is highly labor intensive and quite personalized to the artists who create it.
This is an introductory sample to anime, featuring some well-drawn and sometimes famous characters. There are so many anime productions that trying to be comprehensive would take thousands of pages. Instead, we have a few characters from top anime such as 'Sailor Moon' and may get more specific in other pages.
2014
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