The difference between the styles of animation in the USA and Japan is primarily down to this audience difference. Japanese children's manga has many similarities with American disney animation, with simple colour schemes, minimal backgrounds and the characteristic enlargement of the heads of characters. The animation is also minimal, allowing the way the characters are drawn to be more important than the way they move.
However, manga films like the classic Akira, which are aimed at an older audience, have a very different style, using intricate backgrounds to set the story, and complex animation to give the illusion of reality while being able to manipulate characters and physics more easily than would be possible on real film, while retaining the empathy with characters. The most significant difference tends to be in the shading, while western animation uses two tones per surface and keeps the movement of colour consistent with the general stillness of the animation, manga animation tends to be shaded with three tones which contrast more with each other, and to allow this shading to fluctuate between frames, giving an illusion of continuous movement and realistic unpredictability in the light and the actions of the characters it illuminates.
Japanese manga can be divided into the following categories depending on the age of the audience targeted by the magazines in which they appear: The first category includes children's magazines which are called (yonenshi), teen magazines which are called (shonenshi), and "young" magazines (yangushi, also known as seinenshi) which attract readers from their late teens to their late twenties.
The second group includes adult magazines (known as seinenshi, where seinen refers to adults rather than young people, or otonashi) which are intended for a more mature audience with no upper age limit.
Perhaps one of the best known manga artists to adjust and push the age limit on manga readership is Go Nagai. Having formally entered the growing manga industry at the young age of 20 as an assistant, Nagai's works were typically controversial, violent, and racy. Nagai's most famous work was Devilman, which he first released in 1972. Devilman's hero was unlike any hero seen before in manga. They used a combination of the purity of their soul and combined it with that of a demon in order to fight other demons. This somewhat anti-heroic model, along with the violent story, drew criticism from many fronts due to its age-inappropriateness. However, Nagai perservered, having drawn into his fold many older fans who had read shounen or shoujo anime as children. These people were intrigued by the maturity of Nagai's manga, and Devilman, along with many of his future works (such as the notoriously sexy series Cutey Honey) became among some of the most revered in th emanga community, and also some of the first manga series of its target age group to become animated.
Origin of Manga
While for most western people manga is a word which is related almost exclusively to a style of film and children's anmation, the origin of japanese cartoon drawing was almost eight hundred years ago, and began in temples.
Around the beginning of the thirteenth century pictures began to be drawn on temple walls, depicting images of the afterlife and of animals. These pictures were crude and deliberately exagerrated representations, and bear a remarkable similarity to modern manga. This phenomenon continued over hundreds of years, branching out to include numerous other subjects, although the style remained the same
Around the start of the 1600s these pictures were made attractions in themselves for the first time, they were not drawn on temple walls but on wood blocks. These were known as Edo, and the subject was less religious, often graphically erotic, although they branched out once again to include various other subjects, particularly buildings and satire. At around this time the word manga was first used to describe the artistic style. The pictures were by now generally composed in monochrome, with simple outlines and rudimentary blocks of colour which forewent shading. The subject took precedence over the method of representing it.
