I never had children of my own so I never watched anime shows. However my grandniece Madilynn is interested in being an animator which made me as an artist curious about animation too. Eventually I saw some very beautiful animation movies from Studio Ghibli, like My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away and his first film, Nausicaa.

But the other anime stuff around on Netflix and Hulu for example was much different than Miyazaki’s works from Studio Ghibli. I watched the gruesome dark Death Note series. I watched the very sweet, Your Lie in April, and Violet Evergarden. Finally finishing up my research into anime by watching the entertaining Naruto and Naruto Shippudden.

I find myself knowing all kinds of things like terms: genin, chunin, jonin, samuraii, kazekage, mizukage, hokage, sharingen, basically the world of naruto, sasuke, and all their friends and sensei and rivals. While there is no way I could convincingly draw characters using ninjetsu or taijetsu it’s still fascinating how the characters are colored and drawn to be within their scene environment. Naruto has intensely blue round eyes and bright neon yellow hair…..but not always. Some scenes especially introspective scenes or very emotionally charged scenes have him colored very very differently. And while hes in sage mode with nine tails chakra hes completely yellow with black symbols and red eyes and yet entirely readable as naruto. Very interesting stuff visually speaking.

None of that was intentional. I was only interested in the anime art. But as a storyteller I got caught up in the characters. For 14 seasons of 50 episodes each season. Phew…. but in the end I was drawing passable anime figures. Learning by watching how the artwork informed the characters. I don’t really know if my season is over yet. There’s still 70 episodes of Boruto and quite a few naruto movies. Maybe certain character arcs will play out (sauke and sakura.) These are just screenshots from my phone and I didn’t edit the images.