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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2636 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 29, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Which anime or manga, if any, do you think has a profound art style? Not just interesting, detailed, or cute, but deeper than that?

Many people in this thread are posting good-looking anime with stylish art. I am convinced the art in Flowers of Evil was specifically designed to match the plot and characters by being ugly and banal.

Some unlikely recommendations:

Blue Period. Does an excellent job of capturing coming of age anxieties through the lens of art-commenting-on-art.

Oyaji. I don't know what it is about this manga. It conveys a flawed patriarch's parental love in visceral manner. It is short, and I couldn't put it down. It's not perfect but it is focused and memorable.

Freesia has a really sketchy artstyle that can almost hurt to read sometimes, but it works considering the main character's mental state.

Baki also has a very strange artstyle that can take time getting used to, but it also has the best fight choreography of any manga.

Perfect Blue (1997)

There's an interesting purposeful distinction between the way idols and regular people are drawn in this anime, and it's obviously related to the plotline. I haven't watched too much anime to say that this hasn't been done anywhere else, but so far it's the most realistic portrayal of objectively beautiful appearance and regular/ugly appearance I've seen.

One of the nice parts of anime is how much easier it is to use unreality to engage with themes and so on. Someone seems more dominant in a conversation? Make them a little bigger than they usually are/everyone else. For more stylized ones...make them A LOT bigger.

You can play with those tricks in a way that's much harder with live action.

Huh, for me the decoy villain was drawn in a ridiculously ugly way that strained my suspension of disbelief. Such an extreme outlier would immediately stand out in any crowd.

He was for sure the ugliest... but they were almost all ugly, aside from the idols of course. Side characters and random people in the background weren't good looking, just like people in real life. I guess the reason it stood out to me is because in many other animes, characters that aren't supposed to be pretty are still aesthetically fine by being symmetrical, having perfect teeth/smile and so on. While in Perfect Blue a random guy you see for 3 seconds would have a shitty hairline and droopy eyes for no reason at all.

The Ghibli film The Tale of the Princess Kaguya's art style to me is achingly precious and beautiful. The story is also profoundly moving if you're open to its message but I think many people are not. The art style I think reinforces the beauty of the story.

I am a huge fan of 60s and 70s shoujo manga and I think the artwork in Moto Hagio's and Keiko Takemiya's work from that era are sometimes profoundly beautiful. Shoujo Kakumei Utena borrows heavily from this era of anime/manga and the art style is fantastic- the sort of abstract mannerist heights the movie reaches in its art nouveau meets modernist architecture is really interesting. The character design of the Utena characters is also so odd, with weirdly overlapping physical traits and rich personalities.

I don't know how the content of Ah My Goddess holds up today but I've always found the artist Kosuke Fujishima incredibly talented- the quality of his linework is immaculate and he renders the curls and twists of hair as precisely as the intricate machinery he draws.

Not what you asked for but while I'm here, Macoto Takahashi, Yoshitaka Amano and Tomomi Kobayashi must all be mentioned as extremely good artists working in the manga/anime style.

I don’t know how you describe profound but Yokohama Shopping Trip has beautiful pen and ink. Since it’s essentially about the beauty of the world, it’s important to convey it.

Atelier of Witch Hat follows in that tradition.

Not really sure how you define profound but I liked the art in Homunculus, and parts of Eden: it's an endless world! might have what you're looking for.

Probably not exactly what you're looking for, but the original art for Mob Psycho and One Punch man, by ONE, are notoriously bad. I have absolutely no artistic skills and if I tried to make a manga that's about what it would look like.

What I find profound is that the writing is so good that people noticed and enjoyed them anyway. And because we live in a society, they got adapted into anime by proper artists (and One Punch Man got a remake manga by a talented artist). This guy has amazing writing talent but garbage art talent, and thus on his own would only be able to make mediocre manga. But by synergizing with other humans where he can utilize his strengths to its utmost while someone else uses their strengths to compensate for his weaknesses, together they can make amazing art that is better than what either could make on their own.

It might be bad art, but it's presented well. Like in many ways the quality of the characters, and the general look is worse than Murata, the fights themselves are better presented in One's original web comic.

Dude has a genius level of artistic vision and just lacks the drawing skills. This is one of the things that makes me most excited for AI art as it develops. How many people are out there with creative ideas and vision but only have half the necessary skills and can't actually make their stuff? If ONE had been born 20 years later than he was he probably could have coaxed an AI into converting his character designs into high quality versions of themselves and generating each panel with him tweaking and coaxing it until it gets it right.

If there are dozens of ONEs with similar skillsets who never got noticed, they might be able to make their own stuff without needing a Murata to help them.

Two examples that always come to mind are Blame! and Otoyomegatari.

I was also going to recommend Blame!

The artist has trouble with motion and action, but really sold me on people endlessly wandering through a superstructure the size of the solar system.

Those two are my go-to examples when this topic comes up, explicitly because they're so radically different.

One's a brutalistic dystopic transhuman venture through the metaphorical circles of hell in order to find god and may very well be the ultimate example of 'Show, don't tell', given how much of it is spent in utter silence. And is written by an architect.

The other is a sloppy, historic love-letter to the Asian steppes with attention to detail that borders on extreme autism, with a broad palette of adorable characters you can't help but hope they have a good ending. And is written by a woman.

I'm rather enamored with them both, if you couldn't tell.

Or in Cibo's case: find God and then steal its body to wear as your own.

I've never heard of Otoyomegatari. I'll give it a look.

You might have heard of 'Young Maid Emma', or just 'Emma' which was drawn/written by the same author/mangaka, and is an earlier work. It's also excellent, and I whole-heartedly endorse it, but comparing Emma and Otoyomegatari, you can definitely tell the mangaka has improved drastically, to the point where you can call the style 'profound'.

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