Anime Mania ─ How to Draw Characters for Japanese Animation

There’s no doubt about it: Japanese animation is hot. Television shows, films, and videos featuring the anime style of animation are wildly popular. Japanese animation is like a comic book come to life, retaining all its power but in moving form. It has a very different style from traditional western animation, incorporating heavy shading, dramatic camera angles, and beautifully rendered special effects—especially the fantastic anime depictions of ocean waves, storms, smoke, and explosions. Easier to draw than its western counterpart, anime is more limited and simpler in its execution. In Japanese anime the characters move, but their movements are generally staccato, sharp, and dramatic—not free-flowing with lots of overlapping action, anticipation, and follow-through.

In Anime Mania, famous cartoonist, teacher, and best-selling author Christopher Hart demonstrates how any comic book artist can become expert in this wonderful style of animation. Step by step, he details how to draw the coolest anime characters from the widest selection of popular styles: high-tech cyberpunks who live in the world of the future; teen characters—with troubled relationships at school, home, and on the street; and mighty monsters, fantasy warriors, and giant robots. Aspiring animators will also find chapters on anime’s spectacular special effects, the role of storyboarding in anime, sketching and the art of character design, and a mini-crash course in perspective. The book concludes with interviews with Scott Frazier, an American anime director working in Japan, and Mahiro Meada, a renowned Japanese animation director.

Brimming with hundreds of spectacular examples, illustrations, and step-by-step exercises, Anime Mania details how anyone can become a real anime artist without having to reinvent the art of drawing.

Cartoonist and teacher Christopher Hart is Watson-Guptill’s top-selling author with a track record of phenomenal sales of more than a million copies. He lives in Westport, Connecticut.