Raven Crowking said:
Yes, but many things in anime have influences that can be traced farther back than the advent of "anime" as an artistic genre. I agree that it then becomes difficult to determine if the things is influenced by the historical antecedent (as I believe the 1e gold dragon was) or by the current pop culture reference (as I believe the ravid was).
There was a Dragon Magazine article in the lead-up to 3e, where the artistic design for 3e was discussed. Does anyone remember the issue number? I don't know if that article would shed light on this discussion or not, but I'd like to check.
RC
For the sake of this discussion, the only reasonable thing to do is completely seperate
Anime from Asian. If you assume that
anything of Asian influence is an anime influence, then
of course you will find anime influence. But that is about as useful as saying that anyone using New York as the setting for a novel was possibly influenced by Spiderman comics. It is impossible to sort through, and not necessarily true.
The only useful thing to do would be focus on the well-defined history of anime itself. Anime is an art form which started in the mid 1960s with the work of Osamu Tezuka and his contemporaries. His manga, and the first TV series based on his manga, are the origin point of all midern manga and anime. If we are going to say anything useful about anime at all, we need to limit our discussion to the particular set of Japanese animated shows that hail from that tradition.
After all, if you start talking about
asian influences, it leaves me perfectly free to counter with "Hong Kong kung-fu films" and you
can't counter that. If you claim that something is anime-influenced, and I provide an alternative source of influence, it weakens your argument. If you talk about something specific to anime, then I don't have such an easy way to counter your argument.
So anyways, other than vague similarities to traditional asian mythological creatures, there is nothing "anime" about the ravid. Not anime.
The Ice Creature in that one picture reminds me of the ice creature in Disney's Hercules movie. Other than that I say the pose is not anime-influenced, and I can't really say concerning the elf girl. I guess she might be more of an anime elf... Not a bad picture, even though I can't figure out what is supposed to be going on.
I don't see what is supposed to be anime-influenced in the sunset picture.
Mialee is the anti-existence to anime elves. Further, I demand that you atone for the crime of inflicting one of the
ugliest Mialee images upon us. That kind of art makes me wish for greater anime influence even more.