Olhos mágicos: estudo da evolução gráfica das Mahou Shoujo na animação japonesa

Abstract

Mahou Shoujo, also known in the west as "Magical girl", is a subgenre within fantasy in Japanese media, namely in animation and "shoujo" manga, which appears in the late 60s of the 20th century, aimed at a female children's audience. The premise of the Mahou Shoujo series follows the story of a young protagonist who is born with or receives magical powers from an object that allows her to transform through dynamic choreography, full of bright and strong colors into her magical version. The protagonist faces various challenges throughout the series, where she has to balance her daily life with her magical life. This dissertation aims to study the graphic evolution of Mahou Shoujo's eyes in Japanese animation. It begins with the contextualization of the artistic medium, animation, where this subgenre is inserted, and the socio-cultural aspects that influenced this media theme. Introducing the brief history of animation and Japanese animation, as well as approaching the Japanese socio-cultural part implicit in the Mahou Shoujo series, namely the gender ideals of Japanese society throughout the ages. Then, in a theoretical-practical moment, analyse the morphology of the protagonists of the Mahou Shoujo series, and present the importance of big eyes and their particularities in Japanese animation, meticulously examining the graphic records of the protagonists' eyes in a visual chronology created by the author. In conclusion, animation cinema and the eyes' graphic design are constantly evolving despite their slow progress. This is noticeable in the eyes' chronology, where the animators demonstrate their dexterity in innovating the eye designs and making them more complex over the years. This way new methods are created according to the available technology, such as changing the lines for patches of color.