Sunday, June 07, 2009

Her eyes are huge and she makes no sense...

Can anyone explain this to me?

27 comments:

Anonymous said...

Random.

Anonymous said...

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=magibon&l=1

Anonymous said...

Looks like she's been told over and over that her eyes are her biggest asset and she wants the world to know it. LOL

Anonymous said...

Is it some sort of a "Who blinks first" contest?

Hoarseface said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
lori said...

I think she is the most subscribed to director on Youtube. I like her pluck. She's making money off of it.

Anonymous said...

She is the living embodiment of the fantasy cartoons' version of an attractive (young) woman's face.

Unless you've seen those cartoons (I think they're called hente or something), of course, this is mysterious. Why are those cartoons or comic book treatments popular (mainly in Asia)?

Because they find the large eyed, near child-like look very attractive, evidently. (I myself find them cute, but not in a sexual way.)

XI

Dakinikat said...

adolescent performance art?

and showing off her eye job? guess there's a big market in japan for those and people pay to look like anime characters.

Joseph Cannon said...

XI, the term you are looking for is anime. Character design in Japanese animation is traditionally influenced by early American animated cartoons -- think Max Fleischer -- which featured characters with very large eyes.

Hentai is a pornographic subset of anime. The genre began, as far as I can tell, with an animated film called Urotsukidoji, which has a surprisingly strong story. If you can get past the tentacle rape.

MrMike said...

If she is speaking Japanese high school English she won't make sense. I didn't bother to turn the computer speakers on to find out.

Anonymous said...

Yes, thanks for that. Anime, I've seen a little on television. Hentai, I guess, not so much!

The use of very large, very dark (even black) eyes is the common denominator, or at least one of the most obvious feaures of this anime style.

It's one of the reasons infants and infant animals are considered cute-- their eyes are disproportionately large compared to their face size.

XI

MrMike said...

What came first?
Big eyed anime characters or those big eye paintings that were popular in the 1970's?
I think the eye is one organ that is full sized at birth, anybody know for sure?
The Japanese(unless they are christian)have a more relaxed attitude toward porn than we do.
There are manga (comic books) that feature it readily available in stores.
Also, for those interested, do a web search using the word cosplay.

Perry Logan said...

Was it not the Big Bopper who taught us:

There ain't nothin' in the world like a big-eyed girl
That makes me act so funny, makes me spend my money
Makes me feel real loose like a long-necked goose
Like a girl, oh baby, that's what I like!

Joseph Cannon said...

Mike, I thought I had made the point clear. What came first were the American cartoons of the 1920s and 1930s. Those character designs were, I suppose, drawn from a tradition first established in earlier newspaper comic strips.

Japanese animation began in the 1930s. The first full-length anime was in 1944. The "Walt Disney" of Japanese animation was Osamu Tesuka, creator of Astro Boy and Kimba. I had the honor of meeting him in the 1980s at UCLA.

The "big eye" paintings to which you refer began in the late 1950s. They were attributed to a huckster named Walter Keane; much later, the world learned that the canvases were actually painted by his wife Margaret. Nobody really knows why she allowed him to take credit. Eventually, she divorced him and proved in court that she was the true artist.

The "big eye" works had a huge vogue for a while, thanks to Walter's relentless promotional efforts. The fad infuriated many artists and connoisseurs, who considered the big-eyed waifs to be kitsch. The whole thing was pretty much over by the mid-1960s, although Keane's work is still collected and exhibited.

Anonymous said...

That girl looks like a real live Zwinky

Joseph Cannon said...

And I would take issue with the assertion that the Japanese have a more relaxed attitude toward porn than Americans do.

Americans love to bewail the prudishness of their fellow Americans, but it's simply not a fair accusation. This country is swimming in porn and erotica.

In Japan, explicit porn (including scenes of penetration) was illegal until fairly recently.

Back in the 1970s, I had a teacher in high school -- his name, I recall, was Mr. Ash -- who insisted that Indians (India Indians) had fewer sexual hang-ups than Americans did. I called bullshit. I told him that Indians were in fact more prudish -- you could not even show kissing in a film produced in India. Ash got all huffy and told me I was wrong!

Well, I wasn't wrong, as a little research will confirm. But some people are so emotionally wedded to the "prudish Americans vs. hip non-Americans" stereotype that they will believe in it despite all evidence.

Anonymous said...

BTW - Please don't ask me to explain Zwinky

MrMike said...

Some of those Japanese woodblock prints are pretty raunchy.
I haven't been 100% recently, I did read about the origins of the big eye characters and forgot about it until your mention.
But then I'm a guy who could mess up a paint by numbers picture as far as artistic knowledge and ability.

MrMike said...

Was Mr. Ash a Pokemon trainer in his spare time by chance?

Sextus Propertius said...

XI,

The term "hentai" comes from the Japanese adjective "hen", meaning "strange". "Hentai" roughly translates as "kinky". "weird", or "perverted". It's not considered a complimentary term in Japanese ;-).

Anonymous said...

Big eyes are definitely moe, so I guess that's the biggest draw for subscribers.

Anon 5:40 said...

Joe--

She's a Mark Ryden painting, that is all.

lori said...

I always wanted to do a movie about the Keanes. it has a perfectly cinematic ending.

Years ago, I looked at a brick bungalow in my small, German hometown in Illinois. Despite it's nicely laid out floor plans, with symetrical, easily decorated rooms and lovely stained glass windows, it had been badly abused by having the original fire place replaced with a 50s river rock fireplace, accoustical ceilings, and was now filled to the brim with ghastly contemporary furniture from Sears Roebuck. The piece de resistance, though, was the faux-Keane, big-eyed nudes in the master bedroom. Horrific. Ghastly. Nightmare inducing.

Anonymous said...

You're missing the best part of this mess, the backstory and outing of this girl...

Read the whole article to really take it all in, yes it can be difficult, but in the end, don't you deserve to know the real story of Magibon?

http://encyclopediadramatica.com/MRirian

RedDragon said...

I get it!

That's the same look Obots get when you engage them in a meaningful conversation!

Joseph Cannon said...

You know, the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that this girl has engaged in a brilliant art experiment. The purpose of her exercise is to demonstrate the meanings that viewers will ascribe to an essentially meaningless image.

Look at what has happened on this thread. Quite a few people have presumed that the woman is in Japan. She is American born and bred. People have presumed that this image has something to do with pedophilia. She is 22. People have talked about porn. There is nothing even remotely sexual occurring here.

People have used this image as an excuse to engage in wide-ranging discussions of Japanese art. There have also been discussions of the nature of internet celebrity. People have posted wild speculations as to what this woman's life is like.

And she accomplished all of this just by looking into the camera and saying not one word.

Whoever she is, she's brilliant! She's an artist. A more profound artist than Warhol, and I'm not kidding.

Anonymous said...

Joe, I would point out, though, that it's thanks to the Japanese that we know for certain the effects of porn on the frequency of sex crimes (an effect hinted by the studies commissioned by Helms (or Meese, I forget which)). Several years ago, the Japanese government produced and distributed porn targeted to those who committed certain specific sex crimes. The result? Within a year those crimes decreased in frequency by 80%.


Sergei Rostov