Trigger Happy
anime (animated cartoon films)—the massive Japanese toy and videogame corporation Bandai, for instance, is a major sponsor of animated programming. Whole books have been written about “Japanimation” alone. But the most pertinent aspect of these comic forms for our purposes is their peculiar style of character drawing, which has a very strong influence on Japanese videogames. Anime in particular makes use of a bizarre, so-called deformed style for its people: they have huge heads and eyes, and tiny torsos.
In the early days of videogames, technological considerations more or less forced designers into exactly the same style. The most influential early game to feature a fully humanoid, animated “character” was Shigeru Miyamoto’s Donkey Kong, with its eradefining mustachioed hero, later to be christened Mario. Because of the low resolution offered by videogame systems back then, character designers only had a limited amount of pixels—the little squares of light that make up the visual image—to play with. Miyamoto gave Jumpman (as he was then) a hat, simply because the technology couldn’t enable animated hair; he wore dungarees just to differentiate his red arms from his blue body and legs. As
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