Friday, August 7, 2009

Animated clothing

There is something very interesting about anime and manga that most might take for granted but I always notice it. It's probably because I watch a lot of cartoons (gotta learn those voices!) and notice that cartoon characters almost always wear the same clothes. Which is fine! When we watch The Simpsons, we don't care that they don't age or that they only wear the same clothing everyday. That's the beauty of making a cartoon. Sure, every once and awhile on The Simpsons and Family Guy, they wear "church clothes" which is different.

But on a lot of anime and manga they have what I call the "Default outfit" which most cartoons have. But then a lot of anime I've seen they change their outfits a lot! And that's tough for animation.

For me it's just one of those things that I find very interesting and I get a lot out of it. It seems more real to me. I'm sure there are a lot of people who watch and don't even notice. Which is fine. But I love small touches like that in animation. Also, hair styles. They can change those a bit sometimes in anime.

It's the little thing that make me happy...

Here are some examples from the anime K-On of different clothes...


Til next time!

3 comments:

Michael Flux said...

Changing hairstyles can become quite problematic... Given how similar all the faces are, by changing the hair, well, you're basically creating a new character, and without the hair, more or less they're all identical :p

Seantaku said...

Funny but true! So much of a characters look is based on their eyes and hair in anime. The rest of their facial features are pretty much the same.

While it can get confusing I like the effort put into making it more realistic.

Michael | Low on Hit Points said...

KyoAni is usually very good at changing out the clothes, as can of course be seen in Endless Eight. But Satelight also needs some dap. The lead girl of Shugo Chara has a new outfit almost every episode. Hell, I actually did a post on all of her different outfits from season 1:

http://www.lowonhitpoints.com/anime/shugo.chara.amu.fashion.s1/

Which reminds me: it's about time I got around to catching up with the series to do another outfit post...