Animation and the Eyes of Doom

Now time for a rant.  Snark mode set to HIGH.  (Aware that using pre-existing images from the Internet is often illegal, and not wanting to get involved in a lawsuit, I have taken pictures of my own collection for this blog.  I have only a WebCam of low resolution.  That is why the images are fuzzy and the glare effect is in...effect.  I apologise for the poor visual quality.  On with the rant.)

You know what I'm sick of?  I'm sick of people saying they won't watch anime or they think anime is bad because "all anime characters have big eyes."

Guess what?

American animated characters have big eyes.

Take Rugrats, that popular show of Nickelodeon's from the 1990s:

Whoa, those are some large eyes.  And circular, too.  No irises even, just tiny pupils.  What's up with that?  How do they see in dim light when their pupils are stuck at one size?

 Or the top grossing movie from 1961, 101 Dalmatians:

I'm going to check, but I don't think real dogs' eyes are that big.  Or have that much sclera showing.

Or the longest running cartoon show in American history, The Simpsons:

Eeek!!!! More big eyes!  And what's with the lack of irises?!?  And their eyeballs are hanging off their heads when they're seen from the side.  That's can't be healthy.

Hmm...let's try Garfield and Friends, a cartoon based on one of the most popular newspaper comic strips in the United States:

Holy cow.  Garfield's eyes are bigger than his stomach.  You could fry up those eyes and feed your family at Thanksgiving.  And still no irises.  Those are the biggest eyes in proportion to the rest of the body I've ever seen.  So, why are those okay while Hitomi's aren't?

Poor Escaflowne.  Warner Brothers characters have enormous eyes as well:

And Disney too: behold Beauty and the Beast, the first animated film to be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars.  No woman in the world has eyes this size:

The same can be said of Princess Jasmine from Aladdin:

If those aren't aren't too big for you, then these aren't too big:

Wait.  That guy next to Haydee...are those realistically proportioned eyes on the Count of Monte Cristo?

I think they are!  Imagine that...small anime eyes!

Yes, American animation can have smaller eyes too, as seen in Star Wars: Clones Wars:

Avatar: The Last Airbender, an American production styled after anime, features, like much anime, a variety of eye sizes:

Is my point that I want only realistically proportioned eyes on everything?

No, of course not. (Turning down the Snark-O-Meter) Irregular proportions are very fun in animation, as they don't occur in the real world, and the lack of a third dimension means that things that would freak us out in the real world look fine on paper.  As well, big eyes are more expressive than small eyes in two dimensions.  I once had to do a 2-D realistic wolf drawing and ended up making the eyes larger than they should have been because they looked dead and sunken in as they were; a slightly larger size brightened them and made the wolf more alive.  They still look normal but are bigger than a real wolf's eyes would be on its face.  If all animation used perfectly proportioned eyes, people would probably complain that they were too small, squinty, and unable to communicate emotion.  I don't ask anyone to like anime or like or dislike bigger eyes, only to understand that the very qualms they have with anime eyes are the same things that they don't care about in American cartoons.  It's an odd thing to complain about.  Should I complain about many American cartoon figures having only four fingers, having eyeballs that hang off their heads, or heads too big for their bodies?  No, of course I won't.  It's animation.

Both American

Peanuts

Sleeping Beauty

The Secret of NIMH

and Japanese

Haibane Renmei

Earth Maiden Arjuna

Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo

animation feature a plethora of eye sizes and shapes.  South Park, Family Guy, Rocko's Modern Life, Kablam, Danny Phantom, The Fairly Oddparents, The Powerpuff Girls, and Roger Rabbit all have larger eyes than you would encounter in the real world, while characters from the anime Cowboy Bebop, Gankutsuou, Le Chevalier D'eon, The Twelve Kingdoms, Death Note, Darker Than Black, Boogiepop Phantom, and Millennium Actress have more realistically shaped and sized eyes.  Scooby-Doo's eyes are small-medium while Kanon's are enormous, being moe, which calls for that visual style.  A norm of American animation is to have large round eyes with no iris and a pinprick pupil, whereas much anime shows the iris.  My statement: animation in general features larger-than-normal eyes on its characters.  "Big" eyes are the norm--they're more expressive and look alive.  Be also aware:  Do you know where Osamu Tezuka, creator of Astro Boy, the first major anime, got the idea for larger-than-normal eyes?

He borrowed it from American animation--Bambi, Betty Boop, Bugs Bunny, and Disney in general.