Anime’s physical confrontations don’t mesh with real-world physics, critic says.

While fans’ passion for anime may be immense, the budgets for the series they watch often aren’t. Especially in the current age of late-night TV anime, many shows are produced under tight financial constraints, which is why you’ll see animators cut down on their workload with clever little tricks. A character delivers dialogue dramatically with his back turned, eliminated the need to animate his mouth. The camera zooms in to show a group of friends from the waists up as they walk to school, so as to keep their moving legs out of the frame.

Still, when it’s time to deliver a thrilling fight scene, some genuine kinetic artistry is called for. Hair whips around! Flames flare! Energy bursts crackle! Boobs bounce!

Yes, particularly when the female combatants are bountifully-endowed, anime creators tend to depict their upper-body inertia in loving minutiae of movement. However, Japanese Twitter user @kawachirokow voiced the opinion that these bouncy battles are missing one detail that they’d have in reality, as they fail to convey the fighters’ likely inner dialogue.

In @kawachirokow’s words:

“In scenes where girls with big breasts fight, and their breasts are bouncing and boinging, I always think ‘Ouch ouch ouch ouch they’re shaking so much the skin at the top of the boobs is stretching it’s gonna tear it’s gonna tear it’s gonna tear ouch ouch!!’”

All that jiggling in fight sequences wouldn’t be pleasant for the combatant herself in real life, @kawachirokow asserts, and so she asks anime animators to “Please make those girls with big breasts wear a proper bra.”

Of course, anime has always been a heavily stylized art form, never shying away from choosing a cool-looking depiction over a realistic one. As such, some online commenters had no complaints about the bouncy breasts, even if it took some mental gymnastics to justify them. One supporter of supportless boobs said “Sometimes fights take place in worlds without bras.” Another commenter brushed aside such concerns in the opposite direction, saying “I think it’s best to just believe that they have some kind of special bras that makes even all that bouncing painless,” while yet another chimed in with the declaration that “Of course bouncing breasts are better.”

So even if they may not behave like real breasts, considering that bouncing boobs have been a staple of anime for decades, the movement is unlikely to stop anytime soon.

Source: Twitter/@kawachirokow via Otakomu
Top image: Pakutaso

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