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Race
When viewing an animated television program or film, it is relatively easy to distinguish whether or not it is of the anime genre. Anime has a unique style or its own. With their outrageous character style and story context, anime has attributed itself to being significantly different from anything else, particularly Western animation.
What makes anime’s style most interesting is the visual depiction of its characters. The most popular question that has risen from this is “What race or ethnicity do anime characters represent?”. The majority of anime characters have no set race, ethnicity, or nationality. They are stateless characters that are usually set in stateless fantasy-scapes of futuristic cities of far-away galaxies. Therefore, the characters are context free, largely due to the fact that the anime style is from the animators’ creativity and mind (Lu 6).
Despite this reason, the question still remains as to why no specific racial, cultural, or national identity is place on the characters. As with Western animation, one would conclude that the characters would reflect the appearance of the society that created it. However, anime animators’ intentions may be to make the animation style and context more approachable to the Western audience.
The method of “ethnic bleaching” may remove cultural barriers to enable them to be more acceptable to non-Japanese audiences (Lu 3). In other words, when the anime characters become odorless commodities, in which bodily, racial, and ethnic characteristics have been erased or softened, more global consumers will find it enjoyable. Several researchers attributed the “international look” of anime characters to the international success of the anime genre.
Aside from the style and economic reasons as the why anime characters look the way they do, audience reaction and perception of the characters is also an important topic to focus on, particularly with the Japanese audience. Little research has been conducted concerning anime and race; however, some light has been shed that may offer insight.
Animated caricatures have been documented to augment the communication context of the images of human faces. In addition, race, sex, and age are encoded automatically and mandatorily by the viewers (Lu 4). Specifically, race of an animated character varies by different phenotypic characteristics. Viewers are able to detect race because the conceptual system that people possess can detect these perceptual clusters.
Because of this, the phenotypic traits of a character are used as a conceptual structure. Therefore, the automatic and mandatory race encoding is a byproduct of encoding perceptual attributes, such as eye color and shape, which can be used on both people and objects. In other words, features determine the perceived racial category of a character, and it is what audiences use to racially categorize the anime character, rather than its narrative performance.
Amy Shirong Lu, a doctorate student at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, conducted a study based on this knowledge. Using several hundred visual depictions of anime characters from the 1950s to the present, participants in the study were asked to determine the race of these characters, as well as list the physical features which helped them determine the race (Lu 3).
The results of the study proved remarkably interesting. The categorization of race on any characters was now heavily swayed to one. What is more interesting is that most Asian participants perceived the characters having Asian features, while most Caucasian participants perceived them with Caucasian features. In addition, the number of white phenotypic characteristics rose while those of perceived Asian phenotype traits declined when the anime characters used in the study were plotted in a timeline, according to the year they were created (Lu 10).
Lu’s findings bring lights into how history may have reflected how the audience perceives the race of anime characters. The face of the characters may be so racially ambiguous that the audience is able to project their own racial and culturally stateless identities onto the characters (Lu 11). In addition, it also may be possible that the anime artists’ intentions are to allow anyone to do so. This gives any audience the opportunity to put themselves in the characters’ shoes, allowing for a more personal and effective experience in understanding the trials and tribulations the characters undergo in the narrative (Lu 12).
