I was recently rewatching all of the Slayers anime series with some other people and one of them asked me why the characters would become small every so often. It took me a moment to figure out what she meant but she was referring to when Lina Inverse was shouting at someone and they became tiny or how when the characters were explaining their plan on a blackboard they would all become much smaller looking with large heads. I realised that I didn’t know that much about the super deformed art style and I decided to do some research on it.
First off, I should describe what super deformed art style is. Super deformed, also referred to as chibi, art is where anime/manga characters are depicted with a less realistic head to body proportion. In contrast to the standard head to body proportion where the head makes up about 1/7th of the body, a super deformed character may have their head make up 1/3rd of their body, 1/2nd or even cases where the head is larger than their body!
The origins of super deformed are hazy but the website Tofugu theorises that the art style developed out of the growing fandom of sci-fi anime series in the 1970s and 80s such as Mobile Suit Gundam, Space Battleship Yamato etc. Fanart of these series began to be developed sporting the characters as shorter with larger heads and, eventually, this art began to feed into professional manga that were either comedic or parodies of certain series.
They also claim that one of the people working on the Crusher Joe series, Gen Sato, would create super deformed 4-koma manga of the characters for his bosses whenever they were upset with him. They were so amused by this that they sent the manga to professional manga magazines which eventually published them. They were so popular that they eventually saw a toy deal established which set the stage for modern super deformed toy lines such as Nendoroid.
In the late 1980s, the Gundam franchise established a subseries called “SD Gundam” which were comedic parodies of the Universal Century timeline and saw both the characters and mobile suits depicted in super deformed artwork. This subseries saw numerous anime films, OVAs, manga and video games released under this label and has proven to be quite successful. It’s interesting to note that some believe that SD Gundam is responsible for popularising the term “Super Deformed” for the style of artwork.
Since then, we have seen the super deformed art style become an incredibly vital component of the anime and manga industry. Let me know your thoughts on the super deformed art style, some of your most memorable instances of coming across super deformed art, if you consider it to be an integral part of anime and manga fandom and any additional information you might have on the topic.
Hopefully you have found this article interesting and informative and, if you wish to seek any of the works I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com for all of your needs!
[…] 캐릭터의 유래는 불분명하지만, 일부 웹사이트에서는 1970년대와 80년대의 SF 애니메이션의 팬덤에 기인한다고 주장하고 […]