I haven't been exposed to much anime prior to Monday's class. My main experience was with Sailor Moon when I was a kid. My cousins always watched it but I never really liked it that much.
One of the things I found interesting about it was that even though it is a Japanese style of animation it didn't appear to reflect Japanese.
A lot of the characters in anime are white. This surprised me because it is Japanese animation. I would have thought that Japanese animators would draw characters that reflected themselves. In Sailor Moon, for example, Sailor Moon is blonde and blue eyed. She has another blonde friend, a red head, and two with blue black hair. None of them appear to have any Asian descent in them.
Another characteristic that made all of the characters seem like they were Caucasian is many anime characters have really big eyes. Traditional Asian characteristics have smaller almond shape eyes. I would have liked to see more diversity in animation and I would expect Anime to at least bring in diversity of it's own culture. However, it still was very white washed.
I notice these same traits whenever I watch anime as well. Asians view light skin as beautiful, thus I think that the whiteness of Anime characters may go hand in hand with this belief. However, the big expressive eyes are more of a self-conscious attribute. Many Asian women have surgery or use tape on their eyelids to open their eyes; they get self-conscious about how closed their eyes appear so they attempt to change their appearance; just like many other women (and men) do.
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