CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

My parents and I were just watching The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and my mom commented that the characters didn't look Japanese. She hypothesized that the animators did this deliberately in order to appear more "American". This isn't the first time I've heard it, so I was just wondering what you guys thought.

Personally, I agree with a friend of mine - that anime characters are meant to look exaggerated and strange, not to identify with a certain ethnicity (unless we're talking Monster or Baccano!, or some other realistic anime in which the characters' ethnicity is a point of import). After all, many anime have characters with wacky hair colors, chibi-fied features, etc - and that has nothing to do with race.

Hopefully this thread is OK - I don't mean to be offensive or anything like that. I just wondered if you guys had a better theory than any of us do, haha.

There was a psychology paper about this a while ago. Essentially, people tend to perceive anime characters as their own race because they tend to project their own race on the characters.

Here's the journal article and here's a blog post summarizing it.

blkmage (post: 1517153) wrote:Essentially, people tend to perceive anime characters as their own race because they tend to project their own race on the characters.

This has always been the case for me. Growing up only truly exposed to my own race within my small town is a huge factor.

So, to me, anime characters belong to their own race. The race of rainbow coloured heads.

Scott McCloud covered this somewhat. It's called the masking effect and it ties back to the simplified designs of the charachters. Simplified or stylized humans are easier for a person to apply their own identity upon to fill in the details that arn't provided initially. This stylization allows better connection to charachters for people (often) than a much more specific portrayal of a charachter.