Drawing a Male Character the Boondocks Art Style

Seto Kaiba: Avatar isn't anime!
Gansley: It might as well be.

Things that are done in an art style similar to, or use tropes associated with, Japanese anime. Also called anime-influenced animation, Amerime or Americanime (if it's American), Franime (for French things), or faux-anime, animesque works come from a variety of sources. Some are simply non-Japanese creators deciding to mimic the style, while others are genuine co-productions. France and Canada are especially known for cooperating with Japanese producers in this way. In Japan itself, "anime" is a broad term for anything animated (being shorthand for the loanword "animation"), so technically, all of these examples are "anime" whether or not they are classic Japanese-style anime.

Animesque art is a case of a 'full-circle' evolution, because the Japanese anime style was inspired by classical American theatrical animation of the 1930s and 1940s. For example, the big eyes of anime characters were taken straight from such works as Bambi and the old Fleischer shorts — think Betty Boop. The father of manga himself, Osamu Tezuka, was mainly inspired by the style of Carl Barks.

This style was pretty prevalent in the early 2000s due to the rise of the anime boom in media with many following the trend. Nowadays, not so much, now that anime is pretty commonplace, though still a design choice for some.

Note that this is about a work's art style, not its storytelling.

Super-Trope to Anime Opening Parody. Compare Disneyesque. See also OEL Manga and Fanime.

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Straight Examples

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    Advertising

• The Metro Manners series of PSAs are live-action, but the whole concept toes the line between Affectionate Parody and wholehearted embrace of anime tropes. The videos feature a Magical Girl/Henshin Hero protagonist who fights monsters representing rude transit behavior, with lots of Gratuitous Japanese. The visual style is also very anime-inspired, with examples including Super Kind's purple hair, use of anime-style title cards in Japanese, and the use of freeze-frames with Manga Effects, such as a segment where Super Kind freezes, shocked, while white lines radiate out from her face.
• A few advertisements from Canada also do this:
• Taco Bell's "Fry Force" ads of 2021. Not only are they presented as movie trailers, but the entire fictional movie is a spoof of Pacific Rim, which is itself an homage to mecha anime and tokusatsu movies. Taco Bell would later take this up to eleven by publishing a prequel comic drawn and designed to be read from right to left, as many East Asian comics are published.

    Animation — Asia (non-Japanese)

• The infamous Beauty and Warrior, while very similar to the Japanese style, was actually made in Indonesia.
• Aachi and Ssipak's animation looks like a twisted Nicktoon with anime influences, like characters nose bleeding and becoming momentarily "chibi-styled".
• The Bat Man Shanghai shorts starring Catwoman have an anime aesthetic mixed with a heavy dose of Wuxia influence. The shorts were commissioned from Chinese studio Wolf Smoke for the DC Nation block on Cartoon Network.
• Barangay 143 is a Filipino basketball cartoon emulating anime-style aesthetics.
• Cupid's Chocolates is, to the untrained eye, virtually indistinguishable from an anime series. The catch: It was produced entirely in China.
• Guardian Fairy Michel is a Korean animation that uses an anime art style.

• Leafie, a Hen into the Wild is infamous for being a sad film with Bishōnen ducks, but is a Korean film.
• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: With its cute character designs and utilization of facial expression tropes such as Cross-Popping Veins and the Sweat Drop, has a clear influence in anime, though later seasons look slightly more American.
• Happy Heroes: From the same crew who made Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf, similarly uses animesque facial expressions on its characters.

• The Chinese series Nana Moon has a brightly-colored, cutesy art style that looks much like a kodomomuke anime, and it uses several well-known anime facial expression tropes.

    Animation — Europe

• Fantastic Four: World's Greatest Heroes and Code Lyoko, both produced in France by MoonScoop. Code Lyoko includes a Japanese girl as one of the main characters, perhaps as a way of acknowledging its anime influences.
  • Code Lyoko uses a similar artstyle while trying to be different (notably with less exaggerated expressions than most animesque series), and was inspired by Serial Experiments Lain. The pilot, Garage Kids, is even more inspired by anime, when it comes to it's animation, plot and includes even more blatant Serial Experiments Lain influences.
  • Fantastic Four: World's Greatest Heroes's overall artstyle (characters, fights, animation, places) is also influenced by Japanese animation.
• Miraculous Ladybug, a co-production between French studio Zagtoon and (to no surprise) Japanese studio Toei Animation. The heroine is a Chinese-French Magical Girl who relies on anime-styled transformation sequences; this also applies to Adrien Agreste (Cat Noir) and the characters who become super heroes in the subsequent seasons. It was originally even more anime-like before becoming an All-CGI Cartoon. The original trailer is often compared to Pretty Cure/Glitter Force and featured the protagonist with a huge Idiot Hero, which the anime concept was a complete success. The finalized cartoon is in CGI but still keeps a lot of its Japanese influences (for example, in some of Marinette's trains of thought, her mental images are drawn in the style of black-and-white manga).
• The 2007 adaptation of Valérian called Time Jam: Valerian & Laureline is another.
• The Podcats, a French series animated in Canada by the company who did Clash of the Dinosaurs and some of the effects for Underworld: Awakening.
• Iginio Straffi's shows Winx Club and Huntik: Secrets & Seekers (from Italy) were designed in an anime style, and every character has hair highlights and eyes reminiscent of characters from (respectively) Shoujo and Shonen series. Both heavily feature transformation sequences. They don't use Limited Animation, though.
  • Especially so with the Art Shift in Winx Club's 8th season.
• The Rainbow Magic movie, due to the character designs and animation style; no surprise, as it was co-produced by The Answer Studio.
• Robotboy, which is primarily visible in the Astro Boy-esque premise of the series.
• Spanish animated film Gisaku, going so far as not only being drawn in an animesque style, but also featuring a samurai as protagonist. In Spain.
• Some early Mondo TV (an Italian studio) series were animated in Japan, so an anime style was unavoidable:
  • Christopher Columbus (animation by Nippon Animation)
  • The Jungle Book: The Adventures of Mowgli (animation by Tatsunoko Production)
  • The Legend of Snow White (animation by Tatsunoko Production)
  • Kaiketsu Zorro (aka The Legend of Zorro) (animation by Ashi Production)
  • Robin Hood no Daiboken (animation by Tatsunoko Production)
• Khuda-Yana , a Spanish series by B.R.B. Internacional, looks and moves a lot like your typical anime series.
• Angel's Friends, for the transformation sequences and magical girl motif.
• Sophie et Virginie , for its very Japanese character designs and animation style; not surprising considering it was animated in Japan.
• The characters of Kaeloo often use sweat drops, face faults and other anime-like things.
• Beast Keeper
• Ōban Star-Racers, the series was co-produced in Japan, so it isn't a surprise that it has a Japanesey feel to it.
• The cartoon adaptation of Disney's Italian comic-book series W.I.T.C.H. produced by French studio SIP Animation also uses an anime art-style.
• Wakfu, a France-animated series based on a video game. It's so much that some episodes are produced in Japan. All humanoid characters (those of the Eliatrope, Sadida, Cra and Iop races) have designs and proportions which are faithful to the anime style. For the remaining characters, such as the monsters, the degree of anime influence varies.
• Jelly Jamm is primarily a Spanish-British co-production but utilizes common anime expression tropes including but not limited to; Sweat Drops, Cross-Popping Veins, an Idiot Crow, and even before that there's an episode where Gratuitous Japanese text appears. Bandai Namco of all companies is also involved in the show's production, which may have something to do with it since they're a Japanese company.

    Animation — U.S.A.

• Abby Hatcher is basically a CGI kid's show but with anime elements, especially with the use of quivering puppy dog eyes and miniature mouths with curved corners, speed lines, and the chibi-styled Fuzzlies.

• Avatar: The Last Airbender is anime-influenced in its art style and animation ^note the creators cite Studio Ghibli as an influence, among others. Design-wise, characters have fairly large eyes, exaggerated facial expressions, and Asian-inspired outfits, as the show is rooted in Eastern mysticism and mythology. The animation utilizes Manga Effects like the Sweat Drop and Cross-Popping Veins.
  • The Legend of Korra, as the Sequel Series to Avatar: The Last Airbender, naturally carries over much of the latter's anime influence in its art style. The character designs, exaggerated facial expressions, and many of the outfits all retain the anime influence of the original series. That said, the animesque elements are Down Played compared to Avatar, since Korra mixes them with a Roaring Twenties western aesthetic for most of the environments.
• The Avengers: United They Stand added some Japanese-looking elements. Ant-Man, The Falcon, The Wasp, and Hawkeye were redesigned and given suits of Power Armor, complete with Transformation Sequences.
• Ballmastrz: 9009 is basically a Sports Anime by the creators of Super Jail. Unlike other animesque Adult Swim shows like Perfect Hair Forever and Gemusetto Machu Picchu, it's a somewhat more serious attempt at creating an animesque cartoon rather than being a straight-up parody, although it's still heavily comedic.
• The classic Ben 10 series amalgamates elements from the anime style (speed lines, hair highlights, and flashy transformation sequences) with motifs and character designs from the comic book genre. The Omniverse incarnation of the franchise plays this trope more straight, with character designs that veer away from the American superhero comic book style.

• Blaze and the Monster Machines heavily borrows different styles of anime, especially facial elements. Notable in that the mouths of the trucks tend to expand rather wide when shouting or grit rather exaggeratedly when angry or straining, and as of the Art Evolution introduced in Season 3, speed lines can sometimes be used. It gets much more expressive and detailed as the series progresses.
• The Blinkins, like many 80's cartoons, has animation by a Japanese company, though it was produced in America.
• Steve Ahn's Blossom Detective Holmes brings over the eastern flair from his time working on Voltron: Legendary Defender and The Legend of Korra, channeling it into a young adult mystery series. According to the series' mission statement, it aims to make anime a viable production in the U.S. the same way western series could be made in Japan.
• The Boondocks uses stylistic Watanabe-based animation, chiefly because Aaron McGruder is One of Us. Also, most of the animation studios that worked on this show are in Korea (however, Madhouse in Japan did do a bit of work on this show as well, and two of the animation studios are owned by Japanese companies Madhouse and Studio Gallop). There's an Easter Egg homage to Samurai Champloo in the the second opening. The first one is a Shout-Out to Cowboy Bebop. So, in other words, they're both shout-outs to Shinichiro Watanabe. They even devote an entire episode to both Samurai Champloo's "Baseball Blues" and Shaolin Soccer ("The Red Ball")
• Each season of Captain N: The Game Master was outsourced to a different studio. The second went to Japan. Said season did stand out, though, with better drawn episodes like The Legend of Zelda crossover.
• The DiC series Care Bears has been described as animesque, and in fact it really looks like some of the children and adults are drawn in this style. (There is even an episode where a character is shown wearing a Sailor Fuku.) This was one of the examples of a co-production with Japanese animators, and there were even parts where they showed newspapers with scribbles that seem to indicate it being written like Japanese newspapers.
• Centurions, showing some of Sunrise's influence. It even served as the first ever project for their Studio 7 branch.
• The 4Kids Entertainment cartoon Chaotic is an interesting example of this. Although the first season uses simplistic-looking flash animation, the second season changes completely, using a style that is clearly based on anime.
• Conan the Adventurer, by the American-Japanese studio Jetlag Productions.
• Though it didn't last beyond the Pilot episode, Constant Payne was heavily inspired by anime in its artstyle, and Word of God listed Cowboy Bebop as an inspiration.
• Crunchyroll normally distributes anime, but the few in-house series all carry the aesthetic. This has lead to immense vitriol from more toxic fans who cannot stop complaining that it's "not real anime" or "just cartoons":
  • Onyx Equinox is probably the least over examples. Character designs resemble Avatar ones, but there are a few more "aethentic anime" designs like Quetzalcoatl's true form.
  • High Guardian Spice is inspired by Magical Girl through and through.
  • Blade Runner: Black Lotus is actually listed as an anime, but it was made in-house. It resembles Japanese video games more than anime, but retains many of the medium's styles.
• The DCU:
  • Batman: The Animated Series has a couple of nods to The Castle of Cagliostro (and used TMS Entertainment to boot), but overall, the art style is closer to the old Fleischer cartoons. The New Batman Adventures episode "Growing Pains" in particular has a Ghibli-esque look and feel to it. A bit of research does yield that it was animated alongside some animators from Ghibli.
  • Batman Beyond borrows the setting, a futuristic city overrun by gangs, and a recurring theme of Bio-Augmentation from AKIRA.
  • Some of Justice League's action sequences are Dragon Ball-esque earth-shattering fights. The Justice League episode "Legends" also features a giant robot that is a not-too-subtle Shout-Out to EVA Unit-01. There's also the Justice League Unlimited episode "Chaos at the Earth's Core", which starts with a fight against a kaiju in Japan.
  • The Batman. With the fight scenes, use of stock footage for his suit-up sequence, and the designs for both Robin and Batgirl, it definitely takes influence from anime.
  • Batman: Gotham Knight was created by multiple anime studios, but was primarily made for an American audience, and distributed by an American company. The stories were American-made but the actual animation was directed by several famous anime directors. Each segment also uses a different animation style.
  • Bruce Timm revealed that before Justice League, the next Batman show was slated to be an anime-inspired reboot that he described as "Batman meets Power Rangers".
  • Teen Titans was heavily inspired by anime in general, and by bizarre, expressionist anime like FLCL in particular. This led it to have all the "quirks" of Japanese animation, like sweatdrops, "chibi" forms, etc. and even a title theme by J-Pop band Puffy AmiYumi. Taking it even further, all the quirky "filler" episodes have the theme sung in Japanese.
    • Teen Titans: Trouble in Tokyo, in which the Titans go to Tokyo, contains parodies and references to everything from Kodansha comics and weird Japanese commercials to Japanese art, and includes a sub-plot where Beast Boy sings the Japanese version of the theme song at a karaoke bar and gains a fanbase of Japanese schoolgirls. Even its spin-offs keep up the look; the DC Nation shorts resembled chibi omake chapters, and Teen Titans Go! is a Galaxy Angel-esque parody series that wouldn't look out of place in CoroCoro Comic.
• One of the Dexter's Laboratory Cartoon Network Groovies is styled in an animesque style.
• Dungeons & Dragons (1983) was animated by Toei Animation from beginning to end, and while Marvel/TSR claim to have made sure to keep all designs as American-styled as possible, guest characters often look like they jumped straight out of an anime.
• While Frankenstein Jr. didn't have an especially anime-like art style, it was one of the first Western series to be inspired by anime—specifically, contemporary Super Robot works such as Gigantor.
• Gargoyles uses this trope fairly obviously, and has its share of Japanese directors and designers.
• G.I. Joe: Resolute, a Darker and Edgier incarnation written by Warren Ellis, animated by Titmouse Inc. channeling Madhouse, and voiced by four people. Given the lavish budget of the live-action cartoon, fans wonder how much it cost to make this miniseries and if it can be repeated.
• GI Joe Sigma Six had all-American heroes animated in Japan and badly edited for the US. Few remember the show, but its merchandise like the Dragonhawk are much sought after. The original GI Joe series also had most of its animation done in Japan.
• Glitch Techs features dynamic action scenes, chibis, and expressive facial features reminiscent of 2000s boom of similarly-styled Western cartoons of the trend. It helps that one of the animation studios involved is Flying Bark Productions, which also animated Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the same style.
• True to the birthplace of the eponymous J-pop singers, Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi. And Janice Kawaye's role of Ami helps out, considering that she speaks fluent Japanese.
• DiC's Inspector Gadget. Aside from moving like '80s anime, the influence became especially visible in Gadget any time the characters were shaded. TMS Entertainmnt was even a co-producer during the first season.
• Invader Zim is very popular among anime fans and somewhat animesque; the Megadoomer was even a miniature, squat, practically chibi-style EVA with invisibility, and an entire sequence of the Christmas Episode was a practically shot-for-shot remake of a scene from End Of Evangelion. The DVDs were even produced by a company that usually produces anime DVDs, which caused most video stores to place the show's DVDs in the "anime" section.
• Jem was animated by Toei Animation. It has an overall Western art style; however, some Japanese things accidentally slid in, like some background extras looking animesque and a Japanese eyechart appearing instead of an American one. The series also uses characters who naturally have abnormal hair colors, which is uncommon in American animation, and has some Magical Girl traits. The show has Eye Catches as well, which are more common in anime than American cartoons.

• Kappa Mikey: Everyone save the title character is drawn in a limited-animation anime style as the show is set in Japan — therefore everyone there is Japanese and must be drawn in a Japanese style, except the title character, who is American and drawn in a much simpler fashion. It pulls no punches when it comes to Facefaults and thinly veiled parodies. This is played for laughs in one scene when everyone gets a big-head facefault except Mikey, being drawn in American style. He holds his breath in an attempt to copy them, fails, then mumbles, "Show-offs".
• Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts: The show's artstyle alone gives off this vibe, to say nothing of that fact that the animation is done by Studio Mir.

• Magic Adventures of Mumfie: There are lots of Ridiculously Cute Critters in the show, Mumfie's winking, the characters having Wide Eyes and Shrunken Irises when they are shocked in "The Amazing Scarecrow", a villain who predates shojou anime villains such as the Grim Reaper and Zakkena, and Scarecrow occasionally using an anime style of eyes when smiling or sleeping. The first and second seasons were actually animated in Canada, and the most anime-esque season, the third, was animated in Spain.
• Maryoku Yummy: Just by its name you would think it's Japanese, but it was actually made in America and based on the Edo period of art, most characters have Japanese names, and the characters make anime eyes sometimes, such as Fudan in "Doggone Dog" and Maryoku in "Cinderyoku."
• The Ruby-Spears Mega Man cartoon took a Japanese license, redrew it American style, and had it animated in Japan. What's more, the redesigns were based on some sketches that Mega Man (Classic) creator Keiji Inafune happened to have done in his spare time.
• Megas XLR, which combines something obstinately Japanese (the Giant Mecha genre) with something obstinately American (New Jersey and muscle cars).
• Monsuno. This can be further blurred by most of its English cast being more known for working on anime.

• My Life as a Teenage Robot is Down Played in the sense that the ordinary human characters have a Western aesthetic, but the robot and alien characters, especially the main character Jenny herself, have large eyes and use facial expressions common in Anime. There's even an episode that has Jenny lose her language OS disc after a trip to Japan, leaving her only able to speak Japanese for almost its entirety. As with the AmiYumi example above, it helps that her voice actress, Janice Kawaye, is a Japanese-American who speaks Japanese fluently.
• My Little Pony:
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is what happens if the My Little Pony franchise was rebooted using Anime Tropes. The art style adopted the distinctively big-head, tiny-mouth, wide and sparkling eyes style that anime is known for. Some anime graphical elements even found their way into the show. That said, the art style is still very westernized, in particular when it comes to the non-pony characters and animals.
  • The My Little Pony TV Specials were animated by Japanese studios, and it shows. The second one looks especially shoujo.
  • My Little Pony (G3) was often described in its heyday as an animesque take on the characters, specifically their character designs.
• Neo Yokio is an American production co-animated by Studio DEEN and Moi Animation to boot. The style imitates anime of the early 2000s, complete with frequently off-model characters, flat coloring, and many hallmarks of the genre that have fallen out of favor like sweat drops, nosebleeds, and chibification. It also seems to reference low budget anime dubbing, with poor lip syncing and voice acting of varying quality.
• The New Adventures of He-Man has some pretty clear anime influence in its Title Sequence, and some episodes actually have sweat drop-ing and other signature anime quirks!
• The Owl House leans Western in its character designs and facial expressions, but has some obvious anime influences regardless, such as the large, expressive eyes and Amity's colorful hair. That's not to mention the Trapped in Another World plot heavily mirroring isekai works.
• Ozzy & Drix was based on an American movie and animated in Korea, but came out during the rise of anime-styled shows, so looks animesque.
• The Pirates of Dark Water would weave in and out of this trope due to having Tama Productions among its studios. The pilot miniseries had a little extra work by Madhouse.
• Popples: The children have randoseru backpacks, the "ViVi" magazine in "A Hair-Raising Experience" has Japanese writing on it, and Party has Wide Eyes and Shrunken Irises after very loud music is blasted into her ears by her radio at the near-end of "Pop Goes the Radio".
• The Powerpuff Girls (2016) has an anime-inspired sequence in "Power of Four" where the girls transform into one big glowing Powerpuff Girl and fight a monstrous version of Him. A Japanese song plays as this occurs and a girl takes off her glasses to show off her purple "anime eyes".
• Rainbow Brite made use of Japanese-outsourced animation, and it shows, especially the big eyes and thick eyelashes (which even the boys sport). Some of Murky Dismal's expressions wouldn't look out of place in an anime, either. The show is essentially a Magical Girl cartoon as well, and was even translated as Mahou Shoujo Rainbow Brite in Japan.
• Ready Jet Go!: The characters' huge, shiny eyes and spiky hair on some of them could bring anime to mind. Also, the comic-book style transitions and montages resemble anime. Notable that Craig Bartlett is a fan of Hayao Miyazaki.
• The Real Ghostbusters. The characters practically switch styles depending on whether or not they're shaded. Then you have things like Stay Puft's anime expressions in the opening, and even a Face Fault during the old promo.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power is what would happen if you rebooted the classic She-Ra show using an anime format. The art style clearly borrows from 90's Magical Girl anime, particularly the way the characters's eyes are drawn, and the works of Hayao Miyazaki and Mœbius.
• Animated by Ashi Productions and having a Sentai-like team, Skysurfer Strike Force had several anime-inspered elements, especially the Skysurfers' Transformation Sequence.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil has some shades of this, since the main character is essentially a Magical Girl and there are quite a few anime references, along with some Gratuitous Japanese here and there. This is more pronounced later on, with a major character being a Sailor Senshi Send-Up.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars is described by its creators "like anime but in 3D", the show has clear influence in anime art style merged with the Genndy Tartakovsky style seen in Star Wars: Clone Wars.
• Star Wars Rebels: The successor of The Clone Wars naturally applied an animesque art style fused with a little Disney art style.
• Star Wars Resistance has an even more noticeable anime influence than its predecessors, right down to the more expressive faces and brighter color palette. It's even co-animated by Polygon Pictures, the Japanese studio behind shows like Knights of Sidonia, Blame and Ajin, as well as the animated Godzilla films.
• Though its art style is mostly western, Steven Universe takes a lot of aesthetic and thematic hints from anime. Most notably, the Crystal Gems are essentially Magical Girl Warriors, and there are plenty of references to anime throughout the show. Pearl herself looks very reminiscent of an Osamu Tezuka creation, being very tall and bendy with a pointy nose. The first half hour episode "Bismuth" adds to this by adding Eye Catchs before and after the commercials.
• Storm Hawks's anime influence is most notable in the hair and eyes.
• Super Robot Monkey Team Hyper Force Go, with an old-school super sentai tokusatsu flavor.
• Many episodes of SWAT Kats have anime-like uses of shadows and shading. The series also has some of the most fluid animation and action scenes you'll find in 90s cartoons. This is probably because it was (for the most part) animated by Mook DLE, whom also helped out on Eureka Seven, Gungrave, R.O.D the TV and Mars Daybreak.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) has a Five-Episode Pilot animated by Toei Animation and several later episodes also done in Japan in a distinctly anime-like style at points. This predated the actual anime based on the series.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003) is particularly Animesque in terms of storytelling but many of the action scenes have a clear anime influence. The opening sequence even has a Shout-Out to AKIRA. This actually got more pronounced as the series went on and the "Back to the Sewer" season dropped all pretense whatsoever.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) features even clearer stylistic anime influence than the 2003 show.
  • Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles takes the crown of Animesque TMNT properties, with designs and action scenes that'd look right at home with some of Studio Trigger's more action heavy shows.
• Three Delivery is an anime-influenced series by Animation Collective.
• ThunderCats (2011) touts its look and animation by Japan's Studio 4°C as major selling points.
• Transformers:
  • Transformers Animated. It helps that one of the co-owners of the property is a Japanese company, and all three of its animation studios are Japanese.
  • Transformers: Prime has some anime influences in the overall aesthetic of the show...largely because it's an attempt at blending the style of Transformers Animated with the Michael Bay films.
  • The original Transformers cartoon uses this trope as well. Between much of its animation looking like full-blown anime at times, and the involvement of many prominent Japanese animators for both the show and the movie.
• Trollz is this, with speed lines, animesque eyes, and the girls being magical.

    Animation — Other

• Kung Fu Dino Posse
• Kuu Kuu Harajuku is known with the main characters looking like anime-like characters due to being a Japanese band from Gwen Stefani.
• My Life Me is rather infamous example in some circles for this. It was made to capitalize on the 2000s anime fad.
• Rollbots
• D.N. Ace has a taste of this, given the anime-like look of the cast.

    Arts

    Card Games

• The original card game Magi-Nation was like this, before it got bought out and had change in art style.
• Magic: The Gathering plays this straight often (for example, Chandra, the Firebrand and Jace, Memory Adept. Double points in that there was a special edition version of their original cards drawn by a manga artist released sometime before), but it's averted in the Japan-themed Kamigawa block, which seemed to go more for an art style reminiscent of traditional Japanese art instead of anime.

    Comic Books

• The style of Sky Doll (especially the side material, e.g. Lacrima Christi or Space Ship) is discreetly, but definitely influenced by the manga style.
• Adam Warren drew OEL Manga years before it became the cool thing to do — or had a name. One of his contemporaries in that sense is Lea Hernandez.
• The title character of Empowered hangs a lampshade on this in a meta-text panel from Vol. 1, lamenting that a manga-styled superhero comic won't have it easy when most manga fans have zero interest in western style superheroes, while most superhero fans hate anything that even looks like manga.
• X-Men was actually drawn by manga creator Kia Asamiya for a brief time in 2002. As well, the art of Joe Madureira, who drew the book from 1994 to 1997, is heavily manga-influenced.
• The Marvel Adventures version of Power Pack by Gurihiru Studios. Like with most other Japanese artists hired to draw American comics, it is just as much an example of them matching our style even in pacing and storytelling.
• Ditto the art of Runaways. But looks less animesque as Art Evolution goes.
• Similarly Gurihiru's artwork on Superman Smashes the Klan. In particular, the villain's hair and facial expressions are blatant "shonen manga villain" during the climax, which is amusing given his white supremacist motivations.
• Ninja High School was drawn and written by Ben Dunn, an admitted anime and manga addict, and pretty much spoofed and/or parodied anything and everything in the genres that it could get away with in its early days. Since then, it's settled down into an actual overarching plot, but the parody elements (as well as the art style) remain woven integrally in.
• Gold Digger, another Antarctic Press title by Fred Perry, has an art style heavily influenced by anime/manga, but the artist himself tends to keep the proportions within the art consistent and avoids the common visual gags for the most part. Also, while references creep in from anime that Fred's seen, they're kept company by an equal number of pop culture references from the Western world as well.

• One early example of American graphic novel influenced by manga is Wendy and Richard Pini's ElfQuest.
• The Door Stopper It Takes a Wizard is drawn in manga-style despite not being a "Manga" in definition. (It's even placed in the manga section.)
• Radiant could easily be mistaken for a Japanese series — it even goes on the Manga namespace on This Very Wiki. Valente notes his influence from Toriyama and Yusuke Murata's works, and it definitely shows in his art. He even refers to the series as a shonen manga by name. It's also one of the few mangaesque series to fully make the jump to its country of inspiration; Murata endorsed the series when it was translated into Japanese, and Lerche spearheaded an anime adaptation of the series airing in late 2018. Fairy Tail author Hiro Mashima commented in volume 5 that "while it looks like a Japanese manga at first glance, its slightly bitter tone feels very European."
• James Paterson's novel series Maximum Ride was adapted into an OEL Manga.
• Rockin Raven is very deliberately based on the manga style.
• The art style of Dark Wraith of Shannara, Del Rey's first foray into comic publishing, was meant to emulate manga, but had Western-style panel layout.
• The OEL adaptation of Sherrilyn Kenyon's The Dark Hunters was written by an American, drawn and lettered by Americans, reads and looks like a typical American indie comic, but is formatted in a right-to-left page format like a manga.
• The Dreaming is a comic that is drawn in manga-style by a Chinese-Australian author named Queenie Chan. It's even published by TokyoPop, and is considered one of the first non-Japanese manga series that they published.
• Dork Diaries looks rather animesque, but it's more to give the idea of a girl who is an artist doodling in her diary, and her drawings are actually quite detailed.
• Batman:
  • Gotham Knight
  • Batman Death Mask
  • Batman Child Of Dreams
  • Batman: Black and White: "The Third Mask".
• Ape Entertainment's Scarlet Veronica seems to deliberately attempt to blur the line between western comic art and manga art. Typically resembling Thick-Line Animation, characters facefault, sweatdrop, and even go chibi as the situation requires.
• Becky Cloonan's work in Demo draws primarily from older indie comics, but steps into anime territory for at least two issues — issue #3 ("Emmy") and issue #10 ("Damaged") both seem heavily manga-influenced. By the second series she seems to have grown fond of the style.
• Chynna Clugston's Blue Monday. The cover of the first volume even has the lead lounging in a giant bowl of ramen!
• Vampirella: There was a sci-fi re-imagining called "Vampi" that was done in a heavy anime style.
• Welcome to Tranquility features an Art Shift to this style in the back-up that gives the skinny on background character Mangacide an extreme Occidental Otaku.
• Ame-Comi Girls is a series based off the popular Anime-inspired toyline. The series stars Manga-styled redesigns of characters such as Wonder Woman and Batgirl.
• UDON Entertainment, best known for Street Fighter and official art for most Capcom projects since 2005. Dozens of artists, most of them Canadian, all of them with clearly manga-inspired styles, the best known of them arguably being Alvin Lee, who handled the series up until Street Fighter II and is responsible for the UDON art found in the Capcom games that use it.
• Monica's Gang:
• Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim is quite heavily influenced by manga art style. The characters have large heads with big, expressive eyes.
• Seconds. O'Malley specifically stated he wanted to try "70s/80s manga style like Rumiko Takahashi or Izumi Matsumoto" with "bigger hair and 'cuter' figures."
• Godzilla: Rulers of Earth, whenever it's being drawn by Matt Frank, has extremely anime-like designs, especially on the humans. Which is somewhat fitting seeing as the franchise in general is Japanese in origin.
• Jake Wyatt's issues of Ms. Marvel, complete with really adorable Chibi expressions for Kamala.
• Poet Anderson: The Dream Walker
• Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) went through a period of this from 1996 to about the mid-2000s. Cover artist Patrick "Spaz!" Spaziante was the first to go into this with James Fry and Ron Lim soon after.
• Archie Comics had a few 'manga style' series in the early 2000s, when anime was gaining popularity in America. Fans hated the artwork however the actual writing in the Sabrina the Teenage Witch comic was praised.
• IDW's Jem and the Holograms (IDW) has a western art style however it does have some manga influences. Jerrica does a Magical Girl type spin when becoming Jem and certain artists use some manga-type expressions.
• Erin Hunter:
  • Warrior Cats' graphic novels, despite being American in origin, are called manga, and James Barry in particular has a more animesque style than the other artists. He tends to give cats tufts on their heads, even though cats don't actually have said tufts (and in an extreme example, one had actual hair ◊).
  • Sister series Seeker Bears also has a few OEL Manga.
• The titles of the short-lived Culture Crash Comics from the Philippines, which includes Cat's Trail, One Day Isang Diwa, Pasig, Solstice Butterfly, and sometimes Kubori Kikiam all featured Animesque designs.
• Also, the Filipino Funny Komiks, which formerly utilized Western comics style, later introduced manga-esque designs by the late 90s or early 2000s. The strip Combatron started the trend, which is basically the Filipino take on Mega Man.
• The Manga Classics series adapts classic literature into an OEL Manga format.
• Witch & Wizard was adapted into two manga-style graphic novels in 2010-11.

    Comic Strips

• The Boondocks has been using an animesque artstyle since its newspaper comics strip days. This is because creator Aaron McGruder says that anime presents the feeling of live-action while still being animation. It also allowed him to get away with Only Six Faces by differentiating only the hairdos and skin tone of a lot of the younger characters.
• InSecurity looks as if it came out of a manga series, from wild-looking Anime Hair, Alertness Blinks, Big Ol' Eyebrows and Visible Silence, to most other Japanese Visual Arts Tropes.
• The newspaper strip My Cage has many of its female characters drawn in an animesque style, though everything else is pretty western. Notable for the fact that its syndicate made a big honking deal about how it will appeal to "manga fans". It appealed to people, just not the massive amounts of manga fans that they were expecting.
• A christian comic Tract series called The Truth For Youth uses a manga style.

    Fan Works

• Beochan: Paisean Agus Aiféala has a little bit of an anime feel in its art style, much like The Powerpuff Girls.
• Holo-Chronicles is, appropriately enough for being based off of hololive, a series with a very clear anime inspiration. Kugeki even lists the specific anime that they reference from in the descriptions of the videos.
• Pacific: World War II U.S. Navy Shipgirls is drawn in this manner, due to being a KanColle-based work.

    Films — Animation

• Ark, being co-produced between South Korea and the US, has animation similar to Final Fantasy and wouldn't look out of place when compared to Japanese mecha anime.
• While the Robotech movie Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles is made from original footage, the anime aesthetic of the original series remains. The animation itself is from Korean studio DR Movie, which has worked on anime such as — appropriately — Macross Plus. Being owned by Madhouse also doesn't hurt.
• Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland. An adventurous, higher budget co-production with Japan, the style often fell into full anime mode including the sound effects.

• The Last Unicorn definitely has a resemblance to the anime style. The Unicorn's human form could easily be mistaken for a Sailor Senshi.
• Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, being partly animated in Japan, and Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker being entirely so and actively channeling AKIRA. Mask of the Phantasm even includes a short shot-for-shot recreation of a sequence from The Castle of Cagliostro.
• Most of the DC Universe Animated Original Movies have the feel (if not the look) of a typical anime. With entries like Justice League: Doom and Batman: Gotham Knight having been animated in Japan.
• The Transformers: The Movie. Glaringly Animesque visuals by Toei Animation made even more noticeable by the TV series switching from Toei to AKOM immediately afterward.
• Technotise Edit I Ja is clearly anime-influenced in both style and subject matter, the first Serbian film to be so.
• Ever since The Little Mermaid was released into theaters in the late 1980s, at the same time anime was beginning to show up in the United States, many of Disney's later films started to incorporate anime-influenced elements into their character designs, particularly the size and shape of their eyes. Just compare Snow White's eyes with those of Tiana's!
• The Cars Japanese cars and scenes in Japan lean into anime-ish, with the size and shape of the eyes, Gratuitous Japanese phrases being tossed around, and a drift race involving literal Car Fu with ninjas.
• Bolívar, el Héroe: The designs are drawn in manga style to appeal to younger audiences, since anime series like Saint Seiya and Dragon Ball Z were quite popular then.
• The Mexican film The Guardians of the Lost Code
• Poet Anderson: The Dream Walker is influenced by anime with its character designs and fluid action, though there's still western animation design cues in the characters. Interviews with the creators show it's intentional and classics like AKIRA were cited as influences.
• South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut naturally spoofs anime with the Dragon Ball Z-esque battle between Cartman and Saddam near the end, complete with motion lines and odd camera angles.
• Exchange Student Zero revolves about two students from Australia who frequently play with cards from a card-based anime. A series of events brings one of the game's characters, Hiro, to life, with more joining him as the movie progresses; as a result, the animation is a mix of the Western-styled "real life" characters, done in simple Thin-Line Animation with Black Dot Pupils, and the anime-based card characters, who have Big Anime Eyes and are more detailed with robust shading.
• The character Peni Parker a Japanese/American Spidergirl from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is designed and animated this way, the creators citing Sailor Moon as an inspiration for her.
• The Scooby-Doo films Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, Scooby-Doo! and the Witch's Ghost, Scooby-Doo and the Alien Invaders, and Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase have an anime esque look to them.

    Films — Live-Action

• The Movie version of Speed Racer was described as "the first live-action anime", and it certainly fits, with Speed clearly a Hot-Blooded hero, the mecha-like Car Fu, and even Speed Lines! A parody of Fist of the North Star also appears in the show.
• The story of O-Ren Ishii from Kill Bill Volume One had a portion which was an anime-style cartoon homaging — of course — anime.
• Brick is created with the same shot composition and editing an anime would have. Brendan's looks are also based off Spike Spiegel.
• The story of Pacific Rim The film takes a great deal of cues from Super Robot Genre anime, as well as Toho Kaiju films. This was probably the idea behind the over-the-top characterization, including a hot-blooded rival.

    Live-Action TV

• Between Stephanie's male fans and pink hair, and the cartoony world, non-fans have mistakenly assumed that LazyTown is Japanese or influenced by anime.
• Super Sentai and Power Rangers:
  • Bachsfundo/King Mondo of Chouriki Sentai Ohranger/Power Rangers Zeo has Cross-Popping Veins on his face.

• Hikonin Sentai Akibaranger airs at Otaku O'Clock and has heroes with Anime Hair molded into their helmets, and female characters are constantly subjected to Panty Shot upon Panty Shot.

    Music Videos

    Tabletop Games

• In contrast to the Steampunk aesthetic of the other WARMACHINE factions, the Retribution of Scyrah has a distinctly Magitek feel, with lots of flowing shapes, shining white surfaces, and glowing blue-green Tron Lines. Their myrmidons, the equivalent to other races' steamjacks, bear more than a passing resemblance to the mecha in The Vision of Escaflowne, and many of their characters have spiky hair dyed in bright colors.

    Toys

• LEGO:
  • LEGO Exo-Force was LEGO's take on anime and the Humongous Mecha, replete with very exaggerated Shonen Hair, random kanji slapped everywhere, typical Japanese names, and a heavy dose of anime and mecha-genre tropes.
  • In the same vein, Ninjago focuses on Ninjas with a bit of mecha thrown in here and there, most notably the Samurai X mech and various Serpentine vehicles. It's a little more subtle about it in that it limits itself to Shonen Hair and kanji is few and far in between. The names also reflect a much larger variety, with only Kai, Nya and Misako being anywhere close to Japanese. It still uses a lot of anime cliches, such as magical weapons, power-up transformations, color-coded chosen warriors and the aforementioned Shonen Hair. It also mixes several other asian themes into it as well, most notably Sensei-Wu, who appears more Chinese than Japanese.

    Video Games

• During its development, Jet Force Gemini was inspired by several science fiction works, including the anime series Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, hence the character designs for Juno, Vela and to a lesser extent Lupus, specifically their anime-style eyes and the humans' space suits. In particular, Juno's helmet is modeled similarly to that of Ken the Eagle, while Vela's skimpy wear mimics that of Jun the Swan. At one point in the game, their suits are upgraded with Jet Pads to fly in certain places, similar to the Science Ninja Team when gliding with the Bird Style. And each time the player resumes their playthrough, the character selection has the heroes preparing to eject from their mothership into the site of action, similar to when the Gatchaman characters prepare to head into the current episode's place of conflict.

• The Caverns Of Hammerfest contains a few animesque traits, what with the blurred-feet running animation for Igor and the little dance he might do after you idle — the latter being is a homage to Haré+Guu.

• Dragon Age II: Elves got an overhaul to look more like their Japanese counterparts, with long pointy ears, huge eyes, smoothed-out facial features and skinny bodies, including the token Anti-Hero companion.

• Carrie's Order Up! uses big eyes and a bright, colorful style that does an amazing job of recreating the look and feel of '90s Japanese arcade games.

• Undertale: Invoked; in the True Final Boss fight, the psychedelic background, the music, and the name of his attacks and the calling of them just screams cliched JRPG, but it's because he thinks anime is rad.

• A Hat in Time has cute character designs with large eyes, anime-style expressions, and speed lines are used frequently.

• No Straight Roads uses a highly-stylized art style with a slight anime influence that's most obviously seen in the 2D animation cutscenes. One particularly strong case is the Virtual Idol Sayu, who is deliberately designed to be a cutesy anime Genki Girl with Idiot Hair.
• Haven (2020), by France-based developers The Game Bakers of Furi fame, has an art style and storyline that could be straight out of a Hayao Miyazaki film (the protagonists even have Asian-sounding names), and gameplay highly inspired by Japanese RPG's such as Persona. Bonus points for the Attract Mode and end credits cinematics being produced by an actual Japanese animator.
• Forgotton Anne is a Danish adventure game whose style and themes are clearly inspired by Studio Ghibli films.

    Visual Novels

• Katawa Shoujo is a Western attempt at making a Japanese-style Visual Novel, complete with anime-style artwork. The art style is because the original art that inspired the game was Japanese. Some people saw a Japanese artist's drawings for a visual novel he'd like to see one day and decided to make it an actual visual novel. It succeeds at emulating Japanese anime/manga and Visual Novels so well that a good amount of fans were actually surprised to hear that it wasn't made in Japan.
• Zig-zagged with don't take it personally babe, it just ain't your story. While it is a Western-made visual novel, its background CG art and character sprites are used ready-made from a Japanese designer that specifically makes them available for amateur visual novels. On the other hand, their AmieConnect avatar pictures and event CGs are drawn by a western artist in animesque style, but with still a heavy western feel. The transition is actually slightly jarring.
• Anything by the infamous "Winged Cloud", usually their visual novels are prefixed "Sakura".
• Everlasting Summer was developed by Russians, was originally written in the Russian language, and is primarily set in the former Soviet Union. But both the gameplay and character design seem straight out of a Japanese visual novel.
• Missing Stars is an English language visual novel that has animesque character designs. It is a Spiritual Successor inspired by Katawa Shoujo set in a European school. The finalized art is a bit more western than the early concept art, however it is still animesque.
• NomnomNami's characters are usually drawn in a particular anime style. This style can be seen in Her Tears Were My Light.
• Extracurricular Activities is a Western novel where the facial expressions and gags are anime-influenced, as well as the novel borrowing from the Harem Genre where instead of cute girls, the love interests are hulking anthropomorphic men. In early 2018, the novel switched over to a new artist where the art direction became less animesque.
• We Know the Devil is another Western visual novel with character designs largely grounded in reality, but with clear anime influences. Most pronounced in the case of Venus, who has big round eyes.
• Heaven Will Be Mine is made by the same team as We Know The Devil and not only has the same artist but is a Mecha series with heavy influence from Gundam. One of the main characters, Luna-Terra, is even a female Char Clone.
• Doki Doki Literature Club! is a School Club Story with typical Japanese high school girl archetypes and a moe art style. It was developed by an American team lead by Dan Salvato, who is also a developer and pro player of Project M. This is part of its Affectionate Parody/Deconstructive Parody nature; even the dialogue is written to sound like it's badly translated from Japanese, and there's a fourth-wall-breaking joke that implies it is so translated, even though it's not. Except it eventually becomes very creepy, but keeps the art style.
• Va 11 Hall A looks like an anime visual novel that's really deep in the PC-98 aesthetic, but the game was developed in Venezuela.
• A Summer's End — Hong Kong, 1986 is a Visual Novel developed by Studio Oracle and Bone, a team based in Canada, but it takes a lot of aesthetic cues from anime of The '80s, such as City Hunter and Kimagure Orange Road. In one post from the official site, the artist names the art of Haruhiko Mikimoto, Akemi Takada and Akihiro Yamada as some early artistic influences.

    Web Animation

• Bee and Puppycat is very obviously inspired by shoujo anime both thematically and stylistically. Bee specifically is reminiscent of Usagi in that she is a Loser Protagonist and becomes a Magical Girl who fights in space after she meets a cat (dog... thing.) Character design falls short of just being anime altogether.
• Many of the early BIONICLE web animations had shades of this. The character models were very faithful to the sets, but they would occasionally include things like Sweat Drops, Blush Stickers, and stylized motion-blur backgrounds for action sequences.
• The Machinimas Brawl Universe and Smash King tend to heavily lean on the side of anime with how their episodes are filmed and edited, as they tend to use EyeCatchers, Japanese Opening/Ending themes as well as Cold Openings, and their action sequences do borrow from anime with the Effects of White/Black spikes surrounding the screen if something dramatic happens, as well as sometimes using transformations in battles.
• Broken Saints: This was more notorious before the Animation Bump, with the first episodes being redone in a more realistic style. However, it still had some visual influence from anime.
• Captain Yajima , a short film made by Ian "Worthikids" Worthington of BIGTOP BURGER fame, is an interesting example. The short was animated in Blender, and evokes a distinctive Will Vinton stop motion aesthetic, but the character designs and expressions are heavily inspired by anime. To add a layer of authenticity, the voice acting is done entirely in Japanese, and provided by RASH A 1 M, the same Japanese dubbing team that worked on the Japanese dub for Bigtop Burger.
• Dreamscape: Anjren and Ahjeen are animesque in terms of expressions, oddly enough.
• ETU Animated Stories uses an animesque style in their later videos. They even have animesque expressions.
• gen:LOCK uses the same "3D animations that look like 2010s anime" schtick as fellow Rooster Teeth property RWBY. However, the animation content is quite different; taking cues from Gundam, gen:LOCK is essentially a Western mecha anime.
• Muffin Songs, a YouTube channel for children, uses a style reminiscent of anime for its earlier videos, as well as some Japanese Visual Arts Tropes. For example, on this video, Cinderella's face looks like it's drawn in the Puella Magi Madoka Magica art style, and she wears ribbons that are nearly identical to Haruhi Suzumiya's.
• The Red vs. Blue: Animated pilot uses a beautiful and extremely fluid animesque style. Sadly, differences between Rooster Teeth and the group who animated it prevented them from going any further with this. Until Season 14 anyway, where it was made canon and received an extra scene at the end.
• RWBY by Rooster Teeth is an interesting example of this, with everything about the series looking like a 2010s anime, complete with chibis and various animesque expressions... except that they're 3D animations, making them appear like a series made of cutscenes from a post-Oughts JRPG or a 3DCG show by Sanzigen Animation. It actually does a good job on turning those anime gimmicks 3D, and is able to mix in some Western animation tricks as well. Hilariously, when it was uploaded to Crunchyroll, some people started demanding for the "original" Japanese audio, apparently not realizing that English was the original language (although it received a legit Japanese dub later on). While most of the cast placement and angles appears to be a mix of the Machinima style and soap operas, the fight scenes show Monty Oum's signature mix of anime and Kung Fu/Wuxia choreography norms with western martial arts. It apparently did a good enough job of keeping to Japanese tropes, as the series was popular in Japan and ended up getting official manga adaptations — one by Dogs: Bullets & Carnage artist Shirow Miwa, and another as a 4-volume anthology series.
• TIE Fighter is a fanmade Star Wars short animated in the style of '80s anime.

    Webcomics

• '32 Kick-Up is a Fighting Series that combines Manga Effects with Inkblot Cartoon Style Funny Animals.
• 9th Elsewhere has some anime influence, probably because one of the authors lived in Japan for a time while working on it.
• Aki-chan's Life is purposefully modeled after Doujinshi, despite being obviously Western, to the point where all the panels are read right-to-left.
• Alien Hand Syndrome has detailed black and white (sometimes color) Manga-style artwork, complete with coarse half-tone screening, but reads from left to right.
• A Miracle of Science lampshaded its influences by citing them in The Rant and stealing their onomatopoeia.
• Angel Moxie is another webcomic heavily influenced by the Magical Girl genre, and using the Yonkoma format.
• As a comic written for an Anime news website, it was unavoidable that Anime News Nina was this.
• The Beast Legion is very Anime/Manga inspired.
• Bedlam Genesis is done in this style.
• Beloved is a Chinese webcomic but has been mistaken for a Yuri Genre manga (or manhwa) due to its art style.
• Beyond Bloom is a OEL Manga-type webcomic. Characters are drawn with a heavy manga influence mixed with a more western styled roundness.
• Blue Sky mimics manga tropes in much the same way as Project 0.
• Cat Nine from cat girls to it's relatively simplistic style. Plus, it's based somewhere in the Philippines.
• Dave Cheung's Chugworth Academy and Boss Noodle are anime influenced, seeing as they are so risqué...
• City of Trees draws clear inspiration from early-2000's anime and manga.
• Claude & Monet has a heavy manga influence.
• Coga Nito: The comic's overall style is manga-like, particularly in the character designs.
• Collar 6 and its Spiritual Predeccessor, Crimson Latex, both fall well within this trope.
• Consolers features many characters drawn in an anime-ish style, and often uses Japanese Visual Arts Tropes.
• Cross Heart is a manga, except it was written by a Spanish author, originally in Spanish and English, and published for free on DeviantArt.
• Crystal Heroes has a somewhat 70s/80s shoujo art style to it as well as using several manga visual tropes.
• Danger Zone One employs a visual style specifically drawn to appear like a manga.
• Demon Candy: Parallel is drawn in a Yonkoma fashion.
• Devil's Candy mixes manga-esque art with typical Western settings. Fitting, since the duo behind the series were veterans in the OEL Manga scene and even got a one-shot of theirs published in Shonen Jump.
• Dominic Deegan's style has been described as being on the cheap end of animeshun.
• The Dreamcatchers Masquerade uses an anime-influenced art and animation style.
• Earthsong is a Fantasy Webcomic with manga inspiration.
• El Goonish Shive 's visual style has always been anime-inspired, and grown more so over time. The series leans heavily on anime tropes as well, both for humor and as serious plot points. Notably, it is explicitly mentioned several times that blue, purple, pink, green, etc. are common natural Hair Colors in The 'Verse.
• Furry Fight Chronicles is read like a western comic, but the art style and setting is similar to manga in terms of design thanks to the use of certain gags and frequent Gratuitous Japanese.
• Galebound is influenced by anime and manga, although it is read from left to right. The character's expressions occasionally veer into animesque when properly flabbergasted.
• Ghastly's Ghastly Comic gleefully parodies the Ecchi/Hentai genre, especially the tendency for absurd tentacle groping. The art style itself becomes more and more Animesque, and better-looking, over the course of its Art Evolution.
• Gorgeous Princess Creamy Beamy is a parody of Magical Girl anime, and drawn in an anime-influenced style even though the author is American.
• Tom Siddell, author and artist of Gunnerkrigg Court, cites Battle Angel Alita and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind as artistic influences, alongside Western comics like Hellboy and Tank Girl. He incorporates elements from all of them into his own art.
• Grey is... describes itself as a manga and reads from left to right even though its written in English.
• Gun Kitty has an art style clearly influenced by anime, including Spiky Hair and bouncy boobs just for good measure.
• Hand Command is an Arabic comic drawn manga-style and published in both Arabic and English.
• Harpy Gee uses a rather cute version of this.
• Heartcore. The author has listed Slayers as a major inspiration, and it most definitely shows.
• While most of Homestuck is drawn in its own unique style, quite a few anime and video game tropes show up in the story, the GIF animations, and especially the more elaborate Flash animations, leading to a running joke among the fandom that "Homestuck is their favorite anime". This came to a head when Act 7 was released, which was hand-drawn anime instead of the usual style of Flash animation.
• Starting from Iron Violet: The Shy Titan's second issue onwards, it featured many typical anime-styled art tropes, like face faults and chibis. The huge detailed eyes is also massively anime.

• Kuro Shouri is inspired, both visually and in story, by anime of the 90s and 00s. It has taken some cues from Western works over time.
• L33tStr33t Boys is about a band based on a group of Otaku, done in anime style.
• Lily Love is Thai and not Japanese. However, it takes several aspects from Yuri Genre manga, such as the artstyle and chibis.
• The Lounge has considerable manga influence, both in artistic style as well as the art gags and tropes common to manga.
• Mexican artist Kanela gives M9 Girls! a definite manga look à la The Noordegraf Files, complete with chibi panels and manga annotations. The story itself is the Mad Science version of the Magical Girl genre.
• Animesque style isn't reserved to English-language webcomics. Here's a popular French example : Maliki. With one strip directly referencing its many influences, several of them from anime.
• Mechagical Girl Lisa ANT. Even though Ida Kirkegaard is [[Useful Notes/Denmark Danish]], the drawings are something like distorted manga-style drawings.
• MegaTokyo is the archetypal example of this trope in the world of webcomics, even going so far as to take place in Tokyo and be a fantasy/dating sim storyline. The comic has become one gigantic deconstruction of just about every anime-sub-genre, complete with a disaffected Magical Girl who can't really use her powers the way she thinks a magical girl should (meaning, like Sailor Moon).
• Misfile has a major manga-esque influence, with scarcely a strip going by without a super deform, chibi, or the omnipresent egregious Sweat Drop making an appearance. Even Rumisiel's T-shirt gets one of those at one point.
• Monsterful: A Slice-of-Life Webcomics of a monster-only world that shows a moderate manga influence, but it's well balanced with western influences and completes the circle with multiple video-game and internet references from both Eastern and Western markets.
• Mutant Ninja Turtles Gaiden, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan-comic, which has its human characters drawn in a manga style.
• Nightvee: Characters have large eyes and often make anime expressions.
• No Need for Bushido parodies elements from anime/manga set in feudal era Japan.
• The Noordegraaf Files hits this on the head, linking this trope's page on the comic's homepage, and the creator has said in The Rant that it is drawn and colored in a Japanese paint program made for, you guessed it, making manga.
• Overlord of Ravenfell is stylistically influenced by older CLAMP manga and Yoko Matsushita, so definitely falls in this trope.
• Pandora's Tale uses a very cutesy anime aesthetic, especially noticeable on the Helpers.

• In Ronin Galaxy the cover art resembles anime, and the actual pages are made to look like a manga, despite being read from left to right.
• Roommates and its Spin-Offs, Girls Next Door and Down the Street, (the latter to a lesser extent) have a lot of manga influences. However, the Art Evolution of the first two seem to slowly diverge from this style in different directions: Roommates gets more and more realistic, while GND slowly shifts towards the style of Franco-Belgian comics.
• Rusty and Co., besides the parody mentioned below, grew into this style with its Art Evolution, especially in the design of female characters.
• Sandra and Woo is a mixture of this and western comic stylizations.
• School of Mages is drawn in a manga style, and it is even read from right to left.

• Shadownova is drawn with a somewhat Animesque style. The author is heavily influenced by anime and manga.
• Shotgun Shuffle has Cross-Popping Veins, nose vanishing, Sweat Drops and many other anime tropes.
• Sleepless Domain uses a western art-style but it is an anime-inspired webcomic involving Magical Girls.
• Slightly Damned is very anime inspired. Not only are characters drawn in anime style, but the comic also uses a lot of Manga Effects and has several anime and Japanese video game Shout-Outs. The appearance of demons, dragons, other fantasy creatures in Slightly Damned seem to be heavily pokemon inspired, as the creator draws a lot of pokemon Fan Art.
• Some anime-like designs are used for the Sluggy Freelance storyline "GOFOTRON Champion of the Cosmos", with Riff even describing one of the alien species they encounter as "blue, anime-looking people."

• Sodium Eyes takes notes of many anime clichés.

• Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki looks so much like it came from Japan, that it could possibly sell well if it were a published manga there.
• Spinnerette has a heavily manga-influenced style.
• Starfighter is essentially a Western made Yaoi comic. So it has Shojo-inspired character designs in which the Cast Full of Pretty Boys are all Noodle People with angular yet realistic features and unique, often spiky hairstyles (when they're not Long-Haired Pretty Boys). It also makes heavy use of essential Yaoi tropes. The two main characters are the sensitive, feminine Uke and his aggressive, dominant Seme Bastard Boyfriend.
• Star Impact has been described by creator Jack McGee as "a love letter to shounen action and sports anime", and comes complete with odd eye and hair colors being commonplace.
• Star Of Destiny's art style is heavily influenced by anime and manga. The comic is even read from right to left like manga, which the writer of it has deemed enough to label it a "webmanga".
• Ten is a German webcomic written in English and is made to read right to left.
• Likewise Terra, which leans more heavily on the Western influences but uses animesque faces, particularly on the women.
• Their Story is often mistaken for being Japanese or Korean, but it's a Chinese webcomic.
• Tove is a full color webcomic that often borrows elements of Japanese animation, particularly when a shocked Tove is drawn Chibi style.
• Unicorn Jelly and Pastel Defender Heliotrope have a unique but clearly SD take on its art.

• Van Von Hunter, Sokora Refugees, and Red String are manga-inspired webcomics that were eventually published by major American manga companies TokyoPop and Dark Horse. However, Sokora Refugees appears to have been taken off the 'net.

• Welcome To The Pharmacy: The webcomic's artstyle is line art reminiscent of anime & manga.
• Zos Kias is one of those American manga series that reads right to left.

    Web Original

• Smash King is very anime inspired in having eye catchers, anime openings/endings, as well as very animesque battles while still maintaining a grounded world and characters.
• Keit-Ai features animesque art in the webcomic version. Meanwhile, the fanfic and original fiction also feature a mostly Japanese setting and characters. This is to be expected of a series that originated from 4chan.
• Certain Neopets look suspiciously like Pokémon, the PetPets even more so.
• Despite being a text-based Shared Universe serial, Whateley Universe frequently applies anime tropes, often lampshading or deconstructing them but just as often playing them straight. This is underscored by their being a number of characters who are explicit expies of anime or video game characters either due to their mutation (e.g, Tennyo, Tif Lock, Aerys, and Tiff's brother Squalling), or because they deliberately emulate their favorite characters to an obsessive degree (e.g, Ash and AKIRA). ^note It has been noted that all of the ones whose power turned them into copies were all just as obsessive about those characters before they were transformed, meaning that on some level they became who they wanted to be.
• Along with having a manga style cover, the Superhero Web Serial Novel Gamer Girl is bursting with anime tropes, from manga-like facial expressions, to long, Shonen-esque fights, to wacky gag anime-style comedy.
• Gaia Online features anime-style avatars and illustrations, with plenty of shout-outs to anime, manga, and Japanese games. The plot comics are even referred to as "manga". During the site's early years, the tagline was "an anime role playing community" and once featured a directory of anime-related sites.
• Ichika Whatever has a lot of this. Especially in issue 1. In issue 1, Ichika and Himari are trying to think their perspective of Kurt Cobain is, with what would later become Himari having a light pink background, light pink is associated with good in Anime, and what would later be Ichika had a dark red background in her mind and Kurt Cobain was showing an angry anime facial expression. Complete with the bead eyes and a caption(In English) it first appeared on Facebook and may never see the light of day again, this panel was released in 2019. With the series being continued in 2020.
• The last third of the Scott the Woz episode "Anime Games", appropriately enough, has Scott being pulled over into an anime fight scene (with explosions, hand beams and giant mechas) against one Dr. Anna May, who attempts to eliminate Scott for his distaste in all things anime.

Parodies

    Comic Books

• The Ghost Rider villain Skinbender ◊. Er... not for the faint of heart.
• French comic Sentai School is a spoof of many Japanese series (either anime or live-action, and mostly from the '80s) well-known in France.
• Issue 14 of Bart Simpson's Treehouse of Horror features "Murder, He Wrote", a parody of Death Note drawn in a manga style.
• Scott Pilgrim series bears some artistic and formatting similarities to manga style, but its short parody deserves special mention. Volume 4, "Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together", ends with a reading guide as one would find in a right-to-left book. "STOP. This is the BACK of the book. What do you think you're doing?"

    Fan Works

• It isn't uncommon for fan-artists fond of the Animesque style to use it even when depicting non-Japanese series.
• Zany To The Max
  • Of the seven members of the Kat Krew, five are drawn this way. The other two are Drake the Duck and Narf the Mouse.
  • The newest member of the Warner family is Sikko Warner (Pakko, Makko, and Jot's sister), who is drawn this way as well.
  • Other characters drawn this way are Sekoila Zarner and Wacka and Wakka MaRakka.
  • In fact, Zany to the Max even features a fictional country known as Animenia, where almost all the characters are drawn this way. Since Yakko isn't drawn this way, it is unknown how he became the temporary king of Animenia in one episode.
• Animenia is also featured in this author's Homestar Runner fanstuff (which is known as The Homestar Runner Show). The character of Slipstar Runner was created by Homeschool Winner when he visited Animenia with Homestripe and Coach B. In fact, it is revealed that Homestripe's parents are the king and queen of Animenia.
• A Mr. Men fan series by the same author (called The Mr. Men and Little Miss Show) has Little Miss Slippery, who is drawn this way as well. Later on, Little Miss Wacky and Little Miss Camouflage, who are also drawn this way, were added into the series. In all the fan series by this author, the style is referred to as "Animeniesque", which is pronounced similar to (and is possibly also a reference to) Animaniacs.

    Films — Animation

• Manga, anime, and bad dubbing are affectionately parodied in the 2008 animated adaptation of Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who! while Horton, an elephant, imagines he's a heroic ninja (the result looks a lot like Teen Titans).

    Films — Live-Action

• Spoofed in the movie Super Troopers with the really cheap-looking "Afghanistanimation" cartoons produced by the Taliban. When they find a monkey sticker on bags of marijuana, Rabbit explains that this is likely a brand used by these particular dealers, borrowed from the Afghani cartoon Johnny Chimpo, vaguely reminiscent of Anime.

  Captain: What's the significance of this John Chimpo fella?
  Foster: Uh, well, you know those really cheap Japanese cartoons? No? This is basically a cheaper Afghani knockoff. It's this monkey that basically travels around the world... uh, doing nasty things. His butler tries to keep him in line, but, uh— No.
  Rabbit: It's really funny, Cap! It's Afghanistanimation!
  [later]
  German guy: Well, the butler is basically saying to Johannes Chimpo... "Don't let the Great Satan tempt you with the Western culture. You must remain true to the Taliban warlord."

• Most Fruitful Yuki , a Show Within a Show in the movie Juno.

    Live-Action TV

• Episode 1 of The Hard Times of RJ Berger has an animated flashback in which Natsumi is drawn in anime form and talks in Japanese (with English subtitles).

    Video Games

• Princess Robot Bubblegum, the name of the fictitious anime show in Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony and Grand Theft Auto V, which parodies Japanese Media Tropes (especially Shônen and Shôjo clichés).
• Guitar Hero III depicts Japanese fangirls this way. Also subverted in that the rest of the cutscenes are a mix between this and Western-style.

    Visual Novels

• Doki Doki Literature Club! is Animesque as a parody of the kinds of Japanese works it imitates. However, it parodies the Animesque trope itself when the resident Fourth-Wall Observer notes that some of the locations don't actually look like they're in Japan, thus lampshading that it's a bad imitation of something Japanese.

    Web Animation

    Webcomics

• Ghastly's Ghastly Comic, besides being wholly animesque itself, features a Hentai parody of Scooby-Doo.

  "Man! Is there anything the Japanese don't know how to make better?"

• The Handbook of Heroes also has an animesque one-shot panel, "Style". Complete with Bishie Sparkle for Wizard, which Thief would like to stay.
• Kong Tower features Aya, who due to the Superpowerful Genetics of her Toon Physics father and Japanese Shinto-based magic-using Samurai mother, is drawn in an Anime style in comparison to the other characters, who can see the differences. Various notable aspects of the style are lampshaded.
• Another non-english example is Raruto, a Naruto spoof webdoujin that originated in Spanish.
• One panel of Rusty and Co. go this route thanks to a Belt of Genre Changing.
• While Star Impact is already heavily shōnen-inspired, this Guest Strip exaggerates it in respect to a character in a fictional Fighting Game that Aster and Puck play. The Alt Text makes no bones about pointing this out:

  The hyper anime eyes on the low poly character kills me. It's too heckin' good.

• Unwinder's Tall Comics features a Show Within a Show, Tokyo Delta Jetlag D, an Affectionate Parody of widgety shōnen series, and of bad Fansubs.

    Web Original

• Trope-tan, that Moe Anthropomorphism of some page or another.
• Though a podcast with little physical visuals to work with Kakos Industries manages to be influence by anime by having an episode dedicated to being an Affectionate Parody of hentai and the Humongous Mecha genre. Listen to "Kawaii" to follow the exploits of The Giant-Ass-Japanese-Schoolgirl-That's-Kawaii-As-Fuck-Yo.
• Babylon Bee: There's an article that describes the impeachment of Donald Trump as an episode of Dragon Ball Z, with Nancy Pelosi releasing her Impeachment Attack after gathering the energy from every human spirit, only for Trump to absorb the attack and cackling maniacally at those "Foolish mortals!".

    Western Animation

• Perfect Hair Forever: An unavoidable consequence, of course, of being a Shōnen anime parody, complete with non sequitur fanservice. Taking it a step further than that, Adult Swim even once aired it done up like an old-style VHS (and low-quality) Fansub for the April Fools' Day weekend.
• Gemusetto Machu Picchu is yet another Adult Swim anime parody show, mainly being a parody of sports anime, with a very surreal sense of humor and animation style. It's also more affectionate than Perfect Hair Forever and focuses on trends with a lot of animation bumps. It even has opening themes in (very poor) Japanese!
• Robot Chicken: A puppet Stop Motion and Sketch Comedy that satirizes many Japanese Anime shows such as Sailor Moon, Pokémon, Voltron, AKIRA, Speed Racer, Dragon Ball Z, Inuyasha, Shokushu Goukan, Japanese Hentai, Ranma ½, and Final Fantasy, plus American cartoons such as Teen Titans.
• Cow and Chicken: The Japanese in this Got Milk ad.
• Before they were unceremoniously canceled, the last episode of Clerks: The Animated Series ended with a direct parody of out-sourced animation in general, poking fun at Korean animation studios. Any story this episode had was completely tossed out the window.
• South Park gleefully subverts this trope on a handful of occasions.
  • Most notably, "Good Times with Weapons", where the boys acquire ninja weapons and subsequently get a massive art upgrade into Street Fighter-esque badassery. (The song "Let's Fighting Love" is more or less about how the song makes no sense, especially the Gratuitous English parts.)
  • And "Chinpokomon", in which the boys' craze over a Pokémon-style hobby turns their eyes into arches when they smile and causes them to spout Japanese gibberish with glee. Bonus points: Trey Parker and Matt Stone speak Japanese so it really is gibberish.
  • "A Song of Ass and Fire" and "Titties and Dragons" has Kenny turning into a Magical Girl, Princess Kenny.
• Johnny Bravo once had Johnny watching "Clam League 9000", a spoof of Pokémon with a hint of Dragon Ball Z.
• ReBoot presented a game that simultaneously spoofed both Dragon Ball Z and Pokémon — at the same time.
• One of the several The Fairly OddParents made-for-TV movies has Timmy and Vicky surfing through the dimension of television with magical remotes, creating parodies of numerous classical cartoons, two of which for anime. The first is for Speed Racer's often-joked fast voice acting in the dub. The second is another Dragon Ball Z spoof with a show titled Maho Mushi, portraying a (to Americans) violent fighting tournament and a multitude of beam attacks. The characters' designs change accordingly; Timmy now has bead eyes similar to Krillin while Vicky is dressed like Piccolo. At one point, Cosmo accidentally blasts two holes into sides of the arena. (At least he wasn't Majin...) Though the remote controlled giant mecha were still out of place.
• Johnny Test parodied both the Pokémon anime and games a few times. The parodies were actually surprisingly accurate, including such aspects as evolution by happiness.
• Dexter's Laboratory
  • The series is rather Animesque on its own, but that didn't stop it from doing a complete and full parody of Speed Racer — right down to the style, plot line and Motor Mouth dialogue. Except DeeDee, who didn't get the joke and was animated (largely) normally.
  • In the first series finale, "Last But Not Beast", the students at the Japanese school Dexter transfers to own a mecha. Also, the teacher there had pink hair and blue eyes.
  • In a revived season episode, the villain Hukouchou looks like an evil bishounen. Long hair, icy blue eyes, pointy ears, and so on.
• The Phineas and Ferb special, "Summer Belongs to You", had a short musical segment that took place in Japan and caused all the characters to turn into some strange-looking anime style all while doing a parody of Caramelldansen. The singers were in Sailor Fuku too.
• The animated MAD has a segment called "Grey's in Anime".
• In "Batman's Strangest Cases", an episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold, one segment is an Affectionate Parody of the '60s Batman manga by Jiro Kuwata. The sequence is in sepia tones, has extremely limited animation and out-of-synch "English dubbing", and is a gentle jab at '60s anime like Gigantor.
• The Simpsons:
  • From "In Marge, We Trust", Miisutaa Supakaaru (Mr. Sparkle), the Japanese Homer Simpson. He's actually an amalgation of two Japanese companies whose logos are a fish and a lightbulb, respectively.
  • In "Thirty Minutes over Tokyo", there is a Japanese program called "Battling Seizure Robots", which parodies the infamous episode of Pokémon which caused seizures in nearly 700 people.
  • In "HOMR", the family goes to an animation convention, and Bart and Lisa watch a parody of Fist of the North Star and Battle of the Planets.
  • In "Bart vs. Lisa vs. the Third Grade", Pikachu appears to Bart in a satellite TV-induced hallucination when he tries to take a standardized test.
  • The couch gags of "Tis' The Fifteenth Season" and "[The Simpsons S 15 E 22 Fraudcast News Fraudcast News]]" feature the family dressed as several anime and Japanese media characters. Homer is Ultraman, Bart is Astro Boy, Lisa is Sailor Moon, Maggie is Pikachu, and Marge is Jun the Swan from Science Ninja Team Gatchaman.
  • In "Postcards from the Wedge", Bart watches an accurate parody of Pokémon when trying to do his homework, and lampshades both series' long runner status by wondering "how it managed to stay so fresh". Bonus points for the parody depicting Ash in his Diamond and Pearl attire, as the series was in the Diamond and Pearl arc at the time of the episode's first airing.
• This concept was parodied twice in Garfield and Friends first in "Invasion of the Big Robots" where Garfield winds up in a Voltron-esque show, and in "The Clash of the Titans" where Garfield and Odie team up with the X-Men expies The Power Squad.
• Regular Show: The episode "Brain Eraser" has Mordecai and Rigby rent a videotape of an anime series known as "Planet Starlight Chasers Excellent", which is a parody of many anime series that were popular in The '80s and The '90s. It fits in with the Retro Universe of the show itself, having blinding fight scenes and a Gratuitous Japanese theme song. The video store owner (voiced by Roger Craig Smith, who has done voices for many anime) confesses to watching it "all day, every day."
  • The episode "Brilliant Century Duck Crisis Special" is a huge homage to the Humongous Mecha genre, complete with a Shot-for-Shot Remake of the opening to Neon Genesis Evangelion.
• The recursive "American cartoon with Japanese-outsourced animation that disguises itself as American" style that was endemic in the '80s (see the "Animation-USA" tab in the "Straight Examples" section) was parodied in the Amazing World of Gumball episode "The Sweaters", which featured a high school and a couple of characters drawn entirely in this style. They even have a more washed-out color scheme as if they were ripped straight from an old VHS tape.
  • Sarah's drawings are drawn in a deliberately sucky but anime-inspired way.
  • The flashback sequence in "The Fury" is done in a Dragon Ball style, while fight sequence in the same episode is done in an Animesque style.
• Major Lazer uses a style that makes it look as if it were an American cartoon from the '80s co-produced by Toei.
• The final episode of the sixth Futurama season features three stories animated in a different style, including anime.
• The Angry Beavers episode "Pass it On!" has the brothers and their friends telling parts of a campfire story, each an affectionate parody of some genre of fiction. Treeflower's portion is anime in both visual style and narrative.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: At one point in "My Peeps", Billy gets eyestrain, and Grim uses his magic to fix Billy's eyes, accidentally giving the boy precognitive powers. Grim ends up repeatedly altering Billy's sight in an effort to fix things, demonstrated by point-of-view shots through Billy's eyes as the art shifted through several different styles, including an Animesque one where Mandy speaks Japanese.
• The above gag was also briefly used in an episode of Drawn Together, where Ling-Ling (the resident Pokémon and anime parody) needed to renew his license and, during an eyesight test from his point of view, it was shown that he sees everyone as animesque characters.
• Dr. Krieger's holographic girlfriend Mitsuko Miyazumi from Archer is clearly based on an anime girl with her big sparkling eyes, pink hair, and anime-style expressions.
• In the Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures episode "Don't Touch That Dial" Mighty Mouse encounters The Real Gagbusters, a mix between The Real Ghostbusters (which had several episodes animated in Japan) and Voltron, who are drawn and animated in a very animesque style, they want to rid the world of humor and talk like Lorenzo Music who voiced Peter Venkman in the former show.
• The Animaniacs (2020) revival had two versions: one where the Warners are cute and chibified and a second where they are styled similar to Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and Kill la Kill.
• Jellystone!:
  • In "Face of the Town", Huckleberry Hound undergoes a Sailor Moon-esque magical girl transformation.
  • In "A Town Video: Welcome to Jellystone", Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound have a battle in an anime art-style. They even have Japanese voice actors and speak Japanese (with additional English subtitles).

Inversions

Several Japanese series have inverted this trope by going for a western look. Since American cartoons generally require several times the production money for their higher frame rates, there are limiting factors that keep it to surface aesthetics rather than the actual motion. The limits are easier to get around in comics and video games. If they use English, expect it to be about as good as our Japanese. Also Inverted by Japanese video games in their art style and other choices. Outside the country, some like to call them "Japanese Animation" or "Japanese Comics" to differentiate series with no "anime" traits.

    General

• The character designs of Japanese artist Susumu Matsushita (best known in the US for his work in Maximo: Ghosts to Glory) tend to be very Western-looking, with round eyes and cartoony proportions.
• Pick almost any illustration produced by Gurihiru Studios from Japan. Chances are, it'll look like something out of a Pixar film. They have been commissioned for design on some of Disney's 3D output, most notably their work on Big Hero 6. They were the character designers of Sonic Unleashed, which is why the human characters of said game had such a western look to them.
• Shigeru Mizuki. Generally, his artstyle is more cartoony/surreal than anything else.
• Fujiko Fujio's art (both together and apart as Fujiko F and Fujiko A) tends to retain the exaggerated features, clean lines, and button-nose cuteness of western children's cartoons. This even extends to works aimed at the adult crowd (such as Laughing Salesman), but they're still seen as one of the landmark examples of manga's influence on Japan.
• Pingu In The City, a Japanese-made reboot of Pingu is animated entirely in 3D and rendered in a way to emulate the stop-motion look of the original series, but uses some anime tropes such as a slower frame rate in some scenes and the characters do make the odd face faults.

    Anime & Manga

• The '70s and '80s saw many mangas inspired by contemporary American and European media, some even set in America. Space Adventure Cobra is like Barbarella meets Eagle Land, and Mad Bull 34 is Eagle Land incarnate.
• Given its nature as a multi-vignette show for a young audience, Folktales From Japan features a wide variety of animation designs, most of which cartoony in nature and several in particular rather western. Very rarely does it actually look like anime.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is heavily influenced by American comics.
• While not specifically western (indeed, it more closely resembles Chinese/Korean animation in aesthetics), One Stormy Night is still much closer to your average western animated feature than traditional anime.
• Bambi and Her Pink Gun is so visually influenced by the aesthetics of American comics that only the onomatopoeia give it away as an original Japanese creation.
• The anime for Excel Saga had a scene comparing tropes from anime and tropes from western animation, and as Excel demonstrated the cartoon tropes she and the other characters are animated in the style of American comics, rubber hose cartoons, and the Disney animated canon.
• The art style of Studio Ghibli films are heavily influenced by French animated films. Heck, one of their films is a French Coproduction. Conversely, My Neighbor Totoro and Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea take more influence from American animated films rather than French animated Films.
• The Big O is the result of Japanese animators involved with Batman: The Animated Series running with the influence. Look for the Batmobile in the backgrounds.
• The first ending sequence to the 2003 anime version of Fullmetal Alchemist is done in Mike Mignola's style.
• Hiroyuki Imaishi's projects tend to have this reputation.
  • Zig-Zagged with Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt. It takes most of its art style from animesque Western animation (looking a lot like The Powerpuff Girls). One episode parodying Transformers goes maximum '80s.
  • Dead Leaves borrows some exaggerated faces, angular hard-line animation, and violence from Western cartoons.
  • Space Patrol Luluco carries much of the same spirit of Panty & Stocking, including humor that wouldn't look out of place on Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon.
• King of Bandit Jing, especially the second manga series.
• The original Lupin III manga by Monkey Punch was heavily influenced by MAD, and the art style definitely shows. The subsequent anime adaptations... not so much. They're not significantly more western-like than most other anime products.
• One Piece. The deformations of faces pushed to the limits Looney Tunes-style are probably the most prominent factor. Not to mention Luffy's powers, which are like something taken out of a Tex Avery cartoon. It's even been speculated that its lack of similarity to the archetypal style of anime is a factor in why it hasn't caught on outside of Japan.
• Fairy Tail has a similar art style to One Piece but then that would be a case of an anime imitating a western-influenced anime. Thanks to Art Evolution, Fairy Tail started being drawn in a style that leans much closer to the "traditional" manga/anime style. It still has some similarities to One Piece's style, but those aren't as hugely noteworthy as they used to be.
• Space Dandy is a Genre Throwback to campy western Raygun Gothic in terms of plot, setting and music. The designs and movements of Dandy and his mostly alien cohorts are far more exaggerated akin to the western cartoony style. The series also embraces episodic Negative Continuity akin to western children's cartoons where characters end up hurt and dead, only to be okay the next episode as if nothing happened prior.
• Soul Eater looks like the unholy child of anime and Tim Burton.
• Super Milk Chan
• Tiger & Bunny is made to resemble Western comic books and superhero shows.
• Trigun's designs and especially manga incarnation are heavily influenced by McFarlane.
• ∀ Gundam's mechanical designs by Syd Mead.
• Usavich
• Obscure series Montana Jones resembles a series from The Disney Afternoon such as Adventures of the Gummi Bears, TaleSpin, or Timon & Pumbaa.
• Cowboy Bebop draws on influences from a variety of genres, many of them quite western (including The Western, appropriately enough), down to featuring one setting that is basically Planet Blaxploitation.
• Baby Felix was produced by a Japanese studio with input from current Felix the Cat owner Don Oriolo, and is anime trying (and often failing) to look like Western Animation.
• The character designs from Zoobles seem to be at least slightly influenced by stuff like My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and Littlest Pet Shop (2012), which themselves are very animesque.
• Many of Nippon Animation's works, like World Masterpiece Theater and Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics are drawn in a way that's more reminescent of Western Animation than Anime. The same applies for Around the World with Willy Fog and Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds, though both were co-produced with a Spanish animation studio.
• La Quinta Camera, faces in particular.
• My Hero Academia takes a lot of inspiration from American superhero comics. All-Might in his hero-mode especially looks like someone straight out of The Silver Age of Comic Books.
• The Osamu Tezuka short "Legend of the Forest" uses several different Western Animation styles as the decades pass, first a Winsor McCay style, then a 1930's rubber hose cartoon, a Fleischer Bros/Looney Tunes style, a Disney-esque style, a Fleischer Bros Superman style, and finally a UPA style.
• Dawn of the Seeker, which was an actual Japanese animated movie commissioned and written by a Canadian video game studio, producing a very Western-looking anime.
• This Pokémon short is done in the style of Golden Age cartoons.
• Kodomomuke anime have very simplified art styles to the point where some would get mistaken for western children's cartoons due to lack of "telltale" anime traits. Many of them are adapted from Japanese children's books, which generally tend to be of the same art styles that can be found in the west.
• Anpanman, one of the faces of anime, is about as round and cartoony as any of the kids' shows run in the late 80s early 90s. This partially has to do with it being adapted from the similarly-cartoony book series, see above.
• The long-running series Sazae-san takes many cues from Western newspaper comics, in part due to its beginnings as a newspaper strip in the 1940s— just around the time western cartoons and comics started coming ashore.
• Samurai Pizza Cats resembles a Golden Age Western cartoon in both artstyle and humor.
• Topo Gigio is an anime based on the eponymous 1950s Italian puppet character, and as such it has a style similar to old-school Western kids' cartoons. Interestingly, while the Italian dub has Topo Gigio voiced by the same performer who always voiced the puppet, the Japanese original has him voiced by Ryusei Nakao, who in fact often voiced heroes and main characters in the Japanese dubs of Western cartoons.

    Video Games

• Several Nintendo franchises have a very Western feel and design to them:
  • The Super Mario Bros. series looks like it is firmly planted in the roots of the The Golden Age of Animation in terms of design. The main characters are plumbers with large noses and moustaches who speak with a heavy Italian accent; the use of anime tropes in the series is rather rare aside from subtle graphical elements (particularly the facial expressions of characters); and the minimal audible spoken dialogue by any of the characters (in any language) is in English. Some characters take it further, Princess Daisy's dialogue in particular borrows from many different American English dialects and accents, like Valleyspeak, Southern Dixie and even Ebonics, and Wario and Waluigi are inspired by a classic American character archetype. That said, there are plenty of Japanese influences too, mainly in the form of call backs to the culture and mythology (Usually in the form of Power ups like Raccoon/Tanooki Mario and Cat Mario), and the female characters like Princess Peach have a more anime-styled motif than the male characters, and come across as a blend of western and eastern character designs, particularly in 2D art for games like the Mario & Luigi series or Super Princess Peach. That said, Mario's Western influence is so prevalent that Nintendo even partnered with an American animation studio to make their feature-length Animated Mario movie, set to release in 2022.
  • This was a very intentional move on Nintendo's part when creating the first Donkey Kong arcade game; the game was created because a prior arcade game of Nintendo's, Radar Scope, had flopped hard in the US despite being a bit hit in Japan. To clear out their stock of unsold Radar Scope machines, Nintendo decided to create a game that would be a surefire hit in America and convert the Radar Scope cabinets to run it. To ensure its success in America they took a lot of influence from classic American cartoons when designing the game.
  • The first Super Smash Bros. game has an angular style reminiscent of late 90s cartoons. However, later games in the franchise use a more Anime styled presentation.
  • The Legend of Zelda takes cues from many western fantasy novels and movies; with key influences being Greek mythology, the legend of King Arthur and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. However, Japanese influence became more apparent in games following The Wind Waker. They still hold many western influences and Twilight Princess was specifically based on Wild West stories. Breath Of The Wild firmly returns the series to its Western influence via its focus on exploring a land akin to European and Near East fantasy, with notable exceptions such as the Yiga Clan and Sheikah taking Asian influences, with the Sheikah warrior Impa in the prequel, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, fighting with a Hand Seal usage and Ninja Run that has gotten compared to Naruto. Meanwhile the Link's Awakening remake has more Japanese influences.
  • Metroid has always aimed for an American comic book look with the atmosphere from Hollywood sci-fi, though several games post-Fusion showed more Japanese influence.
  • F-Zero takes place in a comic book future, with Captain Falcon himself being a homage.
  • Star Fox takes cues from Western cartoon animals and space operas. The fuzzy puppets featured in art for the first game and the puppet like mouth face flapping for dialogue in Star Fox 64 was designed to invoke Thunderbirds, though nowadays it just looks like it was animated that way due to console limitations.
  • While it firmly belongs to the JRPG genre (being a partial parody of it), the EarthBound series is also heavily influenced by old-school sci-fi, newspaper comics, and other Western media.
  • Splatoon is what would happen if you asked Nintendo to take everything that made 1990s Nickelodeon what it was, and design it into a game. The game still has a heavy Japanese influence, as the game features a pair of Idol Singers and takes place in a city based on Shibuya, Tokyo. Splatoon 2 instead has a more American influence, with Inkopolis Square taking inspiration from Times Square and featuring a DJ/rapper duo modeled after Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G..
  • Kirby stars a round pink creature with large red feet, and the scenery and characters are clearly reminiscent of cartoons such as The Smurfs. Even the main antagonist is a fat penguin in a Santa Claus-like outfit, and enemies include orange creatures wearing chef hats and wielding frying pans and large beetle-like insects with gloves and sneakers. Played straight with the anime Kirby: Right Back at Ya!, which definitely looks like an anime.
  • Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. features several characters and references from western literature and folklore. Just throw in Abraham Lincoln, some Type 1 Eagleland, a Steampunk setting, a Silver Age comic aesthetic, a Framing Device where cutscenes are played out in the panels of a comic book, and as if those elements weren't enough, a campy anthem as its theme song, you'll have a Japanese-developed game that is very Western.
  • ARMS has an art style heavily influenced by American superhero comics.
  • StarTropics and its sequel Zoda's Revenge don't hide their American influence at all, in fact, the games are so blatantly Western that the developers even went out of their way to make many references to American history and pop culture. The protagonist, Mike Jones, was named after the most common American names at the time (1990). Star Tropics' very western design was practically intended by Nintendo, as the Star Tropics games were designed to capitalize on the Western markets, and were not released in Japan.
  • The Punch-Out!! games are extremely cartoony with over-the-top cartoon caricatures of international stereotypes. The games also draw heavy influence from many Western boxing films like the Rocky series and Raging Bull.
  • Panel de Pon has an artstyle and themes that are highly influenced by Western Children's High Fantasy series like Rainbow Brite and My Little Pony.
  • While the rest of the series belongs strictly on the home front, WarioWare Gold inverts the artstyle from its predecessors, resembling more a Cartoon Network effort than a production from Japan.
  • Despite being the closest thing to a Nintendo franchise completely averting this trope, the Fire Emblem series is firmly entrenched into Western Medieval European Fantasy with minimal Japanese influence outside of the general anime art style, and the amazing technicolor hair of most of the cast. When Asian influenced peoples such as the Kingdom of Hoshido appear in Fire Emblem Fates, it's the exception instead of the rule.
• Several of SEGA's franchises also take influence from western animation and culture.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog, done deliberately so to appeal to the Western market. The design of the Funny Animal characters take cues from Inkblot Cartoon Style, settings, especially urban ones, have a Western feel, an emphasis on techno, rap, and rock for a lot of the music throughout the series, plenty of Gratuitous English in the original localization, and the general "attitude" was to appeal to the "rebellious" nature commonly associated with countries like the United States.
  • Streets of Rage is about ex-cops hunting down crime boss Mr. X and freeing the city from his wrath, while beating up hoards of enemies along the way. This all backed up by a soundtrack influenced by rave techno.
  • Golden Axe in general is influenced by classic fantasy medieval europe, however it's also influenced by the Conan the Barbarian films.
  • Alien Syndrome was influenced by the Alien films, to the point where a Xenomorph expy appears as one of the enemies.
  • Rent A Hero supposedly takes place in Japan, but the titular superhero is modeled after an American comic book hero and the digitized photograph that's supposed to be representing Taro Yamada, the hero, in the intro, is clearly an American model.
  • Clockwork Knight is about a Living Toy soldier named Sir Tongara de Pepperouchau III rescuing the princess Chelsea. It uses a digitized art style comparable to popular western made games during the era like Donkey Kong Country and Mortal Kombat, and the soundtrack emphasizes genres like jazz and ragtime.
  • The artstyle for Panzer Dragoon was partially influenced by the works of French artist Jean Giraud (aka Moebius).
  • House of the Dead is basically one big Affectionate Parody of So Bad, It's Good B-grade horror movies, complete with intentionally narm-ridden dialogue and voice acting. Especially true in the case of House of the Dead: OVERKILL, with the visuals having a clear grindhouse-movie look and feel.
  • NiGHTS into Dreams… was partially influenced by European cultures and theater, with the Cirque du Soleil show Mystère being a specific influence. The sequel NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams takes it a step further by introducing a fictional version of London called Bellbridge and having a cast of British voice actors.
  • Samba de Amigo has a strong Mexican/Latin influence, right down to a good number of the songs being licensed Latin genre music.
  • Toe Jam And Earl is influenced by hip-hop culture (the titular aliens are rappers, for one), and it definitely shows in parts of the soundtrack. It also has gameplay inspired by Rogue and a lighter version of Starflight's science-fiction theme. Its concept was thought up by Greg Johnson, an American.
• Capcom is another Japanese creator with an extensive library of Western-influenced creations.
  • The Bionic Commando stars a soldier named Rad Spencer armed with a Grappling Hook arm. The NES title even had you battling Those Wacky Nazis, including who is definitely not Adolf Hitler (Named "Master D" In-game).
  • Capcom's old mascot Captain Commando is likewise an Affectionate Parody of American superheroes. The company has long walked a middle ground between styles, taking it to a natural conclusion.
  • Darkstalkers and its crazy cartoon violence. It looked and moved more like a cartoon than the actual American TV show.
  • The Ghosts 'n Goblins series stars a medieval knight named Arthur (a clear reference to King Arthur), battling wicked demons and monsters, the majority based on European gothic horror and figures from Biblical mythology like Beezulbub and Satan. The games were also notorious for its very broken English, which has since improved in the sequels.
  • While originally inspired by Astro Boy, many aspects of the Mega Man (Classic) series have since evolved into being more Western. Taking cues from many futuristic sci-fi, episodic saturday morning cartoons, and superhero comic books. Two of the main characters, Dr. Light and Dr. Wily in particular are blatant expies of Santa Claus and Albert Einstein respectively. The Darker and Edgier sequel series Mega Man X was made in the The '90s, and definitely wears its time period on its sleeve, highly imitating the "extreme" trend of many Western action cartoons at the time, with the soundtracks of the games relying heavily on rock and guitar.
  • The Monster Hunter series is known for this, which is ironic since the games are still more popular in Japan than in the West.
  • Capcom's Resident Evil series is influenced by Western Zombie films, Horror B-movies, and various Hollywood action films. All of the main characters are English, and the settings of the games are varied but mostly Western. The first game even went so far as to have English actors and voice acting for its live action cutscenes, even in the Japanese releases. Resident Evil's sister franchise Dino Crisis is more or less the same thing, but with vicious dinosaurs and strongly influenced by Jurassic Park.
  • Street Fighter takes inspiration from American cartoons in many ways. The original Street Fighter had an art style reminiscent of 60s action cartoons. Street Fighter II continued this with an art style similar to 80's saturday morning cartoons, which was taken to a logical conclusion. Street Fighter III continued the Western style further with a artsyle resembling an upper-tier action cartoon with extremely fluid animation and a soundtrack inspired by Late-90's Hip-Hop, Jazz and Techno with loads of Surprisingly Good English. Street Fighter IV takes the action cartoon artstyle of II and brings it into the third dimension, which in turn made the game even more colorful and cartoony than prior entries.
  • Viewtiful Joe is an Affectionate Parody of both comic book superheroes and Tokusatsu.
• Go Go Hyper Grind is a Japanese-developed skateboarding game with American character designs by John Kricfalusi and Spumco, no less! The gameplay also features many Western cartoon cliches such as Wild Takes, Stuff Blowing Up, and characters losing their heads.
• Persona 5 uses an anime art style, plays like a JRPG and visual novel hybrid, and even focusing on issues in modern Japanese society. However, the Phantom Thieves' costumes and Personas, as well as the Jazzy soundtrack take a lot of influence from classic Western comic books and tales of magnificent vigilantes.
• While Onmyōji plays this straight in every other aspect of the game, some in-game comics (like those about the backstory of Ōtakemaru and Kujira) are drawn in a Western comic book style and read left-to-right rather than like a manga.
• PaRappa the Rapper and its spinoff Um Jammer Lammy. Makes sense, as the series artist, Rodney Greenblat, is actually American.
• No More Heroes and its sequel sport a mix of cel-shading and realism with a So-California setting, western-style character designs and names. Both games do make multiple references to anime media, though.
• Killer7 looks, sounds, and feels like if it was made by Mainframe Entertainment than Capcom and Suda 51, and if it was a game in Reboot.
• The main character in Professor Layton, as well as many secondary ones, are designed in a classic French style, though other characters are designed in anime fashion.
• The character design of Sora that Tetsuya Nomura created for the Timeless River world (based off the cartoon short Steamboat Willie and other shorts during the 1930s) in Kingdom Hearts II, which makes him resemble a cartoon character from The Silent Age of Animation (Rubber Hose Limbs and all). Just look ◊ at him ◊.
• Silent Hill is frequently mistaken for an American franchise due to the American setting and realistic graphics, and takes a lot of influence from American media such as Jacob's Ladder the works of David Lynch.
• The Metal Gear series takes its influence from American Hollywood action films such as: Escape from New York, Blade Runner, and other various Western media. The original MSX release of Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake even had images of its characters based on famous hollywood actors at the time (Mel Gibson, Tom Berenger and Sean Connery to name a few), just to hammer the themes in further.
• The Castlevania series is obviously influenced and centered around the lore of Dracula and set in Gothic European settings. Most of if not all of the characters are English and Japanese influence is extremely rare outside of visual effects and artstyle, with few exceptions like Rondo of Blood and Portrait of Ruin.
• For the Frog the Bell Tolls draws heavy inspiration from European fairy tales.
• The arcade baseball game M.V.P., which was made by Sega, used a Franco-Belgian art style for its character design.
• Metal Slug has a style very reminiscent of American cartoons
• D.N.A.: Dark Native Apostle looks like something out of The Dark Age of Comic Books.
• Dark Souls contains many elements typical of Western games such as Real Is Brown visuals, free-roaming gameplay, character customization, and minimalist story presentation. This, combined with the series debuting at a time when most Japanese games weren't getting much mainstream attention in the West, leads many people to be surprised when they find out about the series' Japanese origins. Sekiro returns to Asian influences with its Japanese setting and celebration of the local culture, but is hardly anime in design and retains the grit of the Western influenced settings.
• Metamorphic Force may be the only Japanese-developed Beat 'em Up to look like a Western cartoon or fantasy comic yet not be based on one.
• Kaneko's DJ Boy and its sequel B.Rap Boys are beat-em-ups heavily influenced by American hip hop and street culture of the 80s, and as such have cartoony sprites and graphic elements inspired by graffiti.
• Light Crusader looks much more like a European Amiga game than any of Treasure's other Sega Genesis efforts. The Progressive Rock motifs help confirm this impression.

    Visual Novels

• While most of Marco and the Galaxy Dragon is drawn in typical visual novel style, it Art Shifts to cartoony Thin-Line Animation in cutscenes.

    Web Animation

• The art of Inferno Cop seems to be heavily influenced by American comic books.

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Drawing a Male Character the Boondocks Art Style

Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Animesque

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