Animesque

Seto Kaiba: Avatar isn't anime!
Gansley: It might as well be.

— Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series, Episode 47

Advertisement:

Things that are done in an art style similar to Japanese anime. Also called anime-influenced animation, Amerime or Americanime (if it's American), Franime (for French things), or faux-anime, animesque works come from a variety of sources. Some are simply non-Japanese creators deciding to mimic the style, while others are genuine co-productions. France and Canada are especially known for cooperating with Japanese producers in this way. Oddly enough, in Japanese, "anime" is a broad term for anything animated (being shorthand for the loanword "animation"), so technically, all of these examples are "anime" whether or not they are classic Japanese-style anime.

Interestingly, this is a case of a 'full-circle' evolution, as the Japanese anime style was inspired by classical American theatrical animation of the 1930s and 1940s (for example, the big eyes of anime characters were taken straight from Bambi, or the old Fleischer shorts, such as Betty Boop).

Advertisement:

This style was pretty prevalent in the early 2000s due to the rise of the anime boom in media with many following the trend. Nowadays not so much now that anime is pretty commonplace, though still a design choice for some.

Compare Disneyesque. See also OEL Manga and Fanime.

---

Straight Examples

Animation — Asia (non-Japanese)

• The infamous Beauty and Warrior, while very similar to the Japanese style, was actually made in Indonesia.
• Korean animation is usually done in a style akin to the western (in fact, most western shows have their animation done in Korea, like Family Guy or The Simpsons), but often adopt facial expressions and other things more commonly associated with Japanese animation. Aachi and Ssipak is such an example, in which the animation looks more like a twisted Nicktoon but where characters can be seen nose bleeding and (specially in the case of the bad guys, which already resemble something out of a Japanese children cartoon) in "chibi" forms.
• The Bat Man Shanghai shorts starring Catwoman have an anime aesthetic mixed with a heavy dose of Wuxia influence. The shorts were commissioned from Chinese studio Wolf Smoke for the DC Nation block on Cartoon Network.
• Cupid's Chocolates is, to the untrained eye, virtually indistinguishable from an anime series. The catch: It was produced entirely in China.
• Guardian Fairy Michel is a Korean animation that uses an anime art style.

• Leafie, a Hen into the Wild is infamous for being a Tear Jerker film with bishonen ducks, but is a Korean film.
• The United Arab Emirates has the works of Ego Punch Entertainment, Moving Reflection Productions and Eating Stars Studios, among others. Respectively, their pet projects include Torkaizer, Empire of N and Emara: Emirates Hero, whose OP has already been criticised for being too similar to other shows.
• The immense popularity of Japanese media in China had caused a large amount of modern 2D Chinese animation and art to adopt a style similar to anime and manga art. One would guess that "Chinese cartoons" really is synonymous with anime in a sense.
• Battle of Surabaya, another Indonesian animated film from 2015.

Animation — Europe

• Fantastic Four: World's Greatest Heroes and Code Lyoko, both produced in France by MoonScoop. Code Lyoko includes a Japanese girl as one of the main characters, perhaps as a way of acknowledging its anime influences.
• Totally Spies!, Martin Mystery, Team Galaxy, The Amazing Spiez, Gormiti: The Lords of Nature Return and Redakai, all produced by the French company UP.
• Miraculous Ladybug, a co-production between French studio Zagtoon and (to no surprise) Japanese studio Toei Animation. The heroine is a Chinese-French Magical Girl. It was originally even more anime-like before becoming an All-CGI Cartoon. The original trailer is often compared to Pretty Cure/Glitter Force and featured the protagonist with a huge Idiot Hero, which the anime concept was a complete success. The finalized cartoon is in CGI but still keeps a lot of its Japanese influences.
• The 2007 adaptation of Valérian called Time Jam: Valerian & Laureline is another.
• The Podcats, a French series animated in Canada (no, really) by the company who did Clash of the Dinosaurs and some of the effects for Underworld: Awakening.
• Huntik: Secrets & Seekers, for the transformation sequences, action lines, and hair highlights.
• The Rainbow Magic movie, due to the character designs and animation style; no surprise, as it was co-produced by The Answer Studio.
• Italian show Winx Club is so anime influenced that some Italian viewers thought at first it was a Japanese show until the credits appeared. The show is a Magical Girl Warrior series with heavy use of Shoujo demographic elements and the visual style include body proportions, shading, visual tropes and big doe eyes with sparkles that are very anime-like. It doesn't use Limited Animation, though.
• Robotboy, which is primarily visible in the Astro Boy-esque premise of the series.
• Spanish animated film Gisaku, going so far as not only being drawn in an animesque style, but also featuring a samurai as protagonist. In Spain.
• Some early Mondo TV (an Italian studio) series were animated in Japan, so an anime style was unavoidable:
  • Christopher Columbus (animation by Nippon Animation)
  • The Jungle Book: The Adventures of Mowgli (animation by Tatsunoko Production)
  • The Legend of Snow White (animation by Tatsunoko Production)
  • Kaiketsu Zorro (aka The Legend of Zorro) (animation by Toho) yes, this is mostly where Meta Knight's English anime portrayal came from.
  • Robin Hood no Daiboken (animation by Tatsunoko Production)
• Khuda-Yana, a Spanish series by B.R.B. Internacional, looks and moves a lot like your typical anime series.
• Angel's Friends, for the transformation sequences and magical girl motif.
• Sophie et Virginie, for its very Japanese character designs and animation style; not surprising considering it was animated in Japan.
• The characters of Kaeloo often use sweat drops, face faults and other anime-like things.
• Beast Keeper.
• Ōban Star-Racers

Advertisement:

Animation — U.S.A.

• That Dude in the Suede managed to list 11 of those.
• My Little Pony:
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is what happens if the My Little Pony franchise was rebooted using Anime Tropes. The art style adopted the distinctively big-head, tiny-mouth, wide and sparkling eyes style that anime is known for. Some anime graphical elements even found their way into the show. That said, the art style is still very westernized, in particular when it comes to the non-pony characters and animals.
  • The My Little Pony TV Specials were animated by Japanese studios, and it shows. The second one looks especially shoujo.
  • My Little Pony G3 was often described in its heyday as an animesque take on the characters, specifically their character designs.
• The Avatar: The Last Airbender franchise is usually described as "Asian-influenced". It also seems to have a higher amount of "cred" since it uses a more cinematic, narrative, Miyazakian form of "anime"-style animation and art. Though, funnily enough, it was the hyper-kinetic Widget Series that was FLCL which was required viewing for all the original show's staff. The look and feel for the show was helped by the animation studios, DR Movie and JM Animation, having worked primarily on Japanese productions rather than Western ones^note Studio Mir, which worked on the sequel series, was formed by former staff of the latter, as well as supervising director Oh Seung-hyun having studied for a year under Shoji Kawamori. That said, calling the show an anime in certain places is liable to get you considerably flamed, either by rabid fans, or by purists who hate most non-Japanese animation.
• The Boondocks also uses stylistic Watanabe-based animation, chiefly because Aaron McGruder is One of Us. Also, most of the animation studios that worked on this show are in Korea (however, Madhouse in Japan did do a bit of work on this show as well, and two of the animation studios are owned by Japanese companies^note Madhouse and Studio Gallop). There's an Easter Egg homage to Samurai Champloo in the the second opening. The first one is a Shout-Out to Cowboy Bebop. So, in other words, they're both shout-outs to Shinichiro Watanabe. They even devote an entire episode to both Samurai Champloo's "Baseball Blues" and Shaolin Soccer ("The Red Ball", Season 3).
• The Blaxploitation Parody cartoon Black Dynamite is made by the same team as The Boondocks and has a similarly Animesque style.
• Super Robot Monkey Team Hyper Force Go, with an old-school super sentai tokusatsu flavor.
• The classic Ben 10 series, to a small extent, utilizing speed lines, hair highlights, and flashy transformation sequences. The Omniverse incarnation of the franchise plays this trope more straight, with character designs that veer away from the American superhero comic book style.
  • Transformers Animated, which shared key creative team members with Omniverse. It helps that one of the co-owners of the property is a Japanese company, and all three of its animation studios are Japanese.
• Several of the previous Transformers series have been actual anime, and Generation 1 was animated in Japan, although aired in the US first.
• Kappa Mikey. Everyone save the title character is drawn in a limited-animation anime style (as the show is set in Japan — therefore everyone there is Japanese and must be drawn in a Japanese style, except the title character who is, wouldn't you know, American and is drawn in a much simpler fashion). It pulls no punches when it comes to Facefaults and thinly veiled parodies. This is played for laughs in one scene when everyone gets a big-head facefault except Mikey, being drawn in American style. He holds his breath in an attempt to copy them, fails, then mumbles, "Show-offs."
• Three Delivery is an anime-influenced series by Animation Collective, the studio that made the aforementioned Kappa Mikey.
• Xiaolin Showdown uses Asian-influenced themes and window-dressing and uses visual gags commonly found in anime. The character designs, however, are distinctly western.
• What do you get when executives take the Looney Tunes cast and use them for a pseudo-anime superhero show? Loonatics Unleashed.
• The DCU:
  • The DCAU, they slowly acquired more Asian-influenced artistic design. Batman: The Animated Series has a couple of nods to The Castle of Cagliostro (and used TMS Entertainment to boot), but overall, the art style is closer to the old Fleischer cartoons.
    • The New Batman Adventures episode "Growing Pains" in particular has a Ghibli-esque look and feel to it.^note A bit of research does yield that it was animated alongside some animators from Ghibli.
    • Batman Beyond borrows the setting, a futuristic city overrun by gangs, and a recurring theme of Bio-Augmentation from AKIRA.
    • Some of Justice League's action sequences are Dragon Ball-esque earth-shattering fights. The Justice League episode "Legends" also features a giant robot that is a not-too-subtle Shout-Out to EVA Unit-01. There's also the Justice League Unlimited episode "Chaos at the Earth's Core," which starts with a fight against a kaiju in Japan.
  • The Batman. With the fight scenes, use of stock footage for his suit-up sequence, and the designs for both Robin and Batgirl, it definitely takes influence from anime.
  • Batman: Gotham Knight was created by multiple anime studios, but was primarily made for an American audience, and distributed by an American company. The stories were American-made but the actual animation was directed by several famous anime directors. Each segment also uses a different animation style.
  • Bruce Timm revealed that before Justice League, the next Batman show was slated to be an anime-inspired reboot that he described as "Batman meets Power Rangers".
• Teen Titans was heavily inspired by anime in general, and by bizarre, expressionist anime like FLCL in particular. This led it to have all the "quirks" of Japanese animation (sweatdrops, "chibi" forms, etc.) and even a title theme by J-pop band PuffyAmiYumi. Taking it even further, all the quirky filler episodes have the theme sung in Japanese. Teen Titans: Trouble in Tokyo, in which the Titans go to Tokyo, contains parodies and references to everything from Kodansha comics and weird Japanese commercials to Japanese art, and includes a sub-plot where Beast Boy sings the Japanese version of the theme song at a karaoke bar and gains a fanbase of Japanese schoolgirls. Even its spinoffs keep up the look: The DC Nation shorts resembled chibi omake chapters, and Teen Titans Go! is a Galaxy Angel-esque parody series that wouldn't look out of place in CoroCoro Comic.
• True to the birthplace of the eponymous J-pop singers, Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi. And Janice Kawaye's role of Ami helps out, considering that she speaks fluent Japanese.
• The Animatrix did the same (but did it first), and even had one made by Shinichiro Watanabe. Notably, "Kid's Story" was done by a Japanese company (the same one that did Kill Bill's anime sequence) but set in an American high school; considering how different schools in Japan are, some were surprised how accurately designed it was.
• Dexter's Laboratory's creator, Genndy Tartakovsky, has openly stated the influence of anime on his work. Samurai Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars and Sym-Bionic Titan all show it best. Two episodes of Dexter's Laboratory actually portray the style outright. The first is the Godzilla homage episode (which originally was the first series finale) that draws the Japan nation in anime style. The second uses a very flamboyant villain who is taking over imagination land. Also, the Speed Racer-spoof episode "Mock Five", making jokes upon everything from the dub's infamously fast speech to the low amount of animation frames to the still shots upon tense moments.
• The Powerpuff Girls:
  • Similarly, The Powerpuff Girls, which was created by Craig McCracken but also had Genndy's input. This was eventually taken to its logical conclusion with a Magical Girl version called Demashita! Powerpuff Girls Z.
  • The Powerpuff Girls (2016) has an anime-inspired sequence in "Power of Four" where the girls transform into one big glowing Powerpuff Girl and fight a monstrous version of Him. A Japanese song plays as this occurs and a girl takes off her glasses to show off her purple "anime eyes".
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars has sometimes been described as an anime (notably by the man himself). Considering the supervising director was one of the lead writers for the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender, this is not quite as strange as it first appears to be.
  • The animation for the installment was contracted to Polygon Pictures, which would also work on Mamoru Oshii's The Sky Crawlers and go on to create CGI anime adaptations in the future, so this is actually a Justified Trope from Lucas as the show is technically Japanese animation. Along with anime's previously stated influence on Tartakovsky's 2003 series Japan's influence has come full circle from Star Wars taking inspiration from Eastern culture.
• Star Wars Resistance has an even more noticeable anime influence than its predecessors, right down to the more expressive faces and brighter color palette. It's even animated by Polygon Pictures, the Japanese studio behind shows like Knights of Sidonia, Blame! and Ajin, as well as the animated Godzilla films.
• Halo Legends follows The Animatrix and Batman: Gotham Knight's footsteps, as it also has several Japanese animation studios animating different segments.
• The Red vs. Blue: Animated pilot uses a beautiful and extremely fluid animesque style. Sadly, differences between Rooster Teeth and the group who animated it prevented them from going any further with this. Until Season 14 anyway, where it was made canon and recieved an extra scene at the end.
  • Some of the employees at the studio that animated that particular scene would become involved in Netflix's Castlevania (2017) and are notable for their output being nearly indistinguishable from anime, up to being able to replicate the cadences of Yutaka Nakamura's work.
• Trollz is this, with speed lines, animesque eyes, and the girls being magical.
• My Life as a Teenage Robot. There's even an episode that has Jenny lose her language OS disc after a trip to Japan, leaving her only able to speak Japanese for almost its entirety. As with the AmiYumi example above, it helps that her voice actress, Janice Kawaye, is a Japanese-American who speaks Japanese fluently.
• Megas XLR, which combines something obstinately Japanese (the Giant Mecha genre) with something obstinately American (New Jersey and muscle cars).
• Invader Zim is very popular among anime fans and somewhat animesque; the Megadoomer was even a miniature, squat, practically chibi-style EVA with invisibility, and an entire sequence of the Christmas Episode was a practically shot-for-shot remake of a scene from End Of Evangelion. The DVDs were even produced by a company that usually produces anime DVDs, which caused most video stores to place the show's DVDs in the "anime" section.
• The 4Kids Entertainment cartoon Chaotic is an interesting example of this. Although the first season uses simplistic-looking flash animation, the second season changes completely, using a style that is clearly based off of anime.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003) had shades of this, it was particularly Animesque in terms of of storytelling but many of the action scenes had a clear anime influence. The opening sequence even has a Shout-Out to AKIRA. This actually got more pronounced as the series went on and the "Back to the Sewer" season dropped all pretense whatsoever. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) snuck up behind the other shows and took the Animesque cake.
• When X-Men was dubbed and localized for Japan, new openings and eyecatches were animated that evoke all sorts of anime-related tropes: Anime Theme Songs, Speed Stripes, even a Beam-O-War between Professor X and Magneto. See for yourself.
• Though it had an art style similar to that of the above-mentioned X-Men, The Avengers: United They Stand attempted to cash in on the anime craze by adding some Japanese-looking elements. Ant-Man, The Falcon, The Wasp, and Hawkeye were inexplicably redesigned and given suits of Power Armor, complete with gratuitous Transformation Sequences.
• G.I. Joe: Resolute, a Darker and Edgier incarnation written by Warren Ellis, animated by Titmouse Inc. channeling Madhouse, and voiced by four people. Given the lavish budget of the live-action cartoon, fans wonder how much it cost to make this miniseries and if it can be repeated.
• Peter Chung of Æon Flux fame. Having a mix of European and anime influences, he was involved in several Animesque cartoons, including the intro sequence to TMNT. Japan would later have him bring a western flavor to things like Reign: The Conqueror and the intro to Party 7.
• Storm Hawks, most notable in the hair and eyes.
• Some fans whom had watched The Mr. Men Show felt it was this way. Sanrio's acquisition of the Mr. Men and Little Misses is no surprise considering that it's located in Japan.
• Depending on what you think, Dora the Explorer COULD be considered animesque due to the title girl's big cute eyes. But then again, it's Dora the freaking Explorer. Make of that what you will.
• Transformers Prime, like Animated, has some anime influences in the overall aesthetic of the show... largely because it's an attempt at blending Animated with the Michael Bay films.
• Maryoku Yummy: Just by its name you would think it's Japanese, but it was actually made in America and based on the Edo period of art, most characters have Japanese names, and the characters make anime eyes sometimes, such as Fudan in "Doggone Dog" and Maryoku in "Cinderyoku."
• Animated by Ashi Productions and having a Sentai-like team, Skysurfer Strike Force had several anime-inspered elements, especially the Skysurfers' Transformation Sequence.
• Monsuno. This can be further blurred by most of its English cast being more known for working on anime. There's also a manga in the works.
• The Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld shorts from DC Nation have a very clear anime influence. Which is fitting, since Amethyst was basically a Magical Girl before the genre was known in the United States. And as mentioned above, the Bat Man of Shanghai shorts have a distinct anime flavor and were produced by a Chinese studio.
• Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures is an American/Japanese/Canadian co-production, and going by the credits, at least 60% of it is made in Japan. Not surprising, considering where Pac-Man originated.
• When Magic Adventures of Mumfie returned to Hulu and Netflix in The New '10s, many people unfamiliar with the series called it an anime when it was actually British. And it's not hard to see why they would say that-the characters look like they've come from a Studio Ghibli film, there are lots of Ridiculously Cute Critters in the show, Mumfie's winking, the characters having Wide Eyes and Shrunken Irises when they are shocked in "The Amazing Scarecrow", a villain who predates shojou anime villians such as the Grim Reaper and Zakkena, and Scarecrow occasionally using an anime style of eyes when smiling or sleeping. The first and second seasons were actually animated in Canada, and the most anime-esque season, the third, was animated in Spain.
• Though its art style is mostly western, Steven Universe takes a lot of aesthetic and thematic hints from anime. Most notably, the Crystal Gems are essentially Magical Girl Warriors, and there are plenty of references to anime throughout the show. Pearl herself looks very reminiscent of an Osamu Tezuka creation, being very tall and bendy with a pointy nose. The first half hour episode "Bismuth" adds to this by adding Eye Catchs before and after the commercials. It also has a plot disconnected from the current ongoing Story Arc (which dealt with Jasper's attempt to build a Corrupted Gem army to take revenge on "Rose" (Steven) and Amethyst's feelings of inferiority stemming from being too Unskilled, but Strong to beat Jasper in their first fight), introducing a new upgrade for the heroes (upgrades to the main three Gems' weapons), and introducing a unique antagonist that is introduced and defeated by the end of its running time.
• One of the Dexter's Laboratory Cartoon Network Groovies is styled in an animesque style.
• The Rankin/Bass Productions shows Thunder Cats, SilverHawks, and TigerSharks. The opening sequences, and how much better they are than the rest of the show, are a dead giveaway. The cast is pure American comic book style, yet how they were handled make these some of the most Animesque shots in existence.
• ThunderCats (2011) touts its look and animation by Japan's Studio 4°C as major selling points.
• Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers: The show's plots, voice acting, and some of its design work was done in New York. Most of the show's work was done in Japan by TMS. The Japanese animation really shows in "A-level" episodes like "New Frontier".
• M.A.S.K.: Inverted. Produced by an American company and dubbed in English in the U.S., but otherwise wholly-made by a trio of uncredited Japanese studios^note Production Reed, KK C&D Asia & Studio World, with Hanho Heung-Up and Trans Arts.
• Jem was animated by Toei Animation. It has a western art style however some Japanese things accidentally slid in, like some background extras looking animesque and a Japanese eyechart appearing (instead of an American one). The series also uses characters who naturally have abnormal hair colors, which is uncommon in American animation, and has some Magical Girl traits. The show has Eye Catches as well, which are more common in anime than American cartoons.
• Mighty Orbots and Bionic Six were both American/Japanese coproductions as well, which both were chief directed by legendary Japanese director Ozamu Dezaki.
• Various DiC series including Inspector Gadget, Heathcliff and the Catillac Cats and Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors. Aside from moving like '80s anime, it became especially visible in Gadget any time the characters were shaded.
• The DiC series of Care Bears has been described as being rather animesque, and in fact it really looks like some of the children and adults are drawn in this style. (There is even an episode where a character is shown wearing a Sailor Fuku.) This was one of the examples of a co-production with Japanese animators, and there were even parts where they showed newspapers with scribbles that seem to indicate it being written like Japanese newspapers.
  • There is also a new series coming up—Care Bears: Unlock the Magic, using a new chibi look for the characters.
• Popples, another cartoon based on American Greetings' property (and also made by DIC!) is this. Notable examples include the children having randoseru backpacks, the "ViVi" magazine in "A Hair-Raising Experience" having Japanese writing on it (It helps that said magazine is actually a real one in Japan-maybe it was an in-joke placed there by the animators?), and Party having Wide Eyes and Shrunken Irises after VERY LOUD music is blasted into her ears by her radio at the near-end of "Pop Goes the Radio".
• The Real Ghostbusters. The characters practically switched styles depending on whether or not they were shaded. Then you had things like Stay Puft's anime expressions in the opening, and even a Face Fault during the old promo.
• Mummies Alive! At least, whenever it could afford decent rendering.
• SWAT Kats is notable in being Animesque before anime became popular (or even widely known) in the US. Also has some of the most fluid animation and action scenes you'll find in 90s cartoons. This is probably because it was (for the most part) animated by Mook DLE, whom also helped out on Eureka Seven, Gungrave, R.O.D the TV, Mars Daybreak and also the aforementioned Transformers Animated and Mummies Alive.
• There's also Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures.
• The intro number and Five-Episode Pilot that jump-started Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) look noticeably different from most of what follows.
• Gargoyles. One of the more obvious ones having its share of Japanese directors.
• About 1/3 of the episodes of both Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series. Especially noticeable in episodes where the director is one of theirs, with a side bonus of animation bumps.
• TMS having also worked on DuckTales (1987), Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers, Animaniacs, and countless others... which means the trope occasionally snuck into shows modeled after the classics.
• The Ruby Spears Mega Man cartoon took a Japanese license, redrew it American style, and had it animated in Japan. What's more, the redesigns were based on some sketches that Mega Man (Classic) creator Keiji Inafune happened to have done in his spare time. It boggles the mind, don't it? The pilot pitch was even more animesque than what the final product was. However, what we got out of THAT was an educational miniseries!
• Each season of Captain N: The Game Master was outsourced to a different studio. The second went to Japan, meaning Mega Man (Classic) has been through this twice. Said season did stand out, though, with better drawn episodes like The Legend of Zelda crossover.
• GI Joe Sigma Six. All American heroes animated in Japan and badly edited for the US. Few remember the show but its merchandise like the Dragonhawk◊ are much sought after. The original GI Joe series also had most of its animation done in Japan.
• Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light. Which was one of TMS' co-productions.
• Centurions, showing some of Sunrise's influence.
• Works by the American-Japanese studio Jetlag Productions, which included Conan the Adventurer.
• The New Adventures of He-Man has some pretty clear anime influence in its Title Sequence, but some episodes actually have sweat droping and other signature anime quirks!
• The Pirates of Dark Water would weave in and out due to having Tama Productions among its studios. The pilot miniseries had a little extra work by Madhouse.
• The original Transformers cartoon has this as well. Best exhibited in the movie and many of the later commercials.
• Dungeons & Dragons too was animated by Toei Animation from beginning to end, and while Marvel/TSR claim to have made sure to keep all designs as American-styled as possible guest characters often looked like they had jumped straight out of an anime.
• Rainbow Brite made use of Japanese-outsourced animation, and it shows, especially the big eyes and thick eyelashes (which even the boys sport). Some of Murky Dismal's expressions wouldn't look out of place in an anime, either. The cartoon is essentially a Magical Girl cartoon as well, and was even translated as Mahou Shoujo Rainbow Brite in Japan.
• Voltron: Legendary Defender. After all, it's a reboot of an American TV series made using heavily edited footage of an anime.
• Ozzy & Drix was based on an American movie and animated in Korea, but it looks this way. It came out during the rise of anime-styled shows, though, so it's possible it could have been an attempt to cash in on them. Hector especially looks animesque.
• Neo Yokio is an American production co-animated by Studio DEEN and Moi Animation to boot. The style imitates anime of the early 2000s, complete with frequently off-model characters, flat coloring, and many hallmarks of the genre that have fallen out of favor like sweat drops, nosebleeds, and chibification. It also seems to reference low budget anime dubbing, with poor lip synching and voice acting of varying quality.
• Steve Ahn's Blossom Detective Holmes brings over the eastern flair from his time working on Voltron: Legendary Defender and The Legend of Korra, channeling it into a young adult mystery series. According to the series' mission statement, it aims to make anime a viable production in the U.S. the same way western series could be made in Japan.
• Ballmastrz: 9009 is basically a Sports Anime by the creators of Super Jail

Animation — Other

• Kung Fu Dino Posse
• Kuu Kuu Harajuku is known with the main characters looking like anime-like characters due to being a Japanese band from Gwen Stefani.
• Teletoon's My Life Me is rather infamous example in some circles for this. It was made to capitalize on the 2000s anime fad.
• Rollbots

Arts

• Ur-example: Japonism. Although long before anime, back in the 1860s, Japanese Ukiyo-e prints heavily inspired Western artists of the time. Notably, Van Gogh actually painted two of Hiroshige's works.
• The works of the British (a northern one, to be exact) design studio The Designers Republic in The '90s codified the◊ usage◊ of◊ this◊ trope◊ in Graphic design (prominently featured on the Wipeout series, see above). They turned it into a timeless trend, so timeless that people started copying them. Though they rarely demonstrate this trope anymore, they are still remembered and associated to Japanese-influenced design movements.

Board Games

• There exists a variation on the Japanese game Mahjong called Shanghai or Mahjong Solitaire, which is played with the same tiles as real Mahjong. The game was invented by the American Brodie Lockhard in 1981.

Card Games

• The original card game Magi-Nation was like this, before it got bought out due to a dumning-down and change in art style.
• Magic: The Gathering plays this straight often (for example, Chandra, the Firebrand and Jace, Memory Adept. Double points in that there was a special edition version of their original cards drawn by a manga artist released sometime before), but it's averted in the Japan-themed Kamigawa block, which seemed to go more for an art style reminiscent of traditional Japanese art instead of anime.

Comic Books

• The style of Sky Doll (especially the side material, e.g. Lacrima Christi or Space Ship) is discreetly, but definitely influenced by the manga style.
• Adam Warren drew OEL Manga years before it became the cool thing to do — or had a name. One of his contemporaries in that sense is Lea Hernandez.
  • The title character of Empowered hangs a lampshade on this in a meta-text panel from Vol. 1, lamenting that a manga-styled superhero comic won't have it easy when most manga fans have zero interest in western style superheroes, while most superhero fans hate anything that even looks like manga.
• X-Men was actually drawn by manga creator Kia Asamiya for a brief time in 2002. As well, the art of Joe Madureira, who drew the book from 1994 to 1997, is heavily manga-influenced.
• The Marvel Adventures version of Power Pack by Gurihiru Studios. Like with most other Japanese artists hired to draw American comics, it is just as much an example of them matching our style even in pacing and storytelling.
• Ditto the art of Runaways. But looks less animesque as Art Evolution goes.
• Ninja High School was drawn and written by Ben Dunn, an admitted anime and manga addict, and pretty much spoofed and/or parodied anything and everything in the genres that it could get away with in its early days. Since then, it's settled down into an actual overarching plot, but the parody elements (as well as the art style) remain woven integrally in.
• Gold Digger, another Antarctic Press title by Fred Perry, has an art style heavily influenced by anime/manga, but the artist himself tends to keep the proportions within the art consistent and avoids the common visual gags for the most part. Also, while references creep in from anime that Fred's seen, they're kept company by an equal number of pop culture references from the Western world as well.
  • However, his webcomic Levelup, based around his exploits playing the game Final Fantasy XI has a number of obvious references to specific anime. The anime that is most notably an influence to the style of the comic is Azumanga Daioh.
• TokyoPop tends to publish a great deal of OEL Manga, though some of their titles (I Luv Halloween...) doesn't bear even the slightest resemblance to any common Japanese art style and are really just black-and-white indie comics with the word "manga" on the spine. Others, like Dramacon, Steady Beat and Bizenghast, do a much better job at presenting unique and recognizable art that still comes off as manga-esque.
  • This came full circle when Felipe Smith, one of TokyoPop's authors, had some work of his published in the Afternoon 2 magazine in Japan.
  • Dramacon is an interesting example, as it's a story that takes place at an anime convention. Right down to the distinctly manga-inspired art style, it's a celebration of its cultural influences. Many of those "cultural influences" are lampshaded in the comic itself.
  • Return to Labyrinth and Legends of The Dark Crystal.
  • A Battlestar Galactica — Echoes of New Caprica manga, if you can believe it. One of the stories is a Zarek-centric one by Richard Hatch.
  • While Seven Seas Entertainment was founded specifically to produce original English Language manga, they've since expanded to have some actual Japanese manga translations.
• One early example of American graphic novel influenced by manga is Wendy and Richard Pini's ElfQuest.
• The Door Stopper It Takes a Wizard is drawn in manga-style despite not being a "Manga" in definition. (It's even placed in the manga section.)
• With manga having been popular in France for a good while (Japanese things have been cool in France for over a century), several authors in the Franco-Belgian Comics market (which is extremely prolific) are strongly influenced by anime and manga. Their style is sometimes called "manfra" or "franga", which can include a right-to-left reading order. Here's a few notable names:
  • Algésiras — Candélabres
  • Christophe Arleston — Lord of Burger, Lanfeust Quest
  • Marc Bati — Cristal Majeur, Altor
  • Bruno Bellamy — Sylfeline, Showergate
  • Philippe Cardona — Sentai School, Magical JanKen Pon
  • Kevin Hérault — HK
  • Reno Lemaire — Dreamland
  • Patricia LyFoung — La Rose écarlate
  • Florent Maudoux — Freaks' Squeele
  • Moonkey — DYS
  • Patrick Sobral — Les Légendaires, La Belle et la Bête
  • Vanyda — L'immeuble d'en face, Celle... que je ne suis pas
  • VanRah — Stray Dog
  • Tony Valente's action/fantasy comic Radiant is probably the most prominent example at the moment, to the point it could easily be mistaken for a Japanese series (It even goes on the Manga namespace on This Very Wiki ). Valente notes his influence from Toriyama and Yusuke Murata's works, and it definitely shows in his art. He even refers to the series as a shonen manga by name. It's also one of the few mangaesque series to fully make the jump to its country of inspiration: Murata endorsed the series when it was translated into Japanese, and Lerche spearheaded an anime adaptation of the series airing in late 2018. Fairy Tail author Hiro Mashima commented in volume 5 that "while it looks like a Japanese manga at first glance, its slightly bitter tone feels very European."
• James Paterson's novel series Maximum Ride was adapted into an OEL Manga.
• Spain has started to develop its own "manga" industry during the last decade. The biggest example is the local publisher Editores de Tebeos (former Spanish branch of the French publisher Glenat) which started the "Gaijin Manga" line, with works created by Spaniard artists who grew up with manga and anime in the 80s and 90s. Between 2010 and 2013, over a dozen of Spanish manga were published with a decent success.
• Rockin Raven is very deliberately based on the manga style.
• Most non-Japanese Asian artists also developed a manga-style artwork. Several Malaysian cartoonists like Kaoru (Liew Yee Teng), Benny Wong, Jakalll, Pac, Norman "Juice" Noh, Xanseviera (Haryati Mohd Ehsan) and Keith are examples.
• Also common in Indonesia. Particularly Julian's Archi & Meidy series and Ekyu's Chiaroscuro. Some are high-quality mangas (Archi & Meidy is a physics-teaching manga written by a physics professor), some are Affectionate Parody, some are blatant ripoffs of other mangas like Fushigi Yuugi...
• The art style of Dark Wraith of Shannara, Del Rey's first foray into comic publishing, was meant to emulate manga, but had Western-style panel layout.
• The OEL adaptation of Sherrilyn Kenyon's The Dark Hunters: Written by an American, drawn and lettered by Americans, reads and looks like a typical American indie comic, is formatted in a right-to-left page format. Who do they think they're fooling? Good comic otherwise.
• The Dreaming is a comic that is drawn in manga-style by a Chinese-Australian author named Queenie Chan. It's even published by TokyoPop, and is considered one of the first non-Japanese manga series that they published. (Since it was actually published in Australia, and Queenie has said that she was inspired by a few Australian Horror movies about boarding schools and Urban Legends)
• If you look in the "manga" section of your local bookstore, you'll find that a portion of them will actually be Korean in origin.
• Dork Diaries looks rather animesque, but it's more to give the idea of a girl who is an artist doodling in her diary, and her drawings are actually quite detailed.
• Although Eisner-nominated artist Mark Crilley's (Akiko, Miki Falls) style has always had manga influences, he specifically credits Takeshi Obata's artwork as a source of inspiration for his latest work, Brody's Ghost.
• Incarnate, authored by the son of Gene Simmons, which crossed a line by straight-up tracing issues of Bleach and other artworks.
• For some reason or another, Batman is made a fairly frequent example. Gotham Knight is mentioned above, but there's also Batman: Death Mask by Yoshinori Natsume, Batman: Child of Dreams by Kia Asamiya, and a story in Batman: Black & White by none other than Katsuhiro Otomo himself. They are written and drawn by actual mangakas.
• Randy Queen's Darkchylde briefly flirted with this in Manga Darkchylde — a reimagining of the book's story starring a much younger version of Ariel Chylde. Despite the title, the art wasn't especially manga-influenced.
• Ape Entertainment's Scarlet Veronica seems to deliberately attempt to blur the line between western comic art and manga art. Typically resembling Thick-Line Animation, characters facefault, sweatdrop, and even go chibi as the situation requires.
• Here, some very early examples of anime-inspired comics are discussed — most of them bad. Shuriken actually enjoyed some modest popularity in its day, and may have helped the spread of the trend.
• Becky Cloonan's work in Demo draws primarily from older indie comics, but steps into this territory for at least two issues — issue #3 (Emmy) and issue #10 (Damaged) both seem heavily manga-influenced. By the second series she seems to have grown fond of the style.
• Chynna Clugston's Blue Monday. The cover of the first volume even has the lead lounging in a giant bowl of ramen!
• During the early 00s, there was a sci-fi re-imagining of Vampirella called "Vampi" that was done in a heavy anime style.
• Welcome to Tranquility features an Art Shift to this style in the back-up that gives the skinny on background character Mangacide, an extreme Occidental Otaku.
• British comics publisher Self Made Hero produces manga-style adaptations of William Shakespeare's works.
• DC now publishes Ame-Comi Girls, a series based off the popular Anime-inspired toyline. The series stars Manga-styled redesigns of characters such as Wonder Woman and Batgirl.
• UDON Entertainment, best known for Street Fighter and official art for most Capcom projects since 2005. Dozens of artists, most of them Canadian, all of them with clearly manga-inspired styles, the best known of them arguably being Alvin Lee, who handled the series up until Street Fighter II and is responsible for the UDON art found in the Capcom games that use it.
• Monica's Gang:
  • There is a spin-off series focus on the teenager audience called Monica Jovem (Monica's Teen Gang). Just compare the normal and cartoony Monica and her friends◊ with her Teen◊ version. The Teen comics are in black and white, while Monica strips were often made with colorful tones. The comics still read left-to-right, though (complete with a last-page notice warning readers of this). Some editions even parodies famous anime like Death Note or games like the Phoenix Wright franchise and MMORPGs in general.
  • After the success of Monica's Teen Gang, another printhouse published Luluzinha Teen◊. Yes, it's Little Lulu for teenagers in animesque and yes, that's Tubby Tompkins kissing a Sailor Moon cosplay. For some reason, Animesque comics aimed for teenagers are getting a high popularity in Brazil.
• Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim is quite heavily influenced by manga art style. The characters have large heads with big, expressive eyes. This is also parodied: check the parodies section further below.
• Seconds. O'Malley specifically stated he wanted to try "70s/80s manga style like Rumiko Takahashi or Izumi Matsumoto" with "bigger hair and 'cuter' figures."
• Godzilla: Rulers of Earth (whenever it's being drawn by Matt Frank) has extremely anime-like designs, especially on the humans. Which is somewhat fitting seeing as the franchise in general is Japanese in origin.
• Jake Wyatt's issues of Ms. Marvel, complete with really adorable Chibi expressions for Kamala.
• Another "franga" artist example comes from Poet Anderson: The Dream Walker. It's illustrated by Djet, who also worked on comics published by the company behind Wakfu, published by an American indie comics publisher with a distinct European/Asian, and written by the same Americans that did the short film it's a prequel to. The short film is also animesque with a different character designer.
• Archie Comics' Sonic the Hedgehog went through a period of this from 1996 to about the mid-2000s. Cover artist Patrick "Spaz!" Spaziante was the first to go into this with James Fry and Ron Lim soon after. Many comic fans point this as a major sign of the title's Dork Age.
• Archie Comics had a few 'manga style' series in the early 2000s, when anime was gaining popularity in America. Fans hated the artwork however the actual writing in the Sabrina the Teenage Witch was praised.
• IDW's Jem and the Holograms has a western art style however it does have some manga influences. Jerrica does a Magical Girl type spin when becoming Jem and certain artists use some manga-type expressions.
• Erin Hunter:
  • Warrior Cats' graphic novels, despite being American in origin, are called manga, and James Barry in particular has a more animesque style than the other artists. He tends to give cats tufts on their heads, even though cats don't actually have said tufts (and in an extreme example, one had actual hair◊).
  • Sister series Seeker Bears also has a few OEL Manga.
• Albedo: Erma Felna EDF is a very odd example of this trope, because, while the art is still very western-style (albeit due to Art Evolution, some Japanese elements creeped in, like big eyes), the storytelling is definitely not, as it's very continuity-based (when you need to read all the issues to understand to whole story) just like Japanese manga, and it uses many elements and cliches from Japanese media like wham episodes, craploads of exposition and many other elements. Keep in mind the comic began publication in 1983, many years before anime and manga became popular in the States. This can be explained because the author was heavily influenced in old manga and anime like Space Battleship Yamato and Osamu Tezuka's works, not to mention having some Japanese acquaintances in Real Life.
• The titles of the short-lived Culture Crash Comics from the Philippines, which includes Cat's Trail, One Day Isang Diwa, Pasig, Solstice Butterfly, and sometimes Kubori Kikiam all featured Animesque designs.

Comic Strips

• The Boondocks has been using an animesque artstyle since its newspaper comics strip days. This is because creator Aaron McGruder says that anime presents the feeling of live-action while still being animation. It also allowed him to get away with Only Six Faces by differentiating only the hairdos and skin tone of a lot of the younger characters.
• InSecurity looks as if it came out of a manga series, from wild-looking Anime Hair, Alertness Blinks, Big Ol' Eyebrows and Visible Silence, to most other Japanese Visual Arts Tropes.
• The newspaper strip My Cage has many of its female characters drawn in an animesque style, though everything else is pretty western. Notable for the fact that its syndicate made a big honking deal about how it will appeal to "manga fans". It appealed to people, just not the massive amounts of manga fans that they were expecting.
• Belgian Ine t'Sjoen, who has drawn some cartoons for Schamper, the magazine of the university of Ghent, draws in such a style. Though it probably has more to do with how she is a fan of The Powerpuff Girls rather than anything else. She has a Deviantart profile, for those who are interested.
• A christian comic Tract series called The Truth For Youth uses a manga style.

Fan Works

• Beochan Paisean Agust Aifeala has a little bit of an anime feel in it's art style, much like The Powerpuff Girls.
• Pacific: World War II U.S. Navy Shipgirls is drawn in this manner, due to being a Kantai Collection-based work.

Films — Animation

• While the Robotech movie Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles is made from original footage, the anime aesthetic of the original series remains. The animation itself is from Korean studio DR Movie, which has worked on anime such as — appropriately — Macross Plus.^note being owned by Madhouse also doesn't hurt
• The cult classic Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland. An adventurous, higher budget co-production with Japan, the style often fell into full anime mode including the sound effects. Unfortunately it bombed while Pokémon, Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, and other low-budget series caught on overseas. An apt metaphor for the end of a dream, the failure helped cement the niche, low budget nature of Japanese animation and all it influenced. If it's any consolation, that movie wasn't even very good, not to mention a total nightmare to create. Even Hayao Miyazaki said that working on Little Nemo was one of his worst experiences in his entire professional career.
• The late 1970s Rankin/Bass animated film versions of The Hobbit and The Return of the King. In fairness, the animators were Japanese and seemed to make up the majority of the non-vocal credits. Many of the animators involved were later part of Studio Ghibli.
• The Last Unicorn, another Rankin Bass production made by future members of Studio Ghibli, definitely has a resemblance to the anime style. The Unicorn's human form could easily be mistaken for a Sailor Senshi.
• Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, being partly animated in Japan, and Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker being entirely so and actively channeling AKIRA. Mask of the Phantasm even includes a short shot-for-shot recreation of a sequence from The Castle of Cagliostro.
• Most of the DC Universe Animated Original Movies have the feel (if not the look) of a typical anime. With entries like Justice League: Doom and Batman: Gotham Knight having been animated in Japan.
• The Transformers: The Movie. Glaringly Animesque visuals by Toei Animation made even more noticeable by the TV series switching from Toei to AKOM immediately afterward.
• Technotise Edit I Ja is clearly anime-influenced in both style and subject matter, the first Serbian film to be so.
• Ever since The Little Mermaid was released into theaters in the late 1980s, at the same time anime was beginning to show up in the United States, many of Disney's later films are starting to incorporate anime-influenced elements into their character designs, particularly the size and shape of their eyes. Just compare Snow White's eyes with those of Tiana's!
• The Cars series does this when it depicts Japan. Specific cases are the Japanese news broadcast when Lightning Mcqueen disappears in the first movie, the Tokyo segment of the World Grand Prix in Cars 2, and the Cars Toon Tokyo Mater; which has these traits in the size and shape of the eyes, Gratuitous Japanese phrases being tossed around, and a drift race involving literal Car Fu with ninjas.
• Bolívar, el Héroe, a film from Colombia, attempts this trope... and falls flat on its face. An animesque style was done with the intention to appeal to younger audiences.
• The Mexican film The Guardians of the Lost Code fares better compared to Bolívar el Héroe.
• Poet Anderson: The Dream Walker is influenced by anime with its character designs and fluid action, though there's still Western Animation design cues in the characters. Interviews with the creators show it's intentional and classics like AKIRA were cited as influences.
• South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut naturally spoofs this one, with the Dragon Ball Z-esque battle between Cartman and Saddam near the end, complete with motion lines and odd camera angles.
• Exchange Student Zero downplays this trope. Only the characters that originate from the cards are designed anime-like. The remaining characters are decidedly western-based.

Films — Live-Action

• The Movie version of Speed Racer was described as "the first live-action anime", and it certainly fits, with Speed clearly a Hot-Blooded hero, the mecha-like Car Fu, and even Speed Lines! A parody of Fist of the North Star also appears in the show. Even though it clearly isn't the first live-action anime. That honor would belong to the entire genre of tokusatsu.
• The story of O-Ren Ishii from Kill Bill Volume One had a portion which was an anime-style cartoon homaging — of course — anime. This was animated by Production I.G, but it still counts since Tarantino wrote it.
• Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is extremely geeky and uses lots of anime and manga literary devices and tropes, which only fans of anime and manga would get. The whole premise is a parody of Hot-Blooded shonen like Dragon Ball Z. Scott Pilgrim uses many devices from tokusatsu as well. The most notable one has to be that when Ramona's evil exes die, they explode into coins.
• Sucker Punch is very obviously influenced by anime. Particularly Baby Doll's world, which is practically crawling with huge samurai, her outfit is a midriff baring Sailor Fuku, and she wields a katana.
• TRON: Legacy. Many critics and moviegoers noted similarities to Speed Racer in style; and it becomes quite clear with the light-cycle races and light-jet battles. The dark tone of the movie could easily have it pass for an adaptation of Ghost in the Shell. There are also clear Anime Character Types exhibited with Badass Bookworm Action Girl Quorra, Cloudcuckoolander Castor, and Kevin Flynn being reimagined as The Mentor.
• The Matrix is another film that has multiple techniques seen in anime. From the camera angles of several of the shots during the action sequences, to the superhuman feats of the characters, many of which are in slow-motion, to the character types...
• Pacific Rim is one giant Homage to the Humongous Mecha and Kaiju genres. Some of the giant robots are named for ones from famous mecha anime.
• The Wolverine has this in their rendition of the Silver Samurai, having a sort of Humongous Mecha look to it as opposed to the design from the comic book arc on which much of the film was based.
  • James Mangold also cited the medium of anime as one of the key influences of the visual style of Logan.
• Dark City, one of the influences of The Matrix, also has several anime-esque traits, which become especially apparent in the final fight between Murdock and Mr. Book.
• Mentioned in Super Troopers, when they find a monkey sticker on bags of marijuana. Rabbit explains that this is likely a brand used by these particular dealers, borrowed from the Afghani cartoon Johnny Chimpo, vaguely reminiscent of Anime.
  Captain: What's the significance of this John Chimpo fella?
  Foster: Uh, well, you know those really cheap Japanese cartoons? No? This is basically a cheaper Afghani knockoff. It's this monkey that basically travels around the world... uh, doing nasty things. His butler tries to keep him in line, but, uh— No.
  Rabbit: It's really funny, Cap! It's Afghanistanimation!
  (Later)
  German guy: Well, the butler is basically saying to Johannes Chimpo... 'Don't let the Great Satan tempt you with the Western culture. You must remain true to the Taliban warlord.'
• Suki's car from 2 Fast 2 Furious has this as its theme. The director has also admitted that part of the film's tone was inspired by Anime.
• The B-Movie Asian School Girls contains this as its theme along with Fanservice.
• Edge of Tomorrow contains multiple anime influences, ranging from the Power Armor, BFS, the relationship between the male and female leads, the Anime Character Types of the squad, and even several of the action setpieces. Not too surprising when you consider that it is based of a Japanese light novel / manga.
• Brick is created with the same shot composition and editing an anime would have. Brendan has the look of a Spike Spiegel expy.

Literature

• Avalon: Web of Magic was originally released by Scholastic with American-style cover art, then went out of print for a few years. Manga-publisher Seven Seas Entertainment then picked the series up and re-released it with anime-inspired cover art and in-book illustrations.
• Broken Sky by Chris Wooding draws heavily on anime, giving the characters Japanese-sounding names like Kia and Ryushi. The author stated on his website that the books are indeed inspired by anime, and the novels have manga-style covers, character designs and illustrations.

• Miffy is often mistaken for a Sanrio character, even though she predates Hello Kitty by a few decades.
• Daybreak on Hyperion is deliberately written in the style of Japanese light novels and contains its fair share of anime tropes.
• Rolitania has a noticable manga style cover. Its writing style, although written In English, mimics several well-known Light Novels. The characters even lampshade that there would be no way that they could be in a light novel, because "Who would read a book like that?"
• Seven Seas Entertainment, whose original output already qualifies, decided to publish various old novels with new artwork like this, starting with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass in 2014.

Live-Action TV

• Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide is a live-action series filled with Anime Character Types in a very American Middle School setting.
• Between Stephanie's male fans and pink hair, and the cartoony world, non-fans have mistakenly assumed that LazyTown is Japanese or influenced by anime.
• Super Sentai and Power Rangers, though the degree varies depending on the season.
  • Bachsfundo/ King Mondo of Chouriki Sentai Ohranger/Power Rangers Zeo has Cross-Popping Veins on his face.
  • Many consider Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers conditioning for the anime genre breaking out in America because of its Japanese origin; retaining Shonen traits such as a Hot-Blooded hero, a Humongous Mecha/Combining Mecha, and even leaving in the Japanese symbols and designs of the monsters.
  • Gekisou Sentai Carranger is a parody of Super Sentai, in the same manner that Kinnikuman parodied Ultraman. Power Rangers Turbo lessened this effect by attempting a serious adaptation, but still showed up traces of it in an inversion of the Gag Dub.
  • Engine Sentai Go-onger has a gaggle of Bishonen heroes, Chibi mecha designs, and a cuddly Robot Buddy. Power Rangers RPM again adapted it into a serious story, but its story highly resembles AKIRA. Dr. K is essentially a Gender Flip of L from Death Note.
  • Samurai Sentai Shinkenger resembles a samurai anime of The '70s crossed over with a Sentai series. Power Rangers Samurai did a Shot-for-Shot Remake approach. This leaves in the Rangers being represented by Anime Character Types, visors on the helmets being Kanji symbols, a Hot-Blooded hero, and even a Lethal Chef in Mia. The new Shogun Mode even borders on Scary Impractical Armor.
  • Hikonin Sentai Akibaranger airs at Otaku O'Clock and has heroes with Anime Hair molded into their helmets, and female characters are constantly subjected to Panty Shot upon Panty Shot.
• The Aquabats! Super Show! has a cartoon segment in this style for every episode for season one and one episode for season two. The designs for the Aquabats! came from [[a long time fan from Japan, Eriko Uruma (better known as PEY) http://www.wb.commufa.jp/ptm/tasssc_001.htm]], who has done various fanart pieces and promo stuff for the Aquabats! long before the Supershow! came out. And she's drawn crossover art◊ with Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger, because why not?
• In So Random! they had one skit where they imitated the Power Rangers but that didn't last long. The skit they use the most often is the Naruto/Dragon Ball immitating skit with two fans called Scott and Elliot who apparently do nothing but watch anime and constantly act like an anime character.
• Doctor Who:
  • In "Nightmare in Silver", the Cybermen have a distinct "mecha" look to them, compared to their predecessors Art Deco mid-twentieth century by way of the '90s retro craze aesthetic. The spinal cord-like design of their backs may or may not be a nod to Neon Genesis Evangelion.
  • Some of the animation on the official reconstructions of Missing Episodes, with "The Moonbase" in particular resembling a 1970s anime. "The Tenth Planet" uses anime acting tropes as well, like Open the Iris and a gun shimmering as the character aims it.
• While it doesn't persist in the series proper, the Captain Power training videos have a similar aesthetic (and same animation studio) to that of Bubblegum Crisis. This becomes more evident in the second and third tapes.

Music

• The album cover of Big Black's Songs About Fucking features an woman's head drawn in manga style.
• The cover of David Bowie's Reality and its associated singles feature the singer depicted in an exaggerated version of this trope, in a manner that could easily be mistaken for an amateur DeviantArt user's work.

Music Videos

• As a rapper, Kanye West is very openly influenced by anime in his works. Most notably, the cover for his hit single "Stronger" was designed by J-Pop artist Takashi Murakami and even paid homage to AKIRA within its music video. The scenes in the video (fairly obviously filmed in Tokyo) are also uncannily similar to the song's segment in anime
• Interstella 5555, which "tells" its story entirely through the music of Daft Punk.
• There's also Kanye's fellow CRS mate Lupe Fiasco.
  • "Lupe steal like Lupin the Third", for example. A few of his songs in his album The Cool reference various anime and manga as well.
  • In his song "Gold Watch", he lets you know just HOW much he loves Asia with lines like, "I am American mentally with Japanese tendencies..." and "... keep a wiininja hanging".
  • Also, Lupe produced a band called Japanese Cartoon.
  • When Lupe gave a rundown of his house for a magazine (well, it's really an apartment), there's a picture of him doing a stance, and he also has a bent sword because he bent it when some people disgraced it. Here's◊ that pic. The sword is number 9, and the ninja is 6.
• Kirsten Dunst covered "Turning Japanese", and the music video is her in a magical girl-styled dress, dancing around Akihabara.
• A music video for "First Squad/Первый Отряд" by a Russian group called Legalize is done in this style. Of course, it helps that it's a tie-in for an actual anime, being produced by an actual Japanese studio.
• The video clip for the song "Peut-être toi" by French singer Mylène Farmer.
• Britney Spears' video for "Break the Ice" — a clear homage to Ghost in the Shell.
• Matthew Sweet and the video for his song "Girlfriend," which uses footage from Space Adventure Cobra.
• Duran Duran made a video for "Careless Memories" that is a love-letter to ink and paint.
• The official video clip for Madonna's "Give Me All Your Luvin'" features cheerleaders wearing Anime-style masks and clothes similar to Sailor Fuku.
• The animated music video for the DyE song "Fantasy".
• Linkin Park videos love this style.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40,000
  • The Tau are said to be designed to appeal to anime fans. The reception was and still is mixed. This may have less to do with Japanese influence, which is largely present only in their rather Macross-inspired Battlesuit designs and more to do with their perception as a "good" race by many players in a setting famed for its GRIM DARKNESS. The Tau philosophy is also as much or more Japanese than it is Chinese, specifically WWII-era "Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere" expansionism. The "mecha" design of their battlesuits, vehicles, and power armour is clearly of Japanese pop-culture origin, with a substantial aquatic-form influence.
  • The Eldar, however, are more Japanese-inspired. Although the post-Rogue Trader Eldar were explicitly based on organic forms, with an increasely heavy Art Nouveau influence as the designs evolved. Currently their designs reflect a more medieval Japanese design.
  • Fittingly, the Eldar and Tau technology and look both rather reflect the look of anime which was popular at the time the respective armies came out, with the Eldar resembling the 80s era cyberpunk sci-fi like Bubblegum Crisis and Dominion Tank Police which was just being imported at the time, and the Tau strongly resembling more 1990s era Real Robot designs.
• The 3.5 Dungeons & Dragons supplement, the Tome of Battle: the Book of Nine Swords tends to draw flack for being "Too Anime", to the point that certain snarky 4chan posters refer to it as "The Book of Weeaboo Fightan Magic". Though some fans of the book call it that too.
• Exalted is heavily inspired by western mythology, eastern mythology, and of course anime.
• Infinity draws on Post-Cyberpunk anime for its look and lore.
• CthulhuTech is Call of Cthulhu IN SPACE!! With ANIME!! Basic examples include the Engels, Humongous Mecha that demand severe amounts of mental stress to be operated, or the shapeshifting Body Horror super-warriors called Tagers, who are meant to fight other shapeshifters called Dhohanoids. Not only that, but the two-wave alien invasion of Earth in the backstory reads identically to the one for Robotech, swapping the Mi-Go for the Robotech Masters and the Nazzadi for the Zentraedi.
• Big Eyes, Small Mouth is an open-ended anime RPG, made in Canada. There were a few series-specific books, in case you wanted to roleplay Tenchi Muyo! for some reason, and you could certainly ignore its anime theme and use it for just about anything, but the main appeal behind the game is in roleplaying your own anime series.
• Red Dragon Inn features Witchdoctor Natyli, who is a troll and the niece of another character, Phrenk. Phrenk and the rest of the ever-growing cast of playable characters have more Western-leaning art. Natyli has much larger eyes than the rest of the crew, and is pretty clearly meant to be the game's Cute Monster Girl.
• The supplement Mecha and Manga for the Mutants & Masterminds roleplaying game provides rules for playing anime-styled games, with tons of nods throughout to various existing anime and manga.
• In contrast to the Steam Punk aesthetic of the other WARMACHINE factions, the Retribution of Scyrah has a distinctly Magitek feel, with lots of flowing shapes, shining white surfaces, and glowing blue-green Tron Lines. Their myrmidons (the equivalent to other races' steamjacks) bear more than a passing resemblance to the mecha in The Vision of Escaflowne, and many of their characters have spiky hair dyed in bright colors.
• Munchkin Fu has a different illustrator than the other Munchkin games, and includes Animesque illustrations (though some are more woodblock-print styled instead). It also includes as one of the enemies a Big-Eyes Small Mouse, as a Shout-Out to Big Eyes, Small Mouth.

Toys

• The pets of Littlest Pet Shop have been redrawn as chibified critters; however the designs wandered out of "cute" and into "grotesque", with most of the Pets looking like jowely, baggy-eyed mutants trying to look cute. Case in point: this◊ drooped-joweled monstrosity.
• Bratz dolls certainly have an animesque look about them, and ran a series of dolls with a modern Japanese theme, sold as "Bratz Tokyo-A-Go-Go". The only anime character the Bratz really resemble is Mr. Anago◊, though if they were also voiced by Norio Wakamoto it would be awesome.
• LEGO:
  • LEGO Exo-Force was LEGO's take on this trope and the Humongous Mecha, replete with very exaggerated Shonen Hair, random kanji slapped everywhere, typical Japanese names, and a heavy dose of anime and mecha-genre tropes.
  • In the same vein, Ninjago focuses on Ninjas with a bit of mecha thrown in here and there, most notably the Samurai X mech and various Serpentine vehicles. It's a little more subtle about it in that it limits itself to Shonen Hair and kanji is few and far in between. The names also reflect a much larger variety, with only Kai, Nya and Misako being anywhere close to Japanese. It still uses a lot of anime cliches, such as magical weapons, power-up transformations, color-coded chosen warriors and the aforementioned Shonen Hair. It also mixes several other asian themes into it as well, most notably Sensei-Wu, who appears more Chinese than Japanese.
• Some Monster High merchandise depicts the characters in an anime style.
• The reboot of (Puppy/Kitty/etc) In My Pocket have an animesque style.
• Tech Deck finger skateboards have a line called Hook-ups◊, featuring animesque characters and even ones ripped right from actual series.
  • Hook-Ups has been an Animesque skateboard brand for at least a decade now, rip-offs and all.
• Some toy licenses pass through Japanese sculptors, gaining the traits of anime merchandise.
  • Most Transformers. While we create the concept drawings, Takara's side has to come up with the parts, their shapes, and how they ultimately interlock to make the transformations possible. It can lead to complaints when a robot mode "looks too much like a Gundam."
  • Yujin and Takara Tomy have produced Disney figurines in the style of countless anime mini-figure series. Put them side by side and they blend together.
  • Kotobukiya has done figures for several American licenses over the years including comics. While the faces remain American styled, the anatomy, detail, and composition often resemble anime PCV statues more than our own merchandise.
  • And then you have their Marvel and DC Bishoujo figures that intentionally evoke this trope, being based on Shunya Yamashita's illustrations. Some Marvel examples here.
• Very disturbingly, there was a toy being sold in a convenience store called "Evil Stick" that had animeesque art on it. I don't really wan't to talk about it so search it up, at your own discretion that is.
• DC's Ame-Comi Heroine figures. In contrast to Kaiyodo's Bishoujo line above, the series radically alters the characters' outfits and even gender bends a few male ones. How well they succeeded in capturing anime style depends on who you ask.
• Some of the later Squinkies have taken on an anime style; it's even noted on their official product page.
• The Spanish toyline Pinypon.
• A new toyline, Kawaii Crush draws an obvious inspiration from anime.
• My Little Pony G3 had more animesque character designs than previous incarnations of My Little Pony.
• Bandai Japan's Tamashii Nations line includes Combining Mecha re-imaginings of Mickey Mouse and friends◊, and two inter-compatible sets for the Toy◊ Story◊ gang.◊

Video Games

• Phantom Dust was made by Microsoft to sell in Asian countries, then ported back into America later. The theme, character design, and plot all mimic common Anime and Manga attributes. It was (un)surprisingly much more popular in America than in Japan.
• Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, an early FPS from Monolith (the first to use their Lith Tech technology actually), heavily influenced by mecha anime.
• The rather obscure PS1 beat em up Gekido: Urban Fighters is a partial example: while the characters are drawn in western comic book style, the storyline and aesthetic are evocative of late 80s and 90s cyberpunk anime.
• Also, the little-known Tsunami 2265, a third person shooter aboard mechas produced in Italy. The female lead looks a lot like Motoko Kusanagi.
• Oni is heavily influenced by Ghost in the Shell.
• FusionFall redesigns the Cartoon Network characters appearing in the game with an animesque look. Some are questionable, but others... definitely lack detractors, at any rate. (The redesigned Dexter seems to have a lot of female fans, for example.) The series even has a short, official prologue "manga". The site literally calls it a manga.
• Puzzle Quest also uses anime-like style for its characters.
• Both Pizza Frenzy and Burger Rush puzzle games (especially the latter) from Gamehouse.
• Drawn to Life. Despite all appearances, it had no Japanese involvement in development. 5th Cell seems to be an animesque company. Aside from Drawn to Life, they always made Lock's Quest and D.N.A., both pretty anime-like (Lock's Quest's cover◊, in particular, makes it hard to believe that it isn't a JRPG).
• Little Red Riding Hood's Zombie BBQ, a game from Spain! One of the main characters is from a Japanese folk tale (Momotaro).
• Shantae, a side-scroller for Game Boy Color made by the American developer WayForward Technologies. The first game's Commodore 64-esque soundtrack betrays its Western origins, though. Bonus points for hiring Japanese developer Inti Creates for Pirates' Curse and Half-Genie Hero.
  • BloodRayne: Betrayal, also made by WayForward, utilizes an anime-like artstyle.
• Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes
• In a less big-eyed and pretty way, Warframe uses aspects of anime depictions of ninja and samurai, such as katana-styled swords and other Eastern-style weapons, the speed and grace of swordfighting in anime, and psuedo-Japanese naming and music.
• The art in the various Artix Entertainment games (DragonFable, MechQuest, and the newer parts of AdventureQuest) is heavily anime-influenced, and they're absolutely full of anime Shout Outs if there was any doubt remaining. MechQuest is even about Humongous Mecha and has Expy versions of the EVA series. Pony vs. Pony: Battle is Magic, being an Affectionate Parody of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, qualifies out of principle.
• Taomee's browser game Flower Fairy is made in China, yet it has anime-like visuals as if it was made in Japan.
• The Chinese browser game developer Baitian Wang have incorporated anime-like visuals to their games.
• Spectrobes counts due to its dual nature of production, being jointly made by Jupiter and Buena Vista Games. From its main character being a Captain Ersatz of another certain red Badass Longcoat with a sword arm to having cutscenes rendered similar to another Jupiter game, The World Ends with You, it fits.

• The early Xbox RPG Sudeki, released during the peak of the early-00s anime craze in the West.
• Then there are American-licensed games handled by Japanese developers that would play the trope straight — familiar western characters now with clearly Japanese influence. Can be intentionally invoked in cover art to appeal to their local audience. Konami and Capcom have many classics under their belt that fall on either side.
  • Capcom has had a long relationship with Marvel characters in general, starting with the purely Marvel brawlers X-Men: Children of the Atom and Marvel Super Heroes, and the Beat 'em Up Marvel Super Heroes: War of the Gems. Aside from shouting attack names and using blatantly Japanese fighting game mechanics, the Marvel characters are generally faithful. Except the Sentinel, redesigned from a giant, muscled humanoid to a more mechanical look according to their tastes.
  • Alien vs. Predator (Capcom) had Predators delivering Shoryukens alongside a cyborg Arnold and ninja girl.
  • The two Dungeons & Dragons Arcade Games Tower of Doom and Shadow over Mystara. Having anime girls run through an official D&D campaign setting sounds like an instruction manual for angering fans. Instead the games are well-respected for being faithful to their staggering source material.
  • Once the graphics and sound allowed it, the Japanese influence behind Konami's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games became more obvious. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time had bosses like the Shredder that looked and moved like they should be in a Japanese fighting game. Tournament Fighters didn't even bother hiding the art style◊.
  • The X-Men arcade game seems perfectly American styled except a few goofy Engrish phrases. Until you used Wolverine and Colossus's mutant powers, anyway.
  • The only playable Back to the Future game until late 2010. It is an animesque oddity, but it dared to defy a common problem... in Japan.
  • The SNES and Turbo CD ports of western gaming archetype, Dungeon Master. Namely the added cinematics.
    • The Sega Saturn only sequel, Dungeon Master Nexus, kicked up both the realtime 3D and Animesque. Sadly it was never released outside Japan.
  • Ultima's NES ports by Pony Canyon, Exodus and Quest of the Avatar. The games were streamlined to be playable with NES controls, receiving menus and Super-Deformed sprites akin to old school JRPGs.
  • The Sega CD had a Shadowrun game by Compile with with anime style portraits and other JRPG elements.
• Shadow Warrior (pseudo-sequel to Duke Nukem 3D using the same engine) renders any female seen (either in person or as a picture) in such a style, despite the rest of the game being a sendup of wuxia, Jidai Geki, and Heroic Bloodshed Hong-Kong style blast-outs. It also well predates the anime craze in the US - in 1997. The 2013 reboot, in addition to bringing back said anime-girls, also has a much more anime feel to it in regards to its setting and story.
• One Must Fall 2097, a fighting game produced by Epic Games in 1994, well before anime had a large fan base in the US, had its characters drawn in this style.
• Zone 66 featured an quasi-anime intro.
• Death Rally has this, most notably with female drivers, while shades wearing male drivers (including Duke Nukem) are hardly animesque.
• Jak and Daxter, although the only noticeably "animesque" thing in it is the character design.
• Black Sigil, whose battle system has a very strong Chrono Trigger vibe to it. It's basically nostalgia fodder for SNES JRPGs.
• All of the cutscenes in Mirror's Edge are done in an animesque style.
• Crash Bandicoot:
  • All of the cutscenes in Crash: Mind Over Mutant are all done in a different art style and in the "Fists of Orange Fury" cutscene, it is very animesque.
  • The Trophy Girls in Crash Team Racing qualify to some extent, especially Megumi.
• Idolcraft is a Western freeware take on the same concept as The Idolmaster, where the main character attempts to manage the career of a number of Idol Singers.
• The Caverns Of Hammerfest contains a few animesque traits, what with the blurred-feet running animation for Igor and the little dance he might do after you idle — the latter being is a homage to Haré+Guu.
• X-Blades has a protagonist named Ayumi, and she is rendered in Animesque style. The game was created by russian game developer Gaijin Studios (Gaijin means 'foreigner' in japanese)
  • Its sequel, Blades of Time, jumps on current marketing fads and largely dumps the aesthetic, basically resembling a Tomb Raider game where a vaguely anime Lara Croft runs around with blonde twintails.
• Tecmo Super Bowl, an NES game, used anime-style cutscenes after big plays. The Attract Mode Animation gives a general flavor.
• OpenArena, mainly visible in its models and its attempt to steer away from the norm of grimdark, gritty first person shooters.
• Somewhat incongruously for a Western RPG, the elves in Dragon Age II have got an overhaul to look more like their Japanese counterparts, with long pointy ears, huge eyes, smoothed-out facial features and skinny bodies, including the token Anti-Hero companion.
• Asura's Wrath, with manga style recaps, and is episodic like an actual anime, Eyecatch's included. Critics even referred to it as an "Interactive Anime".
• X-COM: UFO Defense has an animesque intro and the background images for Base functions and the Hidden Movement screen retain the art style of the intro.
  • Spiritual successor Rebelstar: Tactical Command used the trope more fully, featuring anime-style character images and cut scenes.
• Apidya, with its Japanese-style intro scene, was produced by Kaiko, which was a German company despite its Japanese-sounding name and the large amount of Gratuitous Japanese text in their earlier Puzzle Game Gem'X.
• This trope is also present in the intro sequences of Turrican 2 and Turrican 3 for the Amiga. That is if you consider the the games themselves not to be this, as they were considered to be an excellent alternative to the (for Europeans back then) very expensive high-quality Japanese console and its games on the market.
• A few Western RPGs that were made in the seventh generation of console gaming have tried to look like JRPG's, such as Pier Solar and the Great Architects (a homebrew RPG by Watermelon, based on a western website community) and Rainbow Moon (a strategy RPG made by Side Quest Studios, a German developer of video games).
• Captain Morgane and the Golden Turtle, which also features chibi version of the characters during the mini-games.
• The game the white chamber is designed by a British indie group but features character designs that look heavily inspired by Japanese styles.
• The western-made, PC exclusive, RPG Septerra Core uses an anime-like artstyle modeled after late 90s JRPGs, particularly the PS1-era Final Fantasy games made by Squaresoft that were dominating the console RPG market at the time.
• The Wipeout series is Britain-developed, yet incorporates Japanese◊-influenced graphic art◊, courtesy of the Designer's Republic. The third game even has a mascot that is clearly based on cute mascot characters (bonus point for said mascot being voiced by a Japanese woman). Some entries even feature the usage of Katakana. (this is more to the original designers' handiwork, more on that on Other).
• Yandere Simulator was born out of a 4chan post picked up by a dedicated developer. A lot of people are surprised to find out that it's an American game with native English voice acting, albeit heavily based on a Japanese hentai genre, with extensive research put into Japanese cultural nuances not always apparent from anime.
• Carrie's Order Up! uses big eyes and a bright, colorful style that does an amazing job of recreating the look and feel of '90s Japanese arcade games.
• The True Final Boss in Undertale invokes this due to who the Final Boss is rather than trying to emulate anime style. The final boss, Asriel Dreemurr, had died when he was a child. When he, as Flowey, absorb all 6 human souls and the souls of every single monster, he regains his true form which looks like something that came from an anime. The psychedelic background, the music, and the name of his attacks (as well as Calling Your Attacks) just screams cliched JRPG, but it makes total sense for it to happen since Asriel is still a child at heart and most children think anime and comic books are darn cool.
• RWBY: Grimm Eclipse, being a side story to the web series mentioned below, looks a lot like a Japanese hack and slash game. So much so, apparently, that Sony put it into their "Straight From Japan" special category of the PlayStation Store.
• Iggy's Egg Adventure has a style clearly based on anime, particularly large eyes and "manga meat". However, the humans are portrayed in a more western style as opposed to the anime-styled dinosaurs and other animals.
• Wonder Boy Returns, produced by a South Korean company, has cute SD characters.
• _iCEY._ boasts an anime art style, and is made by a Chinese company.

Visual Novels

• Katawa Shoujo is a Western attempt at making a Japanese-style Visual Novel, complete with anime-style artwork. The art style is because the original art that inspired the game was Japanese. Some people saw a Japanese artist's drawings for a visual novel he'd like to see one day and decided to make it an actual visual novel. It succeeds at emulating Japanese anime/manga and Visual Novels so well that a good amount of fans were actually surprised to hear that it wasn’t made in Japan.
• Zig-zagged with don't take it personally babe, it just ain't your story. While it is a Western-made visual novel, its background CG art and character sprites are used ready-made from a Japanese designer that specifically makes them available for amateur visual novels. On the other hand, their AmieConnect avatar pictures and event CGs are drawn by a western artist in animesque style, but with still a heavy western feel. The transition is actually slightly jarring.
• Everlasting Summer was developed by Russians, was originally written in the Russian language, and is primarily set in the former Soviet Union. But both the gameplay and character design seem straight out of a Japanese visual novel.
• Missing Stars is an English language visual novel that has animesque character designs. It is a Spiritual Successor inspired by Katawa Shoujo set in a European school. The finalized art is a bit more western than the early concept art, however it is still animesque.
• NomnomNami's characters are usually drawn in a particular anime style. This style can be seen in Her Tears Were My Light.
• Extracurricular Activities is a Western novel where the facial expressions and gags are anime-influenced, as well as the novel borrowing from the Harem Genre where instead of cute girls, the love interests are hulking anthropomorphic men. In early 2018, the novel switched over to a new artist where the art direction became less animesque.
• We Know the Devil is another Western visual novel with character designs largely grounded in reality, but with clear anime influences. Most pronounced in the case of Venus, who has big round eyes.
• Doki Doki Literature Club! is a School Club Story with typical Japanese high school girl archetypes and a moe art style. It was developed by an American team lead by Dan Salvato, who is also a developer and pro player of Project M. Except it eventually becomes very creepy, but keeps the art style.

Web Animation

• Broken Saints: This was more notorious before the Animation Bump, with the first episodes being redone in a more realistic style. However, it still had some visual influence from anime.
• TOME, Terrain of Magical Expertise.
• RWBY is an interesting example of this, with everything about the series looking like a 2010s anime, complete with chibis and various animesque expressions... except that they're 3D animations, making them appear like a series made of cutscenes from a post-Oughts JRPG or a 3DCG show by Sanzigen Animation. It actually does a good job on turning those anime gimmicks 3D, and is able to mix in some Western animation tricks as well. Hilariously, when it was uploaded to Crunchyroll, some people started demanding for the "original" Japanese audio, apparently not realizing that English was the original language^note though it received a legit Japanese dub later on. While most of the cast placement and angles appears to be a mix of the Machinima style and soap operas, the fight scenes show Monty Oum's signature mix of anime and Kung Fu/Wuxia choreography norms with western martial arts. It apparently did a good enough job of keeping to Japanese tropes, as the series ended up getting official manga adaptations — one by Dogs: Bullets & Carnage artist Shirow Miwa, and another as a 4-volume anthology series.
• gen:LOCK, made by RWBY's creators, uses the same "3D animations that look like 2010's anime" schtick. However, the animation content is quite different; taking cues from Gundam, gen:LOCK is essentially a Western mecha anime with an All-Star Cast.
• Bee and Puppycat is very obviously inspired by shoujo anime both thematically and stylistically. Bee specifically is reminiscent of Usagi in that she is a Loser Protagonist and becomes a Magical Girl who fights in space after she meets a cat (dog... thing.) Character design falls short of just being anime altogether.
• Dreamscape: Anjren and Ahjeen are animesque in terms of expressions, oddly enough.
• The Machinimas Brawl Universe and Smash King tend to heavily lean on the side of Anime with how their episodes are filmed and edited, as they tend to use EyeCatchers, Japanese Opening/Ending themes as well as Cold Openings, and their action sequences do borrow from Anime with the Effects of White/Black spikes surrounding the screen if something dramatic happens, as well as sometimes using transformations in battles.

Web Comics

• Rational Nonsense is basically a mash-up of manga and newspaper comic art.
• '32 Kick-Up is a Fighting Series that combines Manga Effects with Inkblot Cartoon Style Funny Animals.
• City Of Trees draws clear inspiration from early-2000's anime and manga.
• Danger Zone One employs a visual style specifically drawn to appear like a manga.
• MegaTokyo is the archetypal example of this trope in the world of webcomics, even going so far as to take place in Tokyo and be a fantasy/dating sim storyline. The comic has become one gigantic deconstruction of just about every anime-sub-genre, complete with a disaffected Magical Girl who can't really use her powers the way she thinks a magical girl should (meaning, like Sailor Moon).
• Mechagical Girl Lisa ANT. Even though Ida Kirkegaard is Danish, the drawings are something like distorted manga-style drawings.
• The Noordegraaf Files hits this on the head, linking this trope's page on the comic's HOMEPAGE, and the creator has said in The Rant that it is drawn / colored in a Japanese paint program made for, you guessed it, making manga.
• As above, Mexican artist Kanela gives M9 Girls! a definite manga look, complete with chibi panels and manga annotations. The story itself is the Mad Science version of the Magical Girl trope.
• In Ronin Galaxy the cover art resembles anime, and the actual pages are made to look like a manga, despite being read from left to right.
• Powerpuff Girls Doujinshi, Grim Tales from Down Below, and Sugar Bits (created by Bleedman) are heavily influenced by anime, in their art and storytelling.
  • Invader Zim: Manifest Doom, another webcomic published by SNAFU Comics, has an animesque touch.
  • A lot of what SNAFU Comics puts out falls under this category.
• Mutant Ninja Turtles Gaiden, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan-comic, which has its human characters drawn in a manga style.
• Van Von Hunter, Sokora Refugees, and Red String are manga-inspired webcomics that were eventually published by major American manga companies (TokyoPop and Dark Horse). However, Sokora Refugees appears to have been taken off the 'net.
• Cat Nine from cat girls to it's relatively simplistic style. Seeing as it's based somewhere in the Philippines, you could say it's close enough.
• Chugworth Academy and Boss Noodle by Dave Cheung are definitely anime influenced, seeing as they are so risqué...
• No Need for Bushido parodies elements from anime/manga set in feudal era Japan.
• Clone Manga is a collective of Dan Kim's anime influenced webcomics, one of which is Nana's Everyday Life.
• Sodium Eyes takes notes of many anime clichés.
• Aki-chan's Life is purposefully modeled after Doujinshi, despite being obviously Western, to the point where all the panels are read right-to-left.
• Earthsong is a Fantasy Webcomic with manga inspiration.
• Unicorn Jelly and Pastel Defender Heliotrope have a unique but clearly SD take on its art.
• Another example would be Panty Brigade.
• L33tStr33t Boys is about a band based on a group of Otaku, done in anime style.
• Monsterful: A Slice Of Life Webcomic of a monster-only world that shows a moderate manga influence, but it's well balanced with western influences and completes the circle with multiple video-game and internet references from both Eastern and Western markets.
• The Beast Legion is very Anime/Manga inspired.
• Grey is... actually describes itself as a manga and reads from left to right even though its written in English.
• Project 0 is usually described as an American Manga. Written by a duo of brothers and takes a lot of the more cinematic and dynamic aspects of manga from a visual perspective, but not in terms of anime clichés and sweatdrops.
• Blue Sky counts as another.
• The Road to Eden
• Picatrix is another webcomic with a heavy manga influence.
• Misfile has a major manga-esque influence, with scarcely a strip going by without a super deform, chibi or the omnipresent egregious sweat drop making an appearance. Even Rumisiel's T-shirt gets one of those at one point.
• A Miracle of Science lampshaded its influences by citing them in The Rant and stealing their onomatopoeia.
• Tom Siddell, author and artist of Gunnerkrigg Court, cites the Gunnm and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind mangas as artistic influences, alongside Western comics like Hellboy and Tank Girl. He incorporates elements from all of them into his own art.
• Some anime-like designs are used for the Sluggy Freelance storyline "GOFOTRON Champion of the Cosmos", with Riff even describing one of the alien species they encounter as "blue, anime-looking people."
• Animesque style isn't reserved to English-language webcomics. Here's a popular French example: Maliki. With one strip directly referencing its many influences, several of them from anime.
• Gorgeous Princess Creamy Beamy is a parody of Magical Girl anime, and drawn in an anime-influenced style even though the author is American.
• Dominic Deegan's style has been described as being on the cheap end of animeshun.
• Collar 6 and its Spiritual Predeccessor Crimson Latex both fall well within this trope.
• Shadownova is drawn with a somewhat Animesque style. The author is heavily influenced by anime and manga.
• Demon Candy: Parallel is drawn in a Yonkoma fashion.
• Star Of Destiny's art style is heavily influenced by mange and anime. The comic is even read from right to left like manga, which the writer of it has deemed enough to label it a "webmanga".
• Galebound is influenced by anime and manga, although it is read from left to right. The character's expressions occasionally veer into animesque when properly flabbergasted.
• Angel Moxie is another webcomic heavily influenced by the Magical Girl genre, and using the Yonkoma format.
• Overlord of Ravenfell is stylistically influenced by older CLAMP manga and Yoko Matsushita, so definitely falls in this trope.
• Seekers
• As a comic written for an Anime news website, it was unavoidable that Anime News Nina was this.
• Heartcore. The author has listed Slayers as a major inspiration, and it most definetly shows.
• Rain. There's plenty of anime tropes, the author and the protagonist are otaku... not Japanese.
• Ghastly's Ghastly Comic gleefully parodies the Ecchi / Hentai genre, especially the tendency for absurd tentacle groping. The art style itself becomes more and more Animesque (and better-looking) along with Art Evolution.
• School of Mages is drawn in a manga style, and it is even read from right to left.
• The Lounge has considerable manga influence, both in artistic style as well as the art gags and tropes common to manga.
• Cross Heart is a manga, except it was written by a Spanish author, originally in Spanish and English, and published for free on DeviantArt.
• 9th Elsewhere has some anime influence, probably because one of the authors lived in Japan for a time while working on it.
• Closed Gate: Heavily relies on manga-influenced artwork, although the cast consists mainly of anthropomorphized characters.
• Roommates and its SpinOffs Girls Next Door and Down the Street (the latter to a lesser extent) have a lot of manga influences. Still. Although the Art Evolution of the first two seem to slowly diverge from this style. In defferent directions: Roommates gets more and more realistic, while GND slowly shifts towards the style of franco-belgian comics.
• Bedlam Genesis is done in this style.
• Claude & Monet has a heavy manga influence.
• Ten is a German webcomic written in English and is made to read right to left.
• Spinnerette has a heavily manga-influenced style.
• Zos Kias is one of those American manga series that reads right to left.
• Sandra and Woo is a mixture of this and western comic stylizations.
• Likewise Terra, which leans more heavily on the Western influences but uses animesque faces (particularly on the women).
• Alien Hand Syndrome has detailed black and white (sometimes color) Manga-style artwork, complete with coarse half-tone screening, but reads from left to right.
• Rusty and Co., besides the parody mentionned below, grew into this style with its Art Evolution, especially in the design of female characters.
• Harpy Gee uses a rather cute version of this.
• Isaac of Paranatural frequently dips into this, highlighted by his allegedly natural spiky hair and brooding, dramatic personality. It's made much funnier by the fact that only this one character is ever drawn with anime eyes or floating sparkles. The other characters (mostly Max) react accordingly. The readers do as well; Isaac doing things such as turning dramatically, or walking with his eyes closed and a smile while light shines on him from no apparent source spawns comments such as, "Isaac is being awfully anime today. He should probably get that looked at."
• Hand Command is an Arabic comic drawn manga-style and published on the web (in Arabic & English).
• The Dreamcatchers Masquerade uses an anime-influenced art and animation style.
• Tove is a full color webcomic that often borrows elements of Japanese animation, particularly when a shocked Tove is drawn Chibi style.
• Coga Nito: The comic's overall style is manga-like, particularly in the character designs.
• Starting from Iron Violet The Shy Titan's second issue onwards, it featured many typical anime-styled art tropes, like face faults and chibis. The huge detailed eyes is also massively anime.
• Princess Chroma: a Deconstructive Parody of Magical Girl stories.
• Webcomic/Consolers features many characters drawn in an anime-ish style, and often uses Japanese Visual Arts Tropes.
• Slightly Damned is very anime inspired. Not only are characters drawn in anime style, but the comic also uses a lot of Manga Effects and has several anime and Japanese video game Shout Outs. The appearance of demons, dragons, other fantasy creatures in Slightly Damned seem to be heavily pokemon inspired, as the creator draws a lot of pokemon Fan-Art.
• Lily Love isn't Japanese, but Thai. However, it takes several aspects from Yuri Genre manga, such as the artstyle and chibis.
• Korean Webtoons are often in an animesque style, though they usually avoid Anime Hair and unnatural hair colors. This often causes people to mistake series like The Friendly Winter or Nineteen, Twenty-One as Japanese.
• Their Story is often mistaken for being Japanese or Korean. It's a Chinese webcomic.
• El Goonish Shive 's visual style has always been anime-inspired, and grown more so over time. The series leans heavily on anime tropes as well, both for humor and as serious plot points. Notably, it is explicitly mentioned several times that blue, purple, pink, green, etc. are common natural Hair Colors in The 'Verse.
• Shotgun Shuffle has Cross-Popping Veins, nose vanishing, sweat drops and many other anime tropes.
• Beloved is a Chinese webcomic but has been mistaken for a Yuri Genre manga (or manhwa) due to its art-style.
• Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki looks so much like it came from Japan, that it could possibly sell well if it were a published manga there.
• Devil's Candy mixes manga-esque art with typical Western settings. Fitting, since the duo behind the series were veterans in the OEL Manga scene and even got a one-shot of theirs published in Shonen Jump.
• Beyond Bloom is a OEL Manga-type webcomic. Characters are drawn with a heavy manga influence mixed with a more western styled roundness.
• Sleepless Domain uses a western art-style but it is an anime-inspired webcomic involving Magical Girls.
• Crystal Heroes has a somewhat 70s/80s shoujo art style to it as well as using several manga visual tropes.
• Nightvee: Characters have large eyes and often make anime expressions.

Web Original

• Keit-Ai features animesque art in the webcomic version. Meanwhile, the fanfic and original fiction also feature mostly Japanese characters and setting. This is to be expected of a series that originated from 4chan.
• Certain Neopets look suspiciously like Pokémon, the PetPets even more so.
• Despite being a text-based Shared Universe serial, Whateley Universe frequently applies anime tropes, often lampshading or deconstructing them but just as often playing them straight.
• Along with having a manga style cover, the superhero web serial novel Gamer Girl is bursting with anime tropes, from manga-like facial expressions, to long, Shonen-esque fights, to wacky gag anime-style comedy.

Parodies

Comic Books

• The Ghost Rider villain Skinbender. Er... not for the faint of heart.
• French comic Sentai School is a spoof of many Japanese series (either anime or live-action, and mostly from the '80s) well-known in France.
• Issue 14 of Bart Simpson's Treehouse of Horror features "Murder, He Wrote", a parody of Death Note drawn in a manga style.
• Scott Pilgrim series bears some artistic and formatting similarities to manga style, but its short parody deserves special mention. Volume 4, "Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together", ends with a reading guide as one would find in a right-to-left book. "STOP. This is the BACK of the book. What do you think you're doing?"

Fan Works

• It isn't uncommon for fan-artists fond of the Animesque style to use it even when depicting non-Japanese series.
  • Here's an example that work surprisingly well despite the extreme Art Shift: The Order of the Stick Manga Style. (Note that the fan-artist is Chinese.)
  • Another good example: Tiffany Aching if The Wee Free Men was directed by Hayao Miyazaki.
  • South Park not only parodies Anime often, but the Japanese fanbase (or those who are just fans of Japanese anime) often portray the characters as such in fanart and fanfiction, which doesn't please other parts of the fandom. Some of these artworks were actually shown in the episode "Tweek x Craig".
  • The Japanese fanbase of Happy Tree Friends also does this, although it isn't as common that people bash it.
• Zany To The Max
  • Of the seven members of the Kat Krew, five are drawn this way. The other two are Drake the Duck and Narf the Mouse.
  • The newest member of the Warner family is Sikko Warner (Pakko, Makko, and Jot's sister), who is drawn this way as well.
  • Other characters drawn this way are Sekoila Zarner and Wacka and Wakka MaRakka.
  • In fact, Zany to the Max even features a fictional country known as Animenia, where almost all the characters are drawn this way. Since Yakko isn't drawn this way, it is unknown how he became the temporary king of Animenia in one episode.
• Animenia is also featured in this author's Homestar Runner fanstuff (which is known as The Homestar Runner Show). The character of Slipstar Runner was created by Homeschool Winner when he visited Animenia with Homestripe and Coach B. In fact, it is revealed that Homestripe's parents are the king and queen of Animenia.
• A Mr. Men fan series by the same author (called The Mr. Men and Little Miss Show) has Little Miss Slippery, who is drawn this way as well. Later on, Little Miss Wacky and Little Miss Camouflage, who are also drawn this way, were added into the series. In all the fan series by this author, the style is referred to as "Animeniesque", which is pronounced similar to (and is possibly also a reference to) Animaniacs.

Films — Animation

• Manga, anime, and bad dubbing are affectionately parodied in the 2008 animated adaptation of Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who! while Horton, an elephant, imagines he's a heroic ninja (the result looks a lot like Teen Titans).

Films — Live-Action

• Spoofed in the movie Super Troopers with the really cheap-looking "Afghanistanimation" cartoons produced by the Taliban.
• Most Fruitful Yuki, a Show Within a Show in the movie Juno.

Live-Action TV

• Episode 1 of The Hard Times of RJ Berger has an animated flashback in which Natsumi is drawn in anime form and talks in Japanese (with English subtitles).

Video Games

• Princess Robot Bubblegum, the name of the fictitious anime show in Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony, which parodies Japanese Media Tropes (especially Shônen and Shôjo clichés).
• Guitar Hero III depicts Japanese fangirls this way. Also subverted in that the rest of the cutscenes are a mix between this and Western-style.

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner's 20X6, featuring anime versions of the main cast, like Strong Bad as Stinkoman and Homestar as Stinkoman's sidekick 1-Up.
• Angelicate Avenue, by Alli Kat Nya.
• Girlchan in Paradise!!, by Egoraptor.
• Nyan~ Neko Sugar Girls might be an example.
• Many of the early BIONICLE web animations had shades of this. The character models were very faithful to the sets, but they would occasionally include things like Sweat Drops, Blush Stickers, and stylized motion-blur backgrounds for action sequences.
• An The Annoying Orange episode is an Affectionate Parody of Pokémon.
• Japanoschlampen ("Japano-Sluts"), a series spoofing anime tropes and other things, by the German Youtuber Coldmirror.

Web Comics

• Unwinder's Tall Comics features a Show Within a Show, Tokyo Delta Jetlag D, an Affectionate Parody of widgety shonen series, and of bad fansubs.
• Ghastly's Ghastly Comic, besides being wholy animesque itself, features a Hentai parody of Scooby-Doo.
  "Man! Is there anything the Japanese don't know how to make better?"
• Another non-english example is Raruto, a Naruto spoof webdoujin that originated in Spanish.
• One panel of Rusty and Co. go this route thanks to a Belt of Genre Changing.
• Kong Tower features Aya, who due to the Superpowerful Genetics of her Toon Physics father and Japanese Shinto-based magic using Samurai mother, is drawn in an Anime style in comparison to the other characters, who can see the differences. Various notable aspects of the style are Lampshaded

Web Original

• Trope-tan, that Moe Anthropomorphism of some page or another.
• Though a podcast with little physical visuals to work with Kakos Industries manages to be influence by anime by having an episode dedicated to being an Affectionate Parody of hentai and the Humongous Mecha genre. Listen to "Kawaii" to follow the exploits of The Giant-Ass-Japanese-Schoolgirl-That's-Kawaii-As-Fuck-Yo.

Western Animation

• Perfect Hair Forever: An unavoidable consequence, of course, of being a Shōnen anime parody, complete with non sequitur fanservice. Taking it a step further than that, [adult swim] even once aired it done up like an old-style VHS (and low-quality) Fansub for the April Fools' Day weekend.
• Robot Chicken: A puppet Stop Motion & Sketch Comedy that satirizes many Japanese Anime shows such as Sailor Moon, Pokémon, Voltron, AKIRA, Speed Racer, Dragon Ball Z, InuYasha, Shokushu Goukan, Japanese Hentai, Ranma ½, and Final Fantasy, plus American cartoons such as Teen Titans.
• Cow and Chicken: the Japanese in this Got Milk ad.
• Before they were unceremoniously canceled, the last episode of Clerks: The Animated Series ended with a direct parody of out-sourced animation in general, poking fun at Korean animation studios. Any story this episode had was completely tossed out the window.
• South Park gleefully subverts this trope on a handful of occasions.
  • Most notably, "Good Times with Weapons", where the boys acquire ninja weapons and subsequently get a massive art upgrade into Street Fighter-esque badassery. (The song "Let's Fighting Love" is more or less about how the song makes no sense, especially the Gratuitous English parts.)
  • And "Chinpokomon", in which the boys' craze over a Pokémon-style hobby turns their eyes into arches when they smile and causes them to spout Japanese gibberish with glee. Bonus points: The creators speak Japanese so it really is gibberish.
  • "A Song of Ass and Fire" and "Titties and Dragons" has Kenny turning into a Magical Girl, Princess Kenny.
• Johnny Bravo once had Johnny watching "Clam League 9000", a spoof of Pokémon with a hint of Dragon Ball Z.
• ReBoot presented a game that simultaneously spoofed both Dragon Ball Z and Pokémon — at the same time.
• One of the several The Fairly OddParents! made-for-TV movies has Timmy and Vicky surfing through the dimension of television with magical remotes, creating parodies of numerous classical cartoons, two of which for anime. The first is for Speed Racer's often-joked fast voice acting in the dub. The second is another Dragon Ball Z spoof with a show titled Maho Mushi, portraying a (to Americans) violent fighting tournament and a multitude of beam attacks, and Vicky was dressed like Piccolo. At one point, Cosmo accidentally blasts two holes into sides of the arena. (At least he wasn't Majin...) Though the remote controlled giant mecha were still out of place.
• Johnny Test parodied both the Pokémon anime and games a few times. The parodies were actually surprisingly accurate, including such aspects as evolution by happiness.
• Dexter's Laboratory
  • The series is rather Animesque on its own, but that didn't stop it from doing a complete and full parody of Speed Racer — right down to the style, plot line and Motor Mouth dialogue. Except DeeDee, who didn't get the joke and was animated (largely) normally.
  • In the first series finale, "Last But Not Beast", the students at the Japanese school Dexter transfers to own a mecha. Also, the teacher there had pink hair and blue eyes.
  • In a revived season episode, the villain Hukouchou looks like an evil bishounen. Long hair, icy blue eyes, pointy ears, and so on.
• The Phineas and Ferb special, "Summer Belongs to You", had a short musical segement that took place in Japan and caused all the characters to turn into some strange-looking anime style all while doing a parody of Caramelldansen. The singers were in Sailor Fuku too.
• The animated MAD has a segment called "Grey's in Anime".
• In "Batman's Strangest Cases", an episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold, one segment is an Affectionate Parody of the '60s Batman manga by Jiro Kuwata. The sequence is in sepia tones, has extremely limited animation and out-of-synch "English dubbing", and is a gentle jab at '60s anime like Gigantor.
• The Simpsons
  • Miisutaa Supakaaru (Mr. Sparkle), the Japanese Homer Simpson. He's actually an amalgation of two Japanese companies whose logos are a fish and a lightbulb, respectively.
  • In "Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo," there is a Japanese program called "Battling Seizure Robots," which parodies the infamous episode of Pokémon which caused seizures in nearly 700 people.
  • In "HOMR", the family goes to an animation convention, and Bart and Lisa watch a parody of Fist of the North Star and Battle of the Planets.
  • In "Bart Vs. Lisa Vs. The Third Grade", Pikachu appears to Bart in a satellite TV-induced hallucination when he tries to take a standardized test.
  • The couch gags of "Tis' The Fifteenth Season" and "Fraudcast News" feature the family dressed as several anime and Japanese media characters. Homer is Ultraman, Bart is Astro Boy, Lisa is Sailor Moon, Maggie is Pikachu, and Marge is Jun the Swan from Science Ninja Team Gatchaman.
  • In "Postcards from the Wedge", Bart watches an accurate parody of Pokémon when trying to do his homework, and lampshades both series' long runner status by wondering "how it managed to stay so fresh". Bonus points for the parody depicting Ash in his Diamond and Pearl attire, as the series was in the Diamond and Pearl arc at the time of the episode's first airing.
• This concept was parodied twice in Garfield and Friends first in "Invasion of the Big Robots" where Garfield winds up in a Voltron-esque show, and in "The Clash of the Titans" where Garfield and Odie team up with the X-Men expies The Power Squad.
• Regular Show: The episode "Brain Eraser" has Mordecai and Rigby rent a videotape of an anime series known as "Planet Starlight Chasers Excellent", which is a parody of many anime series that were popular in The '80s and The '90s. It fits in with the Retro Universe of the show itself, having blinding fight scenes and a Gratuitous Japanese theme song. The video store owner (voiced by Roger Craig Smith, who has done voices for many anime) confesses to watching it "all day, every day."
  • The episode "Brilliant Century Duck Crisis Special" is a huge homage to the Humongous Mecha genre, complete with a Shot-for-Shot Remake of the opening to Neon Genesis Evangelion.
• The recursive "American cartoon with Japanese-outsourced animation that disguises itself as American" style that was endemic in the '80s (see the "Animation-USA" tab in the "Straight Examples" section) was parodied in the Amazing World of Gumball episode "The Sweaters", which featured a high school and a couple of characters drawn entirely in this style. They even have a more washed-out color scheme as if they were ripped straight from an old VHS tape.
  • The flashback sequence in "The Fury" is done in a Dragonball style, while fight sequence in the same episode is done in an Animesque style.
• Major Lazer uses a style that makes it look as if it were an American cartoon from the '80s co-produced by Toei.
• The final episode of the sixth Futurama season features three stories animated in a different style, including anime.
• The The Angry Beavers episode Pass it On! has the brothers and their friends telling parts of a campfire story, each an affectionate parody of some genre of fiction. Treeflower's portion is anime in both visual style and narrative.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: at one point in "My Peeps", Billy gets eyestrain, and Grim uses his magic to fix Billy's eyes, accidentally giving the boy precognitive powers. Grim ends up repeatedly altering Billy's sight in an effort to fix things, demonstrated by point-of-view shots through Billy's eyes as the art shifted through several different styles including an Animesque one.

Inversions

Several Japanese series have inverted this trope by going for a western look. Since American cartoons generally require several times the production money for their higher frame rates, there are limiting factors that keep it to surface aesthetics rather than the actual motion. The limits are easier to get around in comics and video games. If they use English, expect it to be about as good as our Japanese. Also Inverted by Japanese video games in their art style and other choices. Outside the country, some like to call them "Japanese Animation" or "Japanese Comics" to differentiate series with no "anime" traits.

General

• The character designs of Japanese artist Susumu Matsushita (best known in the US for his work in Maximo: Ghosts to Glory) tend to be very Western-looking, with round eyes and cartoony proportions.
• Pick almost any illustration produced by Gurihiru Studios from Japan. Chances are, it'll look like something out of a Pixar film.^note They have been commissioned for design on some of Disney's 3D output, most notably their work on Big Hero 6. They were the character designers of Sonic Unleashed, which is why the human characters of said game had such a western look to them.
• Shigeru Mizuki. Generally, his artstyle is more cartoony/surreal than anything else.
• Fujiko Fujio's art (both together and apart as Fujiko F and Fujiko A) tends to retain the exaggerated features, clean lines, and button-nose cuteness of western children's cartoons. This even extends to works aimed at the adult crowd (such as Laughing Salesman), but they're still seen as one of the landmark examples of manga's influence on Japan.

Anime & Manga

• The 70s and 80s saw many mangas inspired by contemporary American and European media, some even set in America. Space Adventure Cobra is like Barbarella meets Eagle Land, and Mad Bull 34 is Eagle Land incarnate.
• Given its nature as a multi-vignette show for a young audience, Folktales From Japan features a wide variety of animation designs, most of which cartoony in nature and several in particular rather western. Very rarely does it actually look like anime.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is heavily influenced by American comics.
• While not specifically western (indeed, it more closely resembles Chinese/Korean animation in aesthetics), Arashi no Yoru ni is still much closer to your average western animated feature than traditional anime.
• Bambi and Her Pink Gun is so visually influenced by the aesthetics of American comics that only the onomatopoeia give it away as an original Japanese creation.
• The art style of Studio Ghibli films are heavily influenced by French animated films. Heck,one of their films is a French Coproduction. Conversely, My Neighbor Totoro and Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea take more influence from American animated films rather than French animated Films.
• The Big O is the result of Japanese animators involved with Batman: The Animated Series running with the influence. Look for the Batmobile in the backgrounds.
• The first ending sequence to the 2003 anime version of Fullmetal Alchemist is done in Mike Mignola's style.
• Hiroyuki Imaishi's projects tend to have this reputation.
  • Zig-Zagged with Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt. It takes most of its art style from animesque Western animation (looking a lot like The Powerpuff Girls). One episode parodying Transformers goes maximum '80s.
  • Dead Leaves borrows some exaggerated faces, angular hard-line animation, and violence from Western cartoons.
  • Space Patrol Luluco carries much of the same spirit of Panty & Stocking, including humor that wouldn't look out of place on Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon.
• King of Bandit Jing, especially the second manga series.
• The original Lupin III manga by Monkey Punch was heavily influenced by MAD, and the art style definitely shows. The subsequent anime adaptations... not so much. They're not significantly more western-like than most other anime products.
• One Piece. The deformations of faces pushed to the limits Looney Tunes-style are probably the most prominent factor. Not to mention Luffy's powers, which are like something taken out of a Tex Avery cartoon. It's even been speculated that its lack of similarity to the archetypal style of anime is a factor in why it hasn't caught on outside of Japan.
• Fairy Tail has a similar art style to One Piece but then that would be a case of an anime imitating a western-influenced anime. Thanks to Art Evolution, Fairy Tail started being drawn in a style that leans much closer to the "traditional" manga/anime style. It still has some similarities to One Piece's style, but those aren't as hugely noteworthy as they used to be.
• Soul Eater looks like the unholy child of anime and Tim Burton.
• Super Milk Chan
• Tiger & Bunny is made to resemble Western comic books and superhero shows.
• Trigun's designs and especially manga incarnation are heavily influenced by McFarlane.
• ∀ Gundam's mechanical designs by Syd Mead.
• Usavich
• Obscure series Montana Jones resembles a series from The Disney Afternoon such as Adventures of the Gummi Bears, TaleSpin, or Timon & Pumbaa.
• Cowboy Bebop draws on influences from a variety of genres, many of them quite western (including The Western, appropriately enough), down to featuring one setting that is basically Planet Blaxploitation.
• Baby Felix was produced by a Japanese studio with input from current Felix the Cat owner Don Oriolo, and is anime trying (and often failing) to look like Western Animation.
• The character designs from Zoobles seem to be at least slightly influenced by stuff like My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and Littlest Pet Shop (2012), which themselves are very animesque.
• Many of Nippon Animation's works, like World Masterpiece Theater and Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics are drawn in a way that's more reminescent of Western Animation than Anime. The same applies for Around the World with Willy Fog and Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds, though both were co-produced with a Spanish animation studio.
• La Quinta Camera, faces in particular.
• My Hero Academia takes a lot of inspiration from American superhero comics. All-Might in his hero-mode especially looks like someone straight out of The Silver Age of Comic Books.
• The Osamu Tezuka short "Legend of the Forest" uses several different Western Animation styles as the decades pass, first a Winsor McCay style, then a 1930's rubber hose cartoon, a Fleischer Bros/Looney Tunes style, a Disney-esque style, a Fleischer Bros Superman style, and finally a UPA style.
• Dawn of the Seeker, which was an actual Japanese animated movie commissioned and written by an American video game studio, producing a very Western-looking anime.
• Kodomomuke anime have very simplified art styles to the point where some would get mistaken for western children's cartoons due to lack of "telltale" anime traits. Many of them are adapted from Japanese children's books, which generally tend to be of the same art styles that can be found in the west.
• Anpanman, one of the faces of anime, is about as round and cartoony as any of the kids' shows run in the late 80s early 90s. This partially has to do with it being adapted from the similarly-cartoony book series, see above.
• The long-running series Sazae-san takes many cues from Western newspaper comics, in part due to its beginnings as a newspaper strip in the 1940s— just around the time western cartoons and comics started coming ashore.

Video Games

• Several Nintendo franchises have a very Western feel and design to them:
  • For instance, the Super Mario Bros. series looks like it is firmly planted in the roots of the The Golden Age of Animation in terms of design. The main characters are plumbers with large noses and moustaches who speak with a heavy Italian accent; the use of anime tropes in the series is rather rare aside from subtle graphical elements; and the minimal audible spoken dialogue by any of the characters (in any language) is in English. Some characters take it further, Princess Daisy's dialogue in particular borrows from many different American English dialects and accents, like Valleyspeak, Southern Dixie and even Ebonics, and Wario and Waluigi are inspired by a classic American character archetype. That said, there are plenty of Japanese influences too, mainly in the form of call backs to the culture and mythology (Usually in the form of Power ups like Raccoon/Tanooki Mario and Cat Mario), and the female characters like Princess Peach are a bit more "anime" than the male characters, and come across as a blend of western and eastern character designs, particularly in 2D art for games like the Mario & Luigi series or Super Princess Peach.
  • The Legend of Zelda takes cues from many western fantasy novels and movies; with key influences being the legend of King Arthur and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. However, Japanese influence became more apparent in games following The Wind Waker. They still hold many western influences and Twilight Princess was specifically based on Wild West stories. Breath Of The Wild firmly returns the series to its Western Influence.
  • Metroid has always aimed for an American comic book look with the atmosphere from Hollywood sci-fi, though several games post-Fusion showed more Japanese influence.
  • F-Zero takes place in a comic book future. Captain Falcon himself being an homage.
  • Star Fox takes cues from Western cartoon animals and space operas. The fuzzy puppets featured in art for the first game and the puppet like mouth face flapping for dialogue in Star Fox 64 was designed to invoke Thunderbirds though nowadays it just looks like it was animated that way due to console limitations.
  • While it firmly belongs to the JRPG genre (being a partial parody of it), the EarthBound series is also heavily influenced by old-school sci-fi, newspaper comics, and other Western media.
  • Splatoon is what would happen if you asked Nintendo to take everything that made 1990s Nickelodeon what it was, and design it into a game.
  • Kirby stars a round pink creature with large red feet, and the scenery and characters are clearly reminiscent of cartoons such as The Smurfs. Even the main antagonist is a fat penguin in a Santa Claus-like outfit, and enemies include orange creatures wearing chef hats and wielding frying pans and large beetle-like insects with gloves and sneakers. Played straight with the anime Kirby: Right Back at Ya!, which definitely looks like an anime.
  • Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. features several characters and references from western literature and folklore. Just throw in Abraham Lincoln, some Type 1 Eagleland, a Steam Punk setting, a Silver Age comic aesthetic, a Framing Device where cutscenes are played out in the panels of a comic book, and as if those elements weren't enough, a campy anthem as its theme song, you'll have a Japanese-developed game that is very, very Western.
  • ARMS has an art style heavily influenced by American superhero comics.
  • StarTropics and its sequel Zoda's Revenge don't hide their American influence at all, in fact, the games are so blatantly Western that the developers even went out of their way to make many references to American history and pop culture. The protagonist, Mike Jones, was named after the most common American names at the time (1990). Star Tropics' very western design was practically intended by Nintendo, as the Star Tropics games were designed to capitalize on the Western markets, and were not released in Japan.
  • The Punch-Out!! games are extremely cartoony with over-the-top cartoon caricatures of international stereotypes. The games also draw heavy influence from many Western boxing films like the Rocky series and Raging Bull.
  • Despite only being released (in its original form at least) in Japan, Panel de Pon has an artstyle and themes that are highly influenced from Western Children's High Fantasy series like Rainbow Brite and My Little Pony.
  • While the rest of the series belongs strictly on the home front, WarioWare Gold inverts the artstyle from its predecessors, resembling more a Cartoon Network effort than a production from Japan.
• Similarly, several of SEGA's IPs also take influence from western animation and culture.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog is the most blatant example, done deliberately so to appeal to the Western market. The Funny Animal characters are designed in Inkblot Cartoon Style (with a mix of anime in the Modern incarnation), an emphasis on techno, rap, and rock for a lot of the music throughout the series, and the general "attitude" was to appeal to the "rebellious" nature commonly associated with countries like the United States.
  • Streets of Rage is about ex-cops hunting down crime boss Mr. X and freeing the city from his wrath, while beating up hoards of enemies along the way. This all backed up by a soundtrack influenced by rave techno.
  • Golden Axe in general is influenced by classic fantasy medieval europe, however it's also influenced by the Conan the Barbarian films.
  • Alien Syndrome was influenced by the Alien films, to the point where a Xenomorph expy appears as one of the enemies.
  • Clockwork Knight is about a Living Toy soldier named Sir Tongara de Pepperouchau III rescuing the princess Chelsea. It uses a digitized art style comparable to popular western made games during the era like Donkey Kong Country and Mortal Kombat, and the soundtrack emphasizes genres like jazz and ragtime.
  • The artstyle for Panzer Dragoon was partially influenced by the works of French artist Jean Giraud (aka Moebius).
  • House of the Dead is basically one big Affectionate Parody of So Bad, It's Good B-grade horror movies, complete with intentionally narm-ridden dialogue and voice acting.
  • NiGHTS into Dreams... was partially influenced by European cultures and theater, with the Cirque du Soleil show Mystère being a specific influence. The sequel NiGHTS Journey of Dreams takes it a step further by introducing a fictional version of London called Bellbridge and having a cast of British voice actors.
  • Samba de Amigo has a strong Mexican/Latin influence, right down to a good number of the songs being licensed Latin genre music.
• Go Go Hyper Grind is a Japanese-developed skateboarding game with American character designs by John Kricfalusi and Spumco, no less! The gameplay also features many Western cartoon cliches such as Wild Takes, Stuff Blowing Up, and characters losing their heads.
• Viewtiful Joe is an Affectionate Parody of both comic book superheroes and Tokusatsu.
• Capcom's old mascot Captain Commando is likewise an Affectionate Parody of American superheroes. The company has long walked a middle ground between styles, taking it to a natural conclusion.
• Darkstalkers and its crazy cartoon violence. It looked and moved more like a cartoon than the actual American TV show.
• StreetFighter takes inspiration from American cartoons in many ways. The original Street Fighter had an art style reminiscent of 60s action cartoons. Street fighter 2 continued this with an art style similar to 80s saturday morning cartoons.
• PaRappa the Rapper and its spinoff Um Jammer Lammy. Makes sense, as the series artist, Rodney Greenblat, is actually American.
• No More Heroes and its sequel sport a mix of cel-shading and realism with western-style character designs and names. Both games do make multiple references to anime media, though.
• The main character in Professor Layton, as well as many secondary ones, are designed in a classic French style, though other characters are designed in anime fashion.
• The character design of Sora that Tetsuya Nomura created for the Timeless River world (based off the cartoon short Steamboat Willie and other shorts during the 1930s) in Kingdom Hearts II, which makes him resemble a cartoon character from The Silent Age of Animation (Rubber Hose Limbs and all). Just look◊ at him◊.
• The Monster Hunter series is known for this, which is ironic since the games are still more popular in Japan than in the West.
• The Metal Gear series takes its influence from American Hollywood action films such as: Escape from New York, Blade Runner, and other various Western media.
• The Castlevania series is obviously influenced and centered around the lore of Dracula and set in Gothic European settings. Most of if not all of the characters are English and Japanese influence is extremely rare outside of visual effects and artstyle, with few exceptions like Rondo of Blood and Portrait of Ruin.
• For the Frog the Bell Tolls draws heavy inspiration from European fairy tales.
• The arcade baseball game M.V.P., which was made by Sega, used a Franco-Belgian art style for its character design.
• Metal Slug has a style very reminiscent of American cartoons
• DNA Dark Native Apostle looks like something out of The Dark Age of Comic Books.
• Dark Souls contains many elements typical of Western games such as Real Is Brown visuals, free-roaming gameplay, character customization, and minimalist story presentation. This, combined with the series debuting at a time when most Japanese games weren't getting much mainstream attention in the West, leads many people to be surprised when they find out about the series' Japanese origins.
• Metamorphic Force may be the only Japanese-developed Beat 'em Up to look like a Western cartoon or fantasy comic yet not be based on one.
• Light Crusader looks much more like a European Amiga game than any of Treasure's other Sega Genesis efforts. The Progressive Rock motifs help confirm this impression.

Web Animation

• The art of Inferno Cop seems to be heavily influenced by American comic books.

---