MANGA AND ANIME Comics that escaped Japan and conquered the world This time when all eyes are fixed on Japan and the Olympics is perhaps the right time to familiarise ourselves with their culture and what has become their best export product in the last decade – comics and cartoons. Okay, we actually mean manga and anime
often created on computers. Its style is easily recognisable. e importance is placed on the line, as opposed to the form, while narration and panel ar- rangements differ from the American and European style. As a rule, panels and tables are read from right to left, in accordance with Japanese gram- mar. Impressionist backgrounds are commonplace, as are scenes depicting exterior parts instead of characters. While a drawing can be incredibly re- alistic or comical, it is noticeable that the characters have big eyes (with fe- male characters generally having big- ger eyes than males), small noses, re- duced mouths and flat faces. Big eyes became an integral part of manga and anime back in 1960, when Osamu Te- zuka fisrt began drawing them that way, copying the style of Disney car- toons. He is considered the master of manga, so it would be appropri- ate to familiarise ourselves with him. Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989) Osamu Tezuka was a Japanese manga artist, animator, producer and doctor of science. He is also dubbed the “father of anime”. When Osamu was a boy, his mother would often tell him bedtime fairy tales, which helped him develop a vivid imagi- nation. Other children teased him in secondary school, and he fled to his manga works, which would soon, thanks to him, become the top sensa- tion in Japan. at which his moth- er had always encouraged in him as a hobby became a job. People paid Tezuka to author manga stories and
he gained popularity throughout the entire region. Tezuka had a special drawing style, while he started creat- ing anime sometime later. He intro- duced film narration and characters whose appearance in shorter comic episodes formed part of a larger, com- plete narrative. e only text in Te- zuka’s comics is represented by dia- logue between the characters, which gave these comics a film-like quality. He also introduced Disney style facial expressions, with which the charac- ters’ eyes, mouth, eyebrows and nose are sometimes overly pronounced, which rendered them very striking, and made his work very popular. is served to revive the old ukiyo-e tra- dition to an extent, in which the im- age is more the product of an idea than an actual physical reality. Tezu- ka addressed almost all film genres of his time in his comics. His manga works range from action adventure (Kimba the White Lion) to serious drama (Black Jack) and science fic- tion (Mighty Atom, better known as Astro Boy), horror (Dororo, the man with three eyes). Although he is best known in the West as the creator of Astro Boy, many of his manga have very serious plots, and sometimes dark tones.
T he gaming world is un- known to many, cos- play often doesn’t dif- fer from fancy dress parties, and anime and manga are jammed into the same basket. at’s why we’re travelling to Japan, but not to the Olympic Games. We’re discovering the coun- try that has much higher sales of comic books than anywhere else in the world. ere are several main manga magazines containing a doz- en episodes by different authors that sell in several million copies per week. Manga is appreciated equal- ly as an art form and as popular lit- erature. And beyond Japan, clearly, manga are called comics. What is manga? ey started to be sold on the market in 2006 and have achieved huge popularity. Created using a black and white technique, manga is very
What is anime?
Tekst/Words: Mila Durman @ememblog.rs www.ememblog.rs Fotografije/Photography: Profimedia.rs, iStock
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