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plasmoids
Red Garden is a very intriguing terror anime all on it's own, but I think the art is what makes it really special. A lot of people are actually turned off by it. I've seen a lot of comments about the "weird noses" and that the characters look like they're wearing "white face," but I think that's just people being used to their big eyed, tiny nosed animu characters. First of all, the characters are supposed to be European and not Asian. The production team also took a trip to New York to study the surroundings and people (though it's pretty clear they didn't both with the language). The characters might look a lot different, but there's definitely a good reason.
As I mentioned, the show is a terror/horror series, and I think the characters look a little "grotesque" really helps that. The characters look like people, but if necessary, their features can be easily tweaked to make them look monstrous. The odder the features, the more mysterious the character. A lot of viewers expressed being AFRAID of the character Lula, because she had a very large mouth. And she was supposed to be a weird, scary character and not necessarily understood. Hello Kitty has big eyes, a tiny nose and no mouth because people find that cute and relatable; Lula has small eyes and a big nose and mouth because she's off-putting and somewhat upsetting. And she's supposed to be.
So I think the character designer knew exactly what they were doing when they designed the characters to have exaggerated facial features. They wanted to creep you out.
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Date: 2010-08-22 02:55 am (UTC)As you said, this really works in a positive sense for the series because it wants you to be unnerved, to be slightly put off by what you see. One thing that really stuck with me when my design sheets from the series arrived was how grotesque even the most beautiful characters were in fujijun's scribbles. Kate was stick-thin with a pointed, almost alien look about her face. Herve was intentionally drawn without pupils in his eyes. On one hand they looked soft, almost gentle. On the other... like something out of a horror movie.
I would have to agree that Lula is probably the most unnerving out of everyone, though this plays into her ambiguity (as you mentioned above). Do they trust her, do they run from her? I personally think she's quite beautiful, but not at all in a ~traditional~ sense. She's arresting, you really have to look at her whenever she enters a scene because your eyes are instinctively drawn to her. Her exterior is also quite misleading - you think of her as steely, untrustworthy and alarming, rather than as another victim (which is genius). When I think about Lula's appearance I am always reminded of the drama track where they all go to the spa and Lula parades around without a towel on. All the girls can't help but stare... and be depressed about dying as "girls" rather than "women". ^^:
tl;dr THE RED GARDEN DESIGNS ARE AWESOME.
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