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The wide range of girl body types (europe.pub)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/funny@lemmy.world
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[–] 15 points 10 months ago* (17 children)

In a lot of Asia, youth is seen as attractive

Human eyeballs are generally all the same size, regardless of skull or body size.

Youth = small

Big eyes and small everything else therefore means cute

Art often exaggerates or interprets

Anime is art

Anime is also not a new medium at all in Japanese, and now global culture, and has had a lot of time to evolve

I'm not defending it, just explaining it, in case people don't understand, because this is a long-standing and very common complaint/criticism

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  • [–] 16 points 10 months ago* (14 children)

    But we could have like, a whole anime done in the style of Ukiyo-E, for characters design style motifs, for facial and body proportions..

    You could mock up a 3D model and cel shade these to work out how they'd work from different angles.

    This is certainly an exaggerated interpretation of reality.

    It is also certainly Japanese.

    These were also largely seen as depictions of beautiful, desirable people.

    Here, this one's from 1932,

    The eyes are getting bigger, but noses still exist, the facial proportions are actually pretty close to realistic, if not just completely realistic, unlike in the modern standard anime style.

    I dunno, I guess the modern standard anime style is just much much more neotenous (oversized heads, relatively oversized eyes, relatively undersized/unemphaszed noses) because it is meant to appeal primarily to small children, who are themselves neotenous?

    Whereas the consumer base for Ukiyo-E would have been primarily adults?

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  • [–] 8 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    One of the earliest "modern" manga artists got influenced by the large eyes of disney and other western comics and shows
    And others adapted it

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago

    Ah, thats a very good point!

    And the stylistic intermingling has certainly gone both ways a bit, and then more recently, quite a lot.

    Now we have like, basically hyperrealism done on anime proportions, the kind of AI autogen art style, that I would basically call 'uncanny valley with high production value.'

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago (6 children)

    Manga's and therefore anime's art style evolved to be drawn quickly and cheaply. A ukiyo-e anime would be expensive as hell.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (5 children)

    Well, if you did the exact same production process, yes, but as I posited, you could just 3d render the whole thing, or speed up production with basically 3d blocked out scenes and then basically do rotoscoping off of that, to add more flair or details where its worth it.

    Its... not like cel shaded video games have not been a thing for a while, its not like 3d rendered animes have not been a thing for a while.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    I'm vaguely sure the face expressions would still require a lot of redrawing, for which the manga style is particularly optimized. Plus, the detailed clothing would require plenty of animation of its own.

    Basically, if it were feasible, someone would probably have already made it.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Basically, if it were feasible, someone would probably have already made it.

    The Tale of the Princess Kaguya by Isao Takahata. The most expensive Japanese film ever.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago* (1 child)

    Well, I'd say you'd be surprised by what you can pull off with a sufficiently solid and detailed facerig or set or blendshapes, just in Blender, which is free to use.

    You do have a good point with clothes, thats more complex, but uh, again even in Blender, detailed clothes physics are entirely possible, and its also not too hard to make custom clothes rapidly.

    You can do that with VROID + Blender pretty darn fast, and you can throw whatever base model you want into VROID for it to be a sort of digital tailor for, and then export it to Blender.

    VROID's tool for this is also free.

    Beyond that, there are other freely available plugins for Blender that do or enable the same kind of rapid design and fitting of physics enabled clothes.

    Then you just animate skeletons, generate your frames to potentially rotoscope or what not.

    Basically, I am saying the tools for this do already exist, and many of them actually are already used in 3D anime, just... to my knowledge, not yet with anything resembling Ukiyo-E.

    I'm 100% sure many studios have their own proprietary software and toolsets and pipelines for this.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    But we could have like, a whole anime done in the style of Ukiyo-E, for characters design style motifs, for facial and body proportions…

    What you're forgetting is that anime (and art in general) is typically not done to please the critics, but to please the fans.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    I'm a fan. I am displeased by stylistic homogenization.

    Like, I get that this is, on some level or to whatever extent, a .... marketing to whichever demographic kind of problem or process.

    Either I am in the minority of fans, or, they're targetting market demos inefficiently.

    ... it would be very difficult to say which of those is closer to 'true', with anything approaching objectivity, unless people were literally polled/surveyed on this.

    But, the other element here is that just is what capitalism does to art. It smushes everything down into generic, familiar, safe, with as much broad appeal as possible.

    Because its churning this stuff out on an assembly line, anime is a mass market product, like spam or canned soup or plastic plates.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago* (1 child)

    I simpler terms, broader appeal means less complexity.

    If you want more people to "get" a piece of music, by definition it must be less complex.

    For example a current pop song will be more approachable by more people than Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue", simply because everyone can get the former, but only some people can grok Miles' music (and those people also get the pop stuff, even if they don't listen to it much, or if the listen to it a lot).

    It's not a free market thing, it's simply the old distribution curve applied to art. Marketing just utilizes the nature of people.

    I "get" Miles stuff much more than the average person, but when it comes to visual arts I know fuck all, so only the most fundamental stuff has any appeal to me.

    I'm essentially the same in visual arts as someone who only listens to pop music.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago*

    Capitalism != Free Market.

    Arguably, the entire, main problem with capitalism at a basic conceptual level is its natural tendency toward oligopoly and monopoly.

    You can also have free markets in many kinds of different social paradigms that differently allocate or control capital than our modern paradigm of essentially 'capitalists get to do whatever they want, everyone else is at the mercy of their whim, and mercy is not profitable'.

    You basically always have to have regulation, anti-trust laws, various sorts of mechanisms to actually maintain anything resembling a free and competetive market, in most categories of goods and services.

    IE, "Free Markets" can only exist for a short time by essentially random circumstance; to prevent them from stratifying and consolidating, you need some kind of system that exists outside of and around said market, to actually maintain it as a competetive market.

    You're not wrong that a good deal of the homogenization effect is just basic marketing, just how appeal works across a population...

    ... but capitalism overemphasizes this, exaggerates it, as the relentless pursuit of maximum profit, in the short term, changes business strategy toward monopolist rent seeking.

    Now, combine that with... well this literally is media we are talking about, so, this directly changes broader social and psychological norms of what is socially acceptable to be expected.

    Were the production and distribution of art more distributed, more varied, less highly concentrated into a small number of huge orgs/systems, wasn't gatekept so hard, was easier for smaller players to not get drowned out by bigger players... you woukd find a consumer market closer to a free and competetive market, with more diversity, as it would be easier for studios that take artistic risks to come and go, to exist, to cater to a specific niche or set of niches.

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