Usagi Yojimbo DojoBoard

Sorry for the dull question guyus ,

But Is usagi a Anime/Manga? Or is it uh... What is it

Anime is basicly Japenese Cartoons. Manga is Japanese comics.
North American is now making anime/manga now too by using a style similar to that of the Japanese.

I personally don't consider Usagi manga. When I think of Usagi, I think of one of the greatest comic books on the market toady.


MikeM

Manga tends to have a very distinctive visual style, which Usagi doesn't share, although it does have occasional panels which have a sort of manga feel without directly copying the look.

Just to get really dull, another term people use for comics is 'sequential art'. You can always use that one if you get in trouble for reading comics at school - 'I'm sorry, Sir, I was just studying a fine example of sequential art'.

I think Usagi is hard to categorise, style wise, but I do think it's one of the greatest comics of all time.

Yup, what MikeM and ai no ahodori said .

Besides the aesthetic difference (big eyes, westernized look, speed lines, impossible camera angles...), both manga and anime differ from western comics and animation in technique and execution.

I'm not an expert, but from what I've read, manga is usually drawn in smaller paper than western comics. Also, the panels are drawn, then cut from the paper, and pasted in another one in order to compose a page, or something like that. Inking, backgrounds, and color fills are usually done by different people to speed up things, so you end up with manga like Naruto, written by Masashi Kishimoto, but drawn by him and 5 assistants. This is not unusual, since most manga episodes are weekly.

Regarding anime, Osamu Tezuka was the guy who started it all following Walt Disney's steps, but because of lack of money, Tezuka-sensei couldn't imitate what Disney was making at the time, so he started to research into cheaper techniques which could pull the trick. If you pay attention to a Japanese cartoon and compare it with a Western cartoon, you'll notice that the "feeling" is different. Anime has more detailed backgrounds and characters, but less animated frames, to speed up production. A character isn't a single cell, but many different cells composing different parts of the body so it can be animated independently, like the mouth or eyes. And the list keeps going on.

Quick note: "manga" means literally "random/whimsical pictures" in Japanese. "Anime" is a Japanese adaptation (neologism?) of "dessin animé", which is french for cartoon.

Here is my two cents worth...

ai no ahodori wrote:Manga tends to have a very distinctive visual style, which Usagi doesn't share, although it does have occasional panels which have a sort of manga feel without directly copying the look.

Not all manga has the "look" which is habitually associated with it recently. If you compare the art of a manga like "Lone Wolf and Cub" or "Samurai Executioner" with the more commonly reognized style of "Pokamon", "Dragonball Z" or "Oh My Goddess" (or the American imitations like Ninja High School), they look very differant. I think the majority of what is popular now is the "Big Eyes" style or look, so that is what most people think of when they think of manga, but manga runs the whole spectrum of artistic style (and story content or genre).

While manga is basically the Japanese equivalent for comic book, there is a major difference I've noticed (even though I've read very little manga), and that is the way the stories are set up. From what I've heard, manga usually have a start, middle, and end all planned out from the beginning. "Lone Wolf and Cub" had a starting point, the various parts of their journey, and then the ending which was pre-planned from the beginning. The individual issues are merely chapters in a single, much longer story, which add to and build up to a specific conclusion. If the story is popular, then a second story-line or a third is produced.

Usagi Yojimbo is an open-ended series that is made up of a lot of shorter stories (anywhere from 1 page "gag" stories to multi-issue mini-series) which can all be read and enjoyed independently of each other. The sequence, while there, is not of major importance to the understanding of the stories. This is in the style of American comics (if not western comics in general ?), where a character might have stories written and drawn by a large number of differant artists working independently of each other on seperate stories.

Frank Miller was deeply impressed with Manga, but I have yet to see any influence of the "big eyes" style of manga in anything he's drawn.

OK, sorry, that was more like a quarter of fifty cents worth...
Abayo...

Nausicaa is not in the manga 'style' either, its more European in style. Miyazaki said as much himself.

The structure of Usagi is in the North American tradition. But its drawing style is entirely unique. Totally Stan.