RELATED:Anime Characters With The Most Emotional Backstories
Due to a myriad of factors, every individual draws differently and is drawn to different visual forms of expression. Once the skills of an animator or a mangaka are on the table, these small variations evolve into wildly different and unique art styles. Every series and every artist has their own unique spin, but these art styles have stood the test of time and become so well known that they inspire millions to imitate and pay homage to them.
10 The Naruto Style
While this art style is easily the least unique on this list, this is due mostly to the influence Naruto has had on the anime landscape. When Masashi Kishimoto first started Naruto in 1999, there wasn’t an awful lot that looked like his work. However after the series’ success, more series started to come out that were influenced by it.
The style has since become fairly middle-of-the-road as far as anime goes. It’s fairly realistic anatomy-wise, but especially in the manga renders people in a fairly simplified form without using the huge hair and thin bodies that some other series do.
9 One’s Style
One of the best-known things about the mangaka known as One is that he actually isn’t the best artist around. When he first drew One Punch Man, the art was extremely shoddy. However, this lack of skill actually made his art stand out.
His style prioritizes simplicity due to his own lower skill level, creating plain characters like Saitama and Mob, who nonetheless managed to become iconic. Mob Psycho 100’s anime pays much better homage to his style than OPM does, and actually uses its simplicity to enable extremely smooth animation.
8 Junji Ito’s Style
Junji Ito’s way of drawing human characters isn’t the most remarkable. His people are fairly realistically designed, with proper body proportions. However, it’s his renditions of horror creatures that made his art stand out.
RELATED:Winter 2023 Preview: Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre
Once the paranormal is involved, Ito’s style becomes instantly recognizable. His darkly rendered scenes feel like they’re stuck in perpetual nighttime, and he uses somewhat sketchy lines to make everything feel eerily messy and off-putting. The skill behind his art is likely why anime studios have had a hard time adapting his works and their horror factor accurately.
7 The Yu-Gi-Oh! Style
One word that sums up the way the late Kazuki Takahashi drew Yu-Gi-Oh! is, “sharp”. While the art style did evolve over the manga’s publication, it soon fell into the habit of rendering characters long and spiky. Their clothes are often folded to a razor point, and their faces air on the more angular side.
The style uses big eyes like other anime/manga but often makes the eyes angular as well. By far the most noticeable part of this style, however, is the hair. Yu-Gi-Oh! hair is noticeably large and jagged. To this day, even series like Bakugan that take inspiration from it never get quite as sharp as Yu-Gi-Oh! does.
6 The One Piece Style
The strength of One Piece’s style is that it frees itself from much of the usual constraints of an art style. It’s comfortable being far more cartoony than its peers, allowing the characters to stretch their faces into gaping mouths and popping eyes straight out of a Warner Brothers cartoon.
The style also allows for a range of body types that would look ridiculous anywhere else. The main cast largely keeps it simple, but the extended cast boasts characters like Kaido, Big Mom, and Blackbeard that wildly vary from the other characters’ builds, yet feel right at home amongst them.
5 Osamu Tezuka’s Style
As one of the progenitors of modern anime, this list wouldn’t be complete without Osamu Tezuka. While Astro Boy was by far his most popular creation, he also was behind titles like Dororo and Kiba the White Lion.
RELATED:Most Influential Manga By Osamu Tezuka
Due to inspiration taken from western cartoons like Betty Boop, Tezuka introduced the large, round eyes now commonplace in manga and anime. Along with the simplicity and general softness of his characters, this makes his style distinct even today when it is homaged in shows like Star Wars Visions.
4 The “Shoujo” Art Style
This is easily the broadest art style listed here. As opposed to a style used in one series or across a particular artist’s work, this is a fairly common style within shoujo manga, which sees some slight variation from series to series.
Its most prominent features are thin characters, pointy chins, and big, sparkly eyes. Revolutionary Girl Utena and Sailor Moon are easily the best-known series to use this style, but it can be found in shoujo manga even in the modern day.
3 The Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure Style
When the series began, Hirohiko Araki drew Jojo in a rather similar style to Fist of The North Star, which was one of the big influences for Jojo. As the years went on though, Araki evolved his style into something unique.
RELATED:Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean’s Ending, Explained
The Jojo style is now well known for its highly detailed, heavily shaded, muscular characters. The high detail also keeps the characters’ movements somewhat stiff, resulting in a focus on striking poses. Many anime reference this style, often morphing into it for a quick gag.
2 Akira Toriyama’s Style
Dragon Ball is easily Akira Toriyama’s most popular creation and is the series that introduced most people to his art style. However, it is also used in games like Chrono Trigger or Dragon Quest which Toriyama did the art for, helping to expand the style’s recognisability even further.
Toriyama likes to draw his characters with rather large, oddly shaped heads, and a variety of tightly muscled bodies. He also tends to emphasize his characters’ brow ridges and give them fairly big ears. It’s hard to find someone who won’t notice the style on sight, even if they only know it as the Dragon Ball style.
1 The Studio Ghibli Style
While most of these styles have been from manga and anime series, Ghibli is the king of anime films. Over the years, huge films like Spirited Away and My Neighbour Totoro have helped the studio and their distinct style become recognizable worldwide, even to non-anime fans.
It doesn’t take much effort to find tutorials on how to mimic the distinct way they draw welled-up tears, or their soft-edged, wide-eyed humans. The Ghibli style even has a pastoral energy that makes it welcoming and wholesome to look at, even in its most violent moments.
MORE:The Best Anime Movies On HBO Max (January 2023)
