Your Favorite and Least Favorite Manga/Anime Art Styles Plus Examples

Lucky Star is not Puni Plush? Someone need edit the wiki to clear that up.

It is. Just not the standard type.

@Thnikkafan: I was gonna say Cowboy Bebop, but I thought it was probably too obvious. But really, it still has some of the best art and animation ever for an anime even after ten years. Cowboy Bebop has held up incredibly well for something that was animated in 1999.

edited 1st Jul '10 5:45:37 PM by Sporkaganza

(If I don't mention otherwise, assume I'm talking about the manga.)

My favorite art style is probably CLAMP for being consistently polished and beautiful. I mean the original manga versions of course - I find that animated versions of their work tends to fuck up their style a little, Cardcaptor Sakura (which was gorgeous in manga form but utterly boring and generic in the anime) and xxxHolic being prime examples. Their earliest works ARE generic shoujo, which I can forgive since they were just starting out, and Magic Knight Rayearth was a major turn off at first because of the dated, classic huge eyes shoujo style, but when I got accustomed to it I thought it was fabulously lavish and flowing. My favorite from them, though, is probably Angelic Layer for the warmer, cuddlier style with lovely rich lines (NOT a fan of the color covers, though).

Another favorite is the author of Dance In The Vampire Bund. Great anatomy - I feel that the bodies have a lot of substance, texture, and three-dimensionality to them.

My least favorite manga style would probably be anything too realistic. I tried to start Monster, for instance, but I dropped it pages into the first chapter because the art was too unappealing. When I read anime/manga, I expect the art to be beautifully stylized. I turn to real life if I want to look at ugly people.

But I do appreciate some kinds of realism, of course. I'm a big fan of Tsukasa Hojo's art style in late City Hunter, Family Compo, and Angel Heart. Only Six Faces is a big problem here, though, since he uses mostly realistic hairstyles, it's really hard to tell characters apart if they have the same hair.

Otherwise, one of my pet peeves is unpolished shonen art. Examples would be the early One Piece manga, Rave manga, Lawof Ueki, Bleach manga, especially the first ten volumes or so, Ai Kora, and so on. Bleach early manga was rough, unpolished, completely uninspired. No sense of beauty at all. One Piece art improved as the series progressed, as I can tell from seeing the latest chapters, but the early chapters were just plain unappealing to me. Ai Kora is badly drawn, plain and simple. All of the examples above had really flat, simplistic, almost amateurish art.

Now, early Naruto was spectacular. The style wasn't beautiful; it was rough, but it had charm and a unique flair of its own. It had personality, it had warmth. And then the artist started to go commercial, lost all his personality, and the art slowly warped towards typical bland shonen fare. Urgh.

The art of Princeof Tennis manga is one that I singularly dislike. The faces are just plain lopsided; the noses and mouths are twisted in a way that's rather unattractive. Eyes aren't particularly beautiful either. Poorly drawn overall. Especially unforgivable in this particular series because it's supposed to be Blue Bishōnen Ghetto - but none of the characters look particularly hot because of the sucky artstyle. The anime looks better though.

About Ken Akamatsu: I don't think his art style is particularly groundbreaking, but it IS clean, well-executed, attractive, and fits his storytelling style perfectly. It's simple, but very well done. I think it improved greatly after the few first volumes. The later chapters look amazing.

Another favorite of mine is the Gankutsuou anime for its (in)famous layering technique. I especially appreciated it in the hair. And who can forget Haydee's fabulous opera dress? The manga art was terrible though. Hideously rough. Looked unfinished. Mahiro Maeda is a creative genius, but his art style isn't exactly stellar.

Hunter X Hunter's style is full of charm with a gritty dark edge to it. HAHAHA, well, whenever the author isn't in breakdown mode, at least. -snort- Level E, by the same mangaka, is a great blend of shonen, comedic cartoonish art and realistic, dark, warped art.

Seconding Death Note for a really sleek, dark, polished look, though I feel that the art become worse towards the end of the series. The mangaka's going more cartoony in Bakuman, and I think that it's great that he's breaking out of his usual beautiful bishonen sleekness. His best art was late Hikaru No Go though, in my opinion.

Other favorites: The Wallflower, Ouran High School Host Club manga (late manga), and Kuroshitsuji are all pretty, clean, and polished. Early Ouran manga was horrible though, and early Wallflower tended towards generic sparkling shoujo (but gained more character as the series progressed). Kuroshitsuji is the most lavish of the three - I like its dark, gothic style. Wallflower is probably the most generic. Ouran's style is sweet and cute and has great personality and energy to it.

edited 1st Jul '10 7:26:31 PM by Anarchy

I really like Berserk's style, along with TTGL's when things get really GAR. I'm a sucker for sketchy styles in general.

While its not a manga, I really don't like the art style of the SMT games. Everyone looks so pale, and the eyes seem to lifeless. The later Persona games fixed this somewhat.

I'd say Vagabond is drawn better than Berserk. Or at least, it's prettier. I also like Blade Of The Immortal.

Also relevant: Urasawa versus Tezuka◊

edited 1st Jul '10 8:00:09 PM by kashchei

^ Really? I didn't care for early Naruto's art, but I rather like the new art.

Anyway, Oh!Great. He has some of the best artwork ever. I also like History's Greatest Disciple Kenichi, Change 123, Get Backers and Freezing as well. There have been many comments of Kubo Tite's art, but you have to admit, he does great cover pages. Hellsing has some great art, nice, in a gritty way. And Dance in the Vampire Bund had some really nice gothic art. I rather liked Biomega, Deadman Wonderland, and especially Blame!

Art I don't like would be most shoujo manga. Also Onidere. I like the story but the art could be much better.

edited 1st Jul '10 8:01:27 PM by Chaosjunction

The thing about Get Backers (manga) is, I like the art style, but the backgrounds can get extremely, extremely busy. Overly complex, I should say. But I will say that Get Backers does have a unique look, and that the mangaka and his team put a lot of effort into it.

Also, don't like how he's made the characters' eyes smaller in the latter chapters.

^^I adore the art of Bladeofthe Immortal. It feels like a painting at times. Lovely rough, sweeping lines. It looks brutal. I love it.

edited 1st Jul '10 8:13:01 PM by Anarchy

I'm a tad meh on the character designs of Kishimoto, but his backgrounds are pretty damn detailed (from what I can remember. See Chapter 1 of Volume 1. That city is intense.)

@Anarchy: Whatever you think about Naruto Art Evolution, claiming that it's because he "went commercial" is just completely stupid.

Anyway, I've found it to be a very mixed bag:

Early on the style was incredibly rough, which lead to the being extremely variable: with important stuff that he clearly spent a long time on it looks really good, but when it looks bad (often with character's designs he hadn't gotten used to), well, it looks absolutely horrible.

Toward the end of part 1 he really refined the art: most of the extraneous lines are gone, but the one's left still manage to convey shapes and shades just as well.

However, for something like the last three years or so he's going more toward the opposite extreme: they're to few lines, especially with people looking forward, leaving to much of the contours and such of people's bodies up to the imagination; character actually look better covered in blood/dirt/etc. because they better define facial features  ^*

^{The low-quality of most scans as people try and get them out faster and fast don't help; or that we're comparing chapter versions of later chapters to volume version of early chapters.}

. There's also that "boxy hip" problems he's had for most of Part II, though I think he's gotten a bit better with it in the last year or so.

On the other hand, I think his coloring and backgrounds have simply just improved (unfortunately, this is the only old colored page to compare; while they usually weren't that bad).

Either way, I've always thought his panel arrangements and scene compositions  ^*

EDIT: OK, so you apparently can't make folders on the forum. Or am I just doing it wrong?

edited 1st Jul '10 10:20:56 PM by thatother1dude

How did you do the box formatting?

I tried to put that in a folder. I guess that's all it does on the forums.

I haven't gotten into a whole lot of anime or manga, but...

I'm actually quite a fan of Akira Toriyama's art. Not so much the big foreheads, heavy brows and crazy hair, no... I particularly like his work in the original Dragon Ball. It's so fun and silly and cartoonyish, a real joy to look at. I love his monster designs for Dragon Quest, too. His work often gives me 1950's/60's-animation vibes (from both American and Japanese cartoons of the era), for some reason (happen to be a fan of styles along those lines).

Kiyohiko Azuma's style is quite pleasing to me. Nice and clean, but still consistently interesting to look at. Just a certain way he draws the faces that gives the characters a lot of charm; he's also great with expressions, whether broad and comical or warm and heartfelt. Great attention to detail as well, especially evident in Yotsuba.

And whether or not it's a good show may be debatable, but I will admit I find K-On's character designs adorable. I like the somewhat stylized proportions, they give the characters a bit more life; and the faces are very expressive.

There are more I could blab about but these are the first few that came to mind.

edited 1st Jul '10 11:36:58 PM by Heffy

Oh! Great is awesome. sure, he's known for his excellent NSFW◊ pics but even the SFW scenes look awesome. i just love his style.

i'm really liking the general Manhwa style as well, particularly Immortal Regis and Aflame Inferno.

You know, I wonder if it's a trope to have relatively simple character designs, but insanely complicated background and objects: Mahou Sensei Negima, Dragonball, and Yotsuba&! all qualify—can anyone else think of some others?

The manga version of Genshiken is terrific eye candy, as is The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service.

This is probably going to get me stoned to death, but I do not like Osamu Tezuka's art style. I've tried getting over it, but... I just can't. It looks like crap.

edited 2nd Jul '10 1:18:12 AM by EnglishIvy

Really? I didn't care for early Naruto's art, but I rather like the new art.

Bwahahaha oh wow.

Why why why do you people exist.

This is all I have to say on the matter.

BLAH BLAH HOW DO I EAT FOOD

-hugs Schitzo-

You made me laugh at something I love.

It's my picture so I take the credit. All glory to me.

Also, I have a love hate relationship with Go Nagai's artstyle.

It's basically Grimdark Osamu Tezuka. It's lovely, gorny, sexy, awesome and sketchy, but it gets goofy at times. Also suffers from Only Six Faces.

edited 2nd Jul '10 2:24:10 AM by Schitzo

You know, I wonder if it's a trope to have relatively simple character designs, but insanely complicated background and objects: Mahou Sensei Negima, Dragonball, and Yotsuba&! all qualify—can anyone else think of some others?

Scott McCloud calls it the "masking effect." It's quite common, going back at least to Tezuka. Far from manga-exclusive, either; Tintin uses it and you can see some of it going as far back as Little Nemo In Slumberland.

Well Negima does it by creating the backgrounds in a computer then placing the characters over the background like what animation does, I am pretty sure Yotsuba does the same thing...

The only weakness of this is the white glows that appear around the characters. Negima it seems to be almost his style (as its almost everywhere) but it calls attention to the characters and he messes with it a bit by pulling characters out of the frames quite bit, Yotsuba is a bit better at blending but its still noticeable, DB was all hand drawn IIRC.

edited 2nd Jul '10 7:27:17 AM by Raso

Nasu's stuff ranks really high among my favorites in character design.

Seconding the artstyle of Kimi Ni Todoke.

Ouran High School Host Club as well, for some reason.

Aoi Hana, Sasameki Koto, Maria-sama ga Miteru, and surprisingly, the Studio DEEN character designs of Umineko No Naku Koro Ni (as long as they're not moving).

Angel Beats had really nice character designs that aren't Uncanny Valley like the other three works.

I like the Da Capo character designs in the Visual Novel, but the anime's designs were a bit flawed and they only hit their peak in Da Capo II (which is why Da Capo: If was so awesome to look at, seeing the original cast drawn in the newer and nicer version of their designs).

Shuffle had pretty nice designs in the Visual Novel, especially for Asa and Lisianthus.