{"id":31990,"date":"2013-08-09T13:51:19","date_gmt":"2013-08-09T17:51:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.animenation.net\/blog\/?p=31990"},"modified":"2013-08-09T13:51:19","modified_gmt":"2013-08-09T17:51:19","slug":"ask-john-is-chibi-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.animenation.net\/blog\/ask-john-is-chibi-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"Ask John: Is Chibi Dead?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"450\" height=\"253\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/LTbMkbcc6v8\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><br \/>\n<strong>Question:<\/strong><br \/>\nIs chibi dead?  I have been watching a lot of new anime on streaming sites like Hulu, and I don&#8217;t recall seeing any characters take on a chibi appearance.  Maybe I&#8217;m just watching the wrong shows.  I still notice weirdly drawn eyes in reaction to something, or that anger symbol on a character&#8217;s head.  Haven&#8217;t seen any giant sweat drops off to the side.  Or, like I said, chibi.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\n<strong>Answer:<\/strong><br \/>\nThe Super Deformed or &#8220;chibi&#8221; approach to anime seemed to be most prominent in anime from the 1980s and 90s. Primary examples of anime to exploit squashed, mis-proportioned characters included the SD Gundam and SD Kamen Rider anime franchises and the 1991 CB Chara Nagai Go World OVA series. SD character appearances also memorably appeared in 1985&#8217;s Highschool! Kimengumi, 1994&#8217;s Magic Knight Rayearth, and in the omake segments of Fushigi Yuugi. The American fascination with &#8220;chibi&#8221; character renderings also seemed to reach a pinnacle in the early 2000s before waning. Outside of the American fan fascination with &#8220;chibi&#8221; during the height of the anime boom in America, SD character designs and super deformed anime have never been especially prolific in Japan. The &#8220;chibi&#8221; concept in anime has always been used fairly sparingly since it emerged in the early 1980s. While its evident prominence on American fan websites has diminished in recent years, &#8220;chibi&#8221; character designs and anime actually haven&#8217;t declined at all in anime. Contemporary examples include the 2007 Macross Fufonfia and 2009 Suzumiya Haruhi-chan no Yuutsu web series, 2010 SD Gundam Sangokuden Brave Battle Warriors TV series, 2011&#8217;s SKET Dance SD Chara Flash web anime, last year&#8217;s Naruto SD: Rock Lee no Seishun Full-Power Ninden and Litchi DE Hikari Club television series, and even last month&#8217;s Fate\/Zero Caf\u00e9 motion picture. Characters periodically turned &#8220;chibi&#8221; in the 2009 Sora no Otoshimono television series and even more &#8220;chibi&#8221; than normal in the 2012 Yurumates television series. The frequency of SD or &#8220;chibi&#8221; designs in anime doesn&#8217;t actually seem to have changed much since the 1980s. American observers, however, typically don&#8217;t encounter &#8220;chibi&#8221; illustrations plastered all over the web the way we did in the early 2000s, however, when the fascination with &#8220;chibi&#8221; character designs seemed to dominate much of the American otaku community.<\/p>\n<p><i>From Sora no Otoshimono episode 10:<\/i><br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"450\" height=\"338\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/O3MmstVN3RQ\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Question: Is chibi dead? I have been watching a lot of new anime on streaming sites like Hulu, and I don&#8217;t recall seeing any characters take on a chibi appearance. Maybe I&#8217;m just watching the wrong shows. I still notice weirdly drawn eyes in reaction to something, or that anger symbol on a character&#8217;s head. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ask-john","category-video-trailer"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.animenation.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.animenation.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.animenation.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.animenation.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.animenation.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31990"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.animenation.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31991,"href":"https:\/\/www.animenation.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31990\/revisions\/31991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.animenation.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.animenation.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.animenation.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}