Take Ulysses 31 for example. It's an art style that we don't associate with Japanese animation at all, but it is more common with manga. Where did it come from? We all know that Disney was a big influence on early Japanese animation and manga designs but I

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Naturalistic artstyle anon 6/26/25 (Thu) 07:59:49 No.3636

Take Ulysses 31 for example. It's an art style that we don't associate with Japanese animation at all, but it is more common with manga. Where did it come from? We all know that Disney was a big influence on early Japanese animation and manga designs but I think this style has its own distinct lineage.

My theory is that it's influenced by Soviet animation, not American animation.

anon 6/26/25 (Thu) 08:15:43 No.3637

For many years i couldnt find this show but i knew i saw it sometime in the mid 80s on tv because i couldnt figure out what it was called, when someone mentioned the right name i thought they were joking but sure enough that was it.
Do you have any soviet stuff for reference?
I was under the impression that this whole style was made from a hybrid of western influence at japan and their own character stylization right at the end of the seventies.

anon 6/26/25 (Thu) 09:47:09 No.3638

>>3636
I miss this time period because there was a Japanese art style from the 79-84 which was more grounded and naturalistic like Ulysses 31. It more or less died out in Japan with the anime boom from 1985 onwards and the giant eyes won out. The naturalistic art style lived on with Japanese co-productions like Transformers and GI Joe, and influenced american animation of that era.

anon 6/26/25 (Thu) 13:35:41 No.3639

>>3636
>>3637
>>3638
Not to mention that this was a collaboration with DIC so it had a western release in mind

anon 6/28/25 (Sat) 01:35:43 No.3640

I am glad big eyes prevailed and Japanese animation did not become too close to Western animation styles

anon 6/28/25 (Sat) 19:06:32 No.3641

Disney had less cartoony styles too. And anime and manga also sometimes use styles that are less similar to what people think of when they think anime. Though your talking about manga being more similar to this isn't really true. Manga has a larger variety of art styles I'd say (though if you look at the entire history of anime it's not like there haven't been a variety of styles there either) but it's definitely not true that manga tends to be more "naturalistic" than anime and there's plenty of manga that have styles even more simplistic than you typically get in anime. In fact I've noticed anime tend to even upgrade art styles sometimes when the typical thinking is that anime simplifies styles to make them easier to animate.
>>3638
I would not say 79 to 84 was as a whole more grounded and naturalistic. Fucking Gundam was 1979 and that has a lot of similarities to Hanna-Barbara cartoons in terms of style. People like to pretend that the "mature" OVAs they watch were representative of anime at the time.