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Comment by BobbyH | Hacker News Reader

The post makes a good point, but it does overlook the fact that the "Godfather of Anime", Osamu Tezuka (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osamu_Tezuka) was heavily influenced by Walt Disney and American animation.

For instance, the Wikipedia article notes: "The distinctive "large eyes" style of Japanese animation was invented by Tezuka, drawing inspirations on cartoons of the time such as Betty Boop and Walt Disney's Bambi and Mickey Mouse."

You can see how Bambi was drawn with large eyes here: http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&q=bambi

You can see Betty Boop here: http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&q=betty+boop

You can see Mickey Mouse here: http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&q=mickey+mouse+classi...

You can compare the style of those eyes to Tezuka's Astro Boy, first published in 1952: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AstroBoyVolume1.jpg

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Those characters have big eyes and foreheads for two reasons.

Firstly, to make them cuter... like babies. All baby humans have proportionally big heads/eyes to the rest of their bodies and we're hardwired to think of those characteristics as simpler, cuter, and deserving of our attention.

Secondly, to give the animator a face that is both simpler and larger which makes it much easier to draw expressions

These two things make it much easier for the audience to relate to the animated character and for the artist to draw it

Yeah, in fact, Steven Jay Gould wrote a great article on how "As Mickey became increasingly well behaved over the years, his appearance became more youthful. Measurements of three stages in his development revealed a larger relative head size, larger eyes, and an enlarged cranium--all traits of juvenility." As he puts it, "Humans feel affection for animals with juvenile features."

full article: http://www.monmsci.net/~kbaldwin/mickey.pdf

This would explain the glut of sites such as cuteoverload.com

I once took a Psychology course which had another explanation for the large eyes. Apparently, when humans are sexually aroused, their pupils get larger. This makes people with larger pupils more sexually appealing, leading to all kinds of tricks to making your pupils larger (for example, candlelit dinners; also, in some older civilizations, women used to use eyedrops to make their pupils larger).

All of this leads to people thinking larger pupils look better, and in the case of small cartoon characters, look cuter.

The eyedrops you refer to are belladonna, Italian for 'beautiful woman'.

The intro from the Wikipedia entry ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atropa_belladonna ) says:

"It has a long history of use as a medicine, cosmetic, and poison. Before the Middle Ages, it was used as an anesthetic for surgery, the ancient Romans used it as a poison (the wife of Emperor Augustus and the wife of Claudius both used it to murder contemporaries) and predating this it was used to make poison tipped arrows."

and

"Drops prepared from the belladonna plant were used to dilate women's pupils, an effect considered attractive."

And all of a sudden I want to give my wife a candle-light dinner.

I agree, manga characters are as white as Bambi is.

But that doesn't mean that large eyes means white. Black people generally have characteristically large eyes too.

anime characters clearly aren't black though

Some of them clearly are. Like Brezhnev from Dulalala.

If for any reason you've got safe search off, you've been warned.

Nothing too bad appeared.

At one panel, some anthropology academic/author was talking about the influence of "I Dream of Jeanie" and "Bewitched." Since we destroyed a lot of Japanese infrastructure, the cheapest way to broadcast television in Japan for many years was to dub shows from the United States. Supposedly, an entire generation was imprinted with dubbed US TV. The magical girl genre traces its lineage to those two shows.

Combine the Tezuka/Disney influence with this, and the human instinct to regard large eyes as signals of childhood and cuteness, and the result simply makes sense.

In any case, "Asian" features aren't always as pronounced as westerners imagine them to be. There's not that much genetic distance between the so-called races. "Black" in the US is actually a hugely diverse group all by itself. (There was a Newsweek cover that demonstrated this nicely a few years back.)

(The protagonist of Golgo 13 is said to be indeterminately Spanish or Japanese.)

I don't see the connection (and I don't think there is one) between large eyes and white people.

If you look at anime, people of all colors have pretty much similarly sized eyes, white characters or Japanese characters. If the Japanese really perceive white people to have large eyes, then you would expect to see white people in anime to have larger eyes than Asian characters. That's not the case.

Large eyes is a style in anime in general (as Sukotto explained) and has nothing to do with race.

"If the Japanese really perceive white people to have large eyes, then you would expect to see white people in anime to have larger eyes than Asian characters. That's not the case."

chinese people often have slits for eyes

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