Starting in the early 80s, there was a transition toward more simplified noses, ultimately manifesting in the tendency around 2003 to draw characters without any noses at all. There are two reasons for this: one is that the nose is not very expressive most of the time (unless you’re showing, like, snot streaming from nostrils) so there’s no point in spending space and effort on them that you could instead use on the eyes, eyebrows, and mouth. The other is that “big nose” codes for “white” – and if noses are barely drawn, any noticeable nose at all counts as “big”.
The transitional stage – the level of nose simplification that’s been normal for most characters in most styles from the mid 80s to today (and in some works in the 70s, like those of Leiji Matsumoto) – is to show a nose as a slightly bent line. This is great because realistic noses drawn straight on are very complicated. When a character is drawn in profile, though, the nose becomes visible as a protrusion! Until the 90s this was a major difficulty whenever a character was turning their head: how do you draw a nose that doesn’t draw attention to itself, even if a character smoothly turns their head? The solution was to treat the nose as a slight protrusion in the contour of the character’s face.
This became normal because of the specific problems of animation, but because characters and stories are constantly moving between anime and manga, manga artists quickly adopted it, and it’s been normal for manga to draw noses in the style shown above since the 90s, even when the manga in question would never be adapted to animation.
While it can look funny out of context to somebody not immersed in the style, the underlying logic is actually an attempt to support telling more serious stories. In the 50s and 60s, when practically all manga was light comedy, the style was much more cartoony and characters had a wide variety of probosces, and characters often showed their emotions the same way that they’d be shown in looney toons: dramatic and physically-impossible symbolic mutations of the entire body. The “bishojo style” that is the primary stylistic influence for almost all anime and manga today is the synthesis of two movements happening in manga in the 70s: shojo comics, aimed at teenage girls, were beginning to get emotionally and intellectually complex (in part because the genre, being dismissed as trash, was not getting much oversight from editors and censors, and became a place where politically dissident women, many of them lesbians, thrived and did the artistic experiments that had been getting them kicked out of theater and literary magazines), and to support these stories that were focused in the inferiority of characters and their relationships, a style where bodies were simplified & faces were made larger and more expressive was developed; at the same time, some mostly-male manga artists were annoyed by the lightness and child-centrism of manga and started a movement for darker-and-grittier comics called gekiga, where characters were drawn with realistic proportions and both the style & content was influenced largely by American action movies. These two movements merged into the bishojo style, which was used to sell more complex manga to older teens and adults; “bishojo” means “beautiful woman” & reflects that these comics were sold to men through the sex appeal of attractive characters & to women based on their grace and fashion sense (or at least, that was how many people thought about it at the time). In this new bishojo style, it would be normal to have serious and grounded dramas – and suddenly seeing a nose pop out of somebody’s face can break immersion. (As late as 1995, some anime kept more realistic nose sizes and suffered for it – ex., Escaflowne.)
prguitarman
baratheonpilled
blakekathryn
annaxmalina
andulkaphoto
discoholicmusic
jbbartram-illu
theartofmadeline
