#bort posting

1. There is a lot of definition in the eyes, and people generally have more eyelid than usual in anime. In a lot of anime, either the eyes are big enough or the irises are small enough that there’s white space between the iris and the lids on all sides. The characters who don’t have this usually don’t for a reason, like Kakashi, who’s meant to look bored and closed-off. Ikemoto really seems to favor a half-lidded look, as almost all of Kara, except Daemon most of the time, have half-closed-looking lids unless something extreme is going on. 

This is in the middle of him lunging at Sarada and his eyes are still drooping down.

(Having said that, half-lidded characters are almost always adults, to the point where it looks jarring on a lot of the kids who aren’t Kawaki. Think abt how Boruto is usually only half-lidded when Momoshiki is taking over.) And in addition to just having a lot more lid, they’re very defined. Everyone has a waterline if they’re drawn decently big on the page. There are often multiple lines indicating lid creases, and multiple lines in eyebrows.

^ this one is very zoomed in, the width of a whole page, and this one v is like a fifth of the page big

which makes eyebrow less characters like Jigen look even more uhh?? strange? It’s an inordinate amount of detail even for people who don’t have dojutsu. There’s not a whole lot of variety in shape either. There’s a lot of variety in pupils and irises, but the shape is generally the same within categories (men, women, children.)

2. Almost everyone has defined noses and lips too. Kind of an addendum to point 1, but I wanted eyes to be their own point because they get so much focus. I think that the rest of the face being as detailed as the eyes is a good thing, it’s more balanced, but I feel the need to remark on it because it’s another thing that’s different from a typical anime style.

This panel shows how the eye and lip detail is balanced by detail in the rest of the body. There’s a lot of thought put into how the clothing droops, to the point where it’s obvious that the shirt and the jacket are different fabrics. Fascinating. That is to say, the way Ikemoto draws faces goes well with the clothing he puts the characters in. In fact, take this Mitsuki too. 

Mitsuki doesn’t have nearly as much going on in his face: his eyebrows are very small, he doesn’t have a lot of eyelid definition, and his clothes are drawn much simpler. It’s all balance. (and admittedly this is a smaller picture of Mitsuki but I had a hard time finding a bigger one. He’s not a super featured character like he is in the show.) It should be noted that most of the time the only characters who consistently have upper lips, to my memory, are Delta, Eida and Yodo. Everyone else kind of only has them when they’re being zoomed in on, but most of the time most people have a bottom lip line.

3. The facial hair/shaved hair hatching. I feel like facial hair is hard to come by in general in anime/manga, but it tends to be either one colored shape, like Asuma and Shikamaru’s beards or Armstrong’s mustache in FMA, or scruff indicated by vertical lines, like Aizawa from MHA. Ikemoto puts a lot of hatching in his facial hair, and there are a Lot of characters who have light-colored beards and mustaches, and the one guy who had lambchops?? shojoji? it is such a bizarre choice. Looking back at pics of him all of his hair is very puzzling.

But all that extra hatching, at least to me, makes these guys look so filthy. You could not convince me that Amado or Shojoji have taken a shower in months. It’s a little less grimy-feeling with Boro and KK, for some reason, but maybe that’s just me. Kawaki doesn’t look unwashed so much as he looks like a raccoon crawling out of a dumpster, with the threads coming off his jacket. He’s very punk and I love it for him.

Point 3.5 there’re a lot of extra lines in people’s hair in general. I’m putting this in at the last second so I’m just going to let you notice it as you go through the post instead of providing specific examples because it’s there for everyone with light hair longer than Hinata’s.

4. There’s not a lot of mid-tone shading in this manga. If there’s any shading it’s done with hatching, which isn’t bad, but somehow a lot of manga feels really stark.

I’m having a hard time finding an example of something this pervasive, it’s just everything.

5. And then there’s the way that almost all of the female characters, at least at some point, look like preschoolers, with big chubby cheeks and gangly stick legs, especially when contrasted with the overly-mature clothes the children wear. Sarada and Sumire look like little children trying on their big sisters’ clothes. Hinata yo-yos between looking like someone in her mid-twenties and looking like a strange baby-faced teenager. 

adult!

14 year old??

(these examples are not the most egregious, but those are in the very first chapter when sasuke had curly hair so I’ve decided they are no longer part of the art style and part of the growing pains.)

Yodo suffers the opposite; she looks like she has the face of an adult on a child’s body.

Her bellybutton also doesn’t seem to be in the right place in either of these.

Cho Cho isn’t that bad except that one splash page with Sarada, and Himawari is spared by being an actual little girl. As well, sometimes the 12-13 year olds and Kawaki have proportions that make them look very young, but that’s common for anime and manga styles so I’m not going to gripe about it. I’m not going to get into the clothes right now, that’s for the fashion rating post I have in the works. I’m just going to say that the way Sarada’s thighs are drawn sometimes is concerning. 

That is a grown woman’s leg. Why is it attached to a child?

this is nauseating. Ikemoto if you want to quit Boruto and draw pinup calendars I support you, but please make the figures adults. This is a 13 year old and you know it.

And something I had forgotten during drafting this post, this phenomenon is not girl exclusive!

why is boruto so cut here? i know that 13 year olds can be that muscular, because my former therapist had a 13 year old son who was a bodybuilder and for some reason she was okay with that, but is it still suspicious that, with all these other offenses, Ikemoto’s drawing Boruto with a defined hip line and abs? I think yes. From the neck up this is such a sweet picture of him too.

6. Time to wash your eyes out! The colored splash pages are almost all at maximum saturation. I don’t know why. Often people have different colored versions of the same clothes too, which I think is kind of fun. Very Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.

In looking for an example of this I notice it’s died down a little with the most recent chapters.

7. Also like JJBA, the characters on the splash pages, especially Delta, Code and Eida, are often posed like fashion models. I just think that’s neat, esp with the really distinctive fashion going on in this series.

8. Often in fight scenes the entire background turns to motion lines. I don’t actually know how common this is in manga. 

This is the seventh uninterrupted panel of motion line background. There’s one panel with mountain and tree background, then six more with just motion lines.

9. I can’t believe I almost forgot about this; there are lines on almost every page that are just the slightest bit wiggly. It has a pen-drawn feel, which in this world of digital drawing and stabilizer-smoothed lines creates a distinct look. Check out the lines on Code’s sleeve here, and the whole way his hand looks. It’s just a little fucked up!

You can also see it in his eyes (even professional mangaka struggle with the other eye.) Lines are also not the same width from one end to the other, especially thicker lines like glasses. As well, sometimes solid lines will not be filled in all the way.