 A few lines
on a piece of paper can express more emotion then pages of text. Cartooning
has its own grammar, and anime character design, despite coming from an
Asian language and culture, has shown an universal appeal. Character designers
Yoshitoshi Abe (left) and Shinya Hasegawa (right) talked about their work
at an Otakon panel on Saturday. |
 Abe, the man
who designed the characters for Serial Experiments Lain, made his work
sound more like a business transaction than a work of art. "I just drew
a lot of characters and brought them to a production meeting, and the writers
decided what character fit their story," Abe told an Otakon panel on Saturday.
"We reached a convergence early in the process of creating Lain." But when
abe was asked more by fans about the characters, he let out the main idea
behind the design of the lead character. The creators of the series wanted
Lain to have an asymmetric look, to represent the way she drifts between
the real and wired worlds. |
 Hasegawa,
the designer of the characters for the animated Revolutionary Girl Utena,
said that he wanted to improve his art, so he worked for an entire year
to refine his drawing skill. That experience showed him that education
can go only so far. "The techniques you learn aren't applicable to work.
Your own sensibilities are more important when it comes to drawing." Ironically,
Abe had a similar story. "After high school I was a bum for a while," he
said. Abe was a graduate art student at a Japanese university when he got
the job to create the Lain characters. |
 Anime creators
can consider the number of cosplayers based on their series to be a sign
of support, but Abe looks at it from a different angle, one fitting a person
involved in Lain's oddities. "That's rather embarrassing," Abe revealed.
"I did my characters with a three-dimensional perspective in mind, but
the back sides of the characters were never published. So the cosplayers
had to be `creative' with those hidden sides." Hasegawa enjoys Utena cosplayers.
"I'm glad to see the costumers are faithful to the details. I'd like to
see the American cosplayers go over to Japan." |
