You see, whether you can draw like this or not, being able to think up this kind of design, it depends on whether or not you can say to yourself, “Oh, yeah, girls like this exist in real life.” If you don’t spend time watching real people, you can’t do this, because you’ve never seen it.
Some people spend their lives interested only in themselves. Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people, you know. It’s produced by humans who can’t stand looking at other humans. And that’s why the industry is full of otaku!
:miyazaki-laugh:
To take things even further I think that the objectification, flanderization, comodification and "othering "of female characters in anime has resulted in it almost exclusively catering incels and otaku that see women (and disturbingly, underage girls) as dolls to fetishise.
Which is frustrating because there is good anime out there that isn't like this, but I can't really say I'm an anime fan without people thinking I'm into moe crap or otakus gatekeeping me because I don't like their moe crap.
I just wanna talk about how cool Full Metal Alchemist is...
The founder of Titmouse Chris P. was on suggested donation and he said that a lot of students (and current animators here in America) will just google “door” and draw the first top ten results, same with windows and stuff. It is a detriment, because you are designing by an already shitty and reductive algorithm instead of having a visual library in your head or sketchbook from having gone out and drawn from real life; as an aside, an animation class and sequential art class I started watching both suggest to always draw from life and take a sketchbook with you.
Anyways, I don’t doubt that Miyazaki has the best intentions when he brings that criticism but it is tinted by idealism. “Go out and draw from life, from real people” is expensive! Is not just money, but the time you gotta set aside to do that. Only big budget projects get the chance to bring in real references, or take the main animators out on trips: Turning Red had a business trip to the Zoo where they drew a bunch of red pandas; Aaron Blaise talks about his all-expenses-paid trip to Africa to go sketch and draw Lions and other animals during the production of Lion King. Big studios also have instructors and life drawing sessions occurring on a monthly basis for improvement and training.
With the working conditions of the Anime industry, you are asking people working 12-14 hrs of their day to go DRAW and Sketch and observe from life, as if they have the energy or passion to do that. It’s idealistic.
Its sad that so much time is stolen from us :sadness:
It’s truly the greatest fucking crime of all Capitalist exploitation. The stealing of time in all the ways it does.
George Orwell wrote about it in one of his novels. His conclusion was that if the working class were not kept busy all the time, they might get ideas about how they should be governed and then they would :vote:. Thus they must be kept in misery and poverty so that the good people in society can vacation in Spain.
Probably why the insurrection of 2020 popped off at the exact time it did. The proles had too much time on their hands during the lockdowns and it was an absolute shit show for the ruling class.
The whole thing was done by the FBI, just like the Tsarnev brothers