The Wonders of Anatomy

[spotto]

Alright Livejournal just exploded my rant TWICE.

The autosave feature is horribad. It keeps returning to a saved draft I had BEFORE the one I typed out. I was going to throw in a link but then the page acts as if the link-box is open without it actually being open (when you turn something into a link, the  box pops up, the page turns lighter but you can't actually access anything.)

So this rant is being typed out in Wordpad.

I was going to discuss how much I dislike the Negima art style. I had a nice rant all typed up, but from my frustration this third attempt will probably be pretty inferior to the original or even the second draft, but hopefully my point still stands.

Now, first I was expressing my distaste for not only the Hetalia Anime but also Beyblade's first season, and also Negima's first anime. What do they all have in common? Really really bad character design. Beyblade suffers from all their characters being fat and ugly. Hetalia's anime has the worst colour palette ever with nonsensical shades for the hair and the dullest looking designs of all time, while Negima's first season is similar with instead a nonsensical colour palette and awful, awful animation.

But my complaints are actually against Akamatsu's art style itself. His artwork works for a manga but it just doesn't look that good when imitated in an animated feature, this being the OADs and the upcoming movie probably. His characters look like paper-children inside an elaborate free-roaming three dimensional world, almost like throwing Maplestory sprites into Minecraft's endless world. He uses powerful tools and impressive CG talents to do the detailed backgrounds, but the characters themselves fall short.

It's fine for a manga really, but it looks weird in the OADs.
Let's take Rakan for example:


His jawline is so well-defined to the point of being unrealistic! I wouldn't be surprised if one of his attacks was to stab people with the sharp angles of his chin. I also don't understand that thick extra line going down his nose, making it look so rigid and angular that it could be mistaken for Toblerone.

This is similar to Takamichi, who too has this weirdly shaped face and random-cartoony lines on his face that apparently means he is old. What I see is a young man with squiggly lines drawn with a marker all over his face. I think he's trying too hard to make them look manly.


I like how the shadow implies his face is a rectangle. I also like how Kurt's chin jutts out like that, so beautifully drawn!

This is not manly.


It's not just the old men either. I don't really like the face shape of ANY of the characters really .The chins are pointed rather sharply, the eyes seem incredibly flat, the nose is more like a distorted triangle slapped on the face...it looks weird animated. If the angle of their face is not straight at you or in profile view it looks very strange because I don't see anything three-dimensional about the head.

And that's not even half of it. Akamatsu's anatomy is just...odd. While this practice is definitely not recommended, most people learn to draw by imitating their favourite artists, which tends to be the Anime and Manga style because of how appealing it is to their audiences. That is not a good idea because fictional characters being drawn by other people do not have realistic proportions, and the best way to learn is to imitate life itself and deviate from that to form your own art style. Unfortunately copying the manga-look is the common way of learning how to draw, and it's also what I did too. Yet even when I was slowly taking in how to draw anatomy, I always always found Akamatsu's to be completely weird...more messed up than normal.

Let's take Rakan again. (You can tell Rakan just bothers me entirely)

This pretty epic looking picture is not very epic to me:


THAT TORSO. THAT WAIST. THOSE HIPS.
It seems that Akamatsu has spent so much of his time drawing shapely bodies of women that he has forgotten THAT MALES DO NOT LOOK LIKE THIS. I even drew males like that for a while because I was imitating how Akamatsu did it, but when I was doing it on iscribble someone (I think Souless) asked if that was a girl I was drawing, which it definitely wasn't. I eventually erased it quite quickly and never confirmed to him whichever gender it was, but seriously.

First, males do not give birth. I hope everyone knows this...it is quite obvious. Males do not have a uterus, they do not have the female reproduction system that is required to pop out babies. Therefore, such hips are not necessary. A muscular-bound testosterone-filled male should not look like he can also give birth. That imagery is just wrong and...the anatomy is completely fail here.

The waist too...a concave!? Are his internal organs smushed up together inside there? Considering he apparently has tons of muscles means there really is very little room for things like stomachs and intestines to freely sit around. Did Rakan wear a corset for a long time when younger or something!? I can also complain about how he defines muscles (because sometimes they look like bricks were stuffed under the skin) but my knowledge on muscle anatomy is not thorough enough to be complaining as much as I wish to.

And it's not just the males. Females also look really really weird. Here's Asuna!


That pose is completely impossible. IMPOSSIBLE. You will obliterate your spine if you try to do that. It is simply not possible. I can also go into the detail that waists are sometimes thinner than people's heads, but I think that one is pointed out quite a bit in the anatomy of a lot of anime artwork already so whatever.

And even children look messed up. Okay, children do not have shapely bodies at all..they're not very well-defined and just look like polygons I guess...and yet Akamatsu still tries to throw in those hips onto some people. Have some chibisame:


Man, I wouldn't want to see five-year-old girls giving birth either.

Even Negi himself, as well as Kotaro...basically little boys AND teenage ones. Why oh why does Akamatsu think looking anorexic is badass? Here is a badass Negi.


JESUS CHRIST NEGI EAT A BURGER. He looks equally as thin (with random muscles on his arms or whatever...like, squiggly lines drawn on with a marker basically to ATTEMPT to throw on muscle on a malnutrition'd body) as a "teenager".



I can also go into the absurd length of some legs, like Kaede...and Nagi, but a bigger offender is Sailor Moon and its moose legs. (They just get longer every season...watch the Eternal Sailor Moon henshin, it's crazy) Now again I know people are always like "it's a cartoon, so anatomy is not really that important" and I agree, it really isn't, but some things in Negima go against anatomy so badly that it isn't just a "style choice" it just looks messed up.  I mean making females have stick-thin waists and comically-sized hips is one thing (especially since it's done so often) but that's exaggeration, and we see it all the time. TURNING A MALE INTO A FEMALE is...rather different, because males JUST don't look like that. You can make them have super long legs, give them the squariest body ever (Hello Professor Utonium) make them look ridiculously muscular, anything to exaggerate but squeezing waists like that is not exaggeration...it is simply breaking the law of anatomy completely.
 
I mean I'm not saying Akamatsu can't draw. He is a very talented artist, storyteller, and generally an all-around great mangaka, but I can complain, can't I!?



...now if only I could exterminate all the Yuyuko fanart on the internet with messed up looking chests. I don't care if you want to make her have the Most Common Superpower, but please do it properly or leave it flat/undefined looking like how the artwork in Touhou itself is like. That is all from Spotto! I wish this rant was longer...it really was going to be, but Livejournal is a complete faggot. So unfortunately it is not.