does the greater majority of all manga look like Speed racer?
Aurora Moon
uh, sorry, but I don't think that all manga looks the same that way...
after all, there is varying different styles of drawing and so on forth. can you show a example of an actual manga page where you think it looks like speed racer?
ozoneocean
Well manga and anime have a set of lose stylistic conventions about stories, character design, expression, emotions, situations etc, so it's inevitable that they all share a lot of traits in common with each other. But that doesn't mean there isn't also a vast amount of variation within manga and anime. The conventions aren't as limiting as they might appear to some observers, they're just quite visible if you look at manga and anime in a purely surface, superficial way.
Most media follows conventions of some sort, they're just not always apparent, and just because they're not immediately as apparent as they are in anime and manga doesn't make them unrestrictive, frequently the opposite is true; Mainstream Hollywood movies are a great example of this! Scratch the surface of any product of creative media and you will find the conventions... It doesn't make them bad, it's just what they have in common, what makes them recognisable as a subset... Look at Shakespeare for example: you can tell exactly what makes a Shakespeare play a Shakespeare play, they're all the same in some respects, but they're still all pretty notable works regardless of any similarities. Renaissance paintings or the works of the impressionists (for example) tend to share similar traits, which is why they're identified together (not just because of sharing a similar time period and location), but again; that doesn't make them bad. You don't look at a Degas painting of a woman in a bath and say "oh my GOD not another bloody Monnet haystack type painting, for f**k's sake, they're all the same!?" lol!
-But you could.
Someone
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Darth Mongoose
Wow, the age of Speed Racer...
...Wait, wasn't that like, twenty or thirty years ago?
Is it just me, or are all people who think all manga look the same completely unable to tell the difference between manga and anime?
Time for a quick Japanese lesson. Repeat after me, kiddies:
"MANGA MEANS COMICS."
"ANIME MEANS ANIMATION."
Personally as somebody who's been a manga reader a long time, when I first tried to read American superhero comics, I thought they all looked the same. People with little oblong heads, little eyes, square jaws. enormous torsos and wearing skintight everything. Took me some time to get used to the subtle differences between artists and styles, and now I can tell them apart a lot better.
You could easily say 'Is it just me, or are all DC comics Batman?' or, 'Is it just me, or all all newspaper funnies Charlie Brown?' Heck, take it a bit further and I could say, 'Is it just me, or do all Hip Hop songs sound the same?' Of course they don't if you're a fan of that style, because you notice the differences. People from outside my immediate family can't tell mine and my mother's and sister's voices apart on the phone, but my Dad and brother can. It's the same thing with art and music and...well, pretty much anything. The more you understand something, the better you become at noticing small details, an the more the small details matter to you.
So yeah, all anime looks like Speedracer if you're not somebody who regularly watches anime, becaue you look at it and just see big eyes, small noses and soft-featured faces and characters with slim, long-legged physiques. But an anime fan can not only distinquish vstly different styles, say 'Azumanga Daioh' compared to 'Great Teacher Onizuka' but subtley different styles too, like 'Azumanga Daioh' compared to 'Uchuu no Stellvia', because we see subtle differences in eye-shape, the colours chosen, the way characters gesture etc.