Do ugly anime characters turn you off to a good anime?

[someperson]

If anime character designs weren't appealing then a lot of us probably wouldn't be members of this forum. Not saying that the majority of the members here weren't drawn in by plot but being human beings we are atracted to pretty things.

[Malificus]

I must admit, I like the appealing character designs, but the big thing for me is story. If the story is good, I'll like it, no amount of Ms. Akis could stop that.

[TaranT]

When given a choice of two facial photographs to look at, babies usually prefer and spend more time gazing at the person who is better-looking.

The problem with this is, who decided which one was "better-looking"? It's a subjective call; certainly an agreement had to be reached by a majority of those involved with the study -- but not everyone may agree with their judgments. We'll never know.
When you combine that with the fact that they said "USUALLY" and the fact that correlation does <i>not necessarily</i> imply causation, I'm still not quite convinced.

A Google search on "slater exeter beauty" turns up several more articles. It turns out that the subjects (numbering about 100) averaged only 2.5 days of age. That effectively rules out any effects of culture, upbringing, videogames, beer, etc.

The infants were shown composite photographs:

The two sets of faces were composites created by computers from a number of volunteers' faces. They followed the now widely observed psychological consensus that faces with features that are close to the human average in size and shape are generally perceived to be attractive.

source

Or maybe not:

In the new study, Dr Slater’s team used this effect to test whether newborns with little or no experience of the world shared their elders’ assumptions about facial beauty. The researchers took hundreds of pictures of female members of the public, and asked adult volunteers to rate their attractiveness on a scale of one to five.

Dr Slater then paired particularly beautiful faces, with an average score of close to five, with particularly unattractive ones scoring close to one. Care was taken to match qualities such as hair colour and length that might otherwise interfere with the experiment. Almost 100 newborn babies, with an average age of two days, were then shown these paired images.

About 80per cent of the time the babies looked exclusively or mainly at the face judged “prettier”. The effect was also seen when the experiment was repeated with male faces and faces from many different ethnic groups.
source

There's some confusion in the reporting. Maybe both methods were used.

Since the infants were not "tainted" by education or experience, and since the choice of attractive people was the same between adults and infants (80% of the time), that leads to the conclusion of "hardwiring". It's the consistency that rules out subjectivity - unless 2-day old humans are somehow capable of complex psychology.

In any event, these results might be a basis for creating or predicting which AMVs will win a contest (or movies at the box office). People in crowds will generally revert to relatively primitive behavior (let's not use the word "infantile" ). Pretty faces, lots of motion, bright colors, etc. should do it 80% of the time.

[Cloud_Strife077]

hey have u dudes heard of yu-gi-oh some of the female characters on that are so hot

[ashiteruSweetSurrender]

it depends on how ugly they are... but in my case if the main and secondary characters are unattractive to me I don't bother.
--{xoxo}sakari.

[Kai Stromler]

Personally, I'm more inclined to like an anime if it has "ugly" characters, because "ugly" when used to describe anime is often a synonym for "realistic". As Oto pointed out in the first post, Naoki Urasawa is never going to win any awards for most fan-friendly character design, but that doesn't diminish the awesomeness of Monster, Yawara, and Master Keaton. Same goes for Patlabor, Akira, Jin-Roh, the list goes on. Very little that Leiji Matsumoto or Mitsuru Adachi put out falls under the conventional anime definition of "attractive" but that doesn't mean it's not great stuff.

These creators are all still great artists, it's just that they don't draw conventionally pretty people. While fan appeal is certainly a valid route to success, it should be notable when something succeeds (commercially or artistically) without that measure of visual flash.

--K

[x_rex30]

Personally, I'm more inclined to like an anime if it has "ugly" characters, because "ugly" when used to describe anime is often a synonym for "realistic". As Oto pointed out in the first post, Naoki Urasawa is never going to win any awards for most fan-friendly character design, but that doesn't diminish the awesomeness of Monster, Yawara, and Master Keaton. Same goes for Patlabor, Akira, Jin-Roh, the list goes on. Very little that Leiji Matsumoto or Mitsuru Adachi put out falls under the conventional anime definition of "attractive" but that doesn't mean it's not great stuff.

These creators are all still great artists, it's just that they don't draw conventionally pretty people. While fan appeal is certainly a valid route to success, it should be notable when something succeeds (commercially or artistically) without that measure of visual flash.

--K

Well said Kai.

[Pyle]

After watching Naruto, I'm grateful that most anime has hawt girls in it. Pretty much the only attractives females in Naruto are men.

Rock Lee is ugly, and he's the pimpingest character I've ever seen.

[Pyle]

hey have u dudes heard of yu-gi-oh some of the female characters on that are so hot

I desperately want to sig this for some reason.

[OtakuMan22]

Couldn't have said it better myself!

Good points and excellent taste.

And I can't think why I didn't mention Satoshi Kon earlier. Perfect Blue, Millenium Actress, and Tokyo Godfathers are all real genius pieces of work, but they are not the "Negima" or "Love Hina" pretty. And that's a GOOD thing!

~Otaku-Man