Are Japanese Anime Creators Obsessed with Heavy Metal?

Japanese anime characters are easy to spot for those obsessed with the genre and casual observers alike. The way Japanese anime artists put the finishing touches on each character is truly unique to the country’s artists, and any other country’s artists that copy the style will have their newly created characters labeled as false replicas. But where did this unique style come from, and how much influence has the heavy metal niche had on its creators?

The anime-themed metal band Animetal — their name, obviously, an un-subtle combination of the two terms — are perhaps the most on-the-nose example, the first clue in our mission to prove that Japanese anime creators are obsessed with heavy metal. They’re pretty good too! Have a listen:

Metal music itself often plays a prominent role in anime series. The intro and ending of any animated series comes with its own theme song, but if you have ever watched anime you will have noticed that metal is quite often used for cutscenes, fight sequences, and during special missions. Many of these soundtracks, whether used for a short fight scene or as the intro music to the animation, have been created by Animetal or other metal artists.

Another theory holds that the Japanese are very mindful of mental health, and several studies show that heavy metal seems to be good for you.

If you take a bit of a deeper dive into the characters’ styles and fashion you’ll quickly realize that there is a distinctive metal influence in anime. The word “anime” itself literally means “animation” in Japanese, while for the rest of the world it specifically refers to a niche of animated characters that originate from Japan. Characters within the anime world are quite diverse: cute and cuddly, model-like men and women, pop stars and superheroes, young and old, good and evil, and characters from different racial backgrounds, just to name a few. But in amongst all these different kinds of characters there seems to be a much larger percentage of them that look like rock and metal stars compared to animation originating from other places in the world.

For starters, the wide variety of hair colors used in anime character design is one of the most obvious touch points. Metal fans love to dye their hair all sorts of colors, and that’s certainly also true of characters on the anime circuit. Anime character hairstyles also often bear similarity to that of metal fans: spikey, messy and long, pigtails that spike at the bottom, short hair with an uneven or zigzagged cut around the base — all these hairstyles have long been prevalent within the metal scene dating back to the genre’s early days.

A large number of Japanese anime characters have been designed in such a way that you could take them out of their anime cultural niche and throw them into a metal-style animation created anywhere else in the world and no one would question it. Could an anime character have a role on Metalocalypse? That character would surely be made fun of mercilessly by Nathan Explosion, but no one would question their presence in the series.

There are also quite a few characters that would fit in with the darker side of heavy metal music culture. Hellsing is your quintessential gothic anime series that sports a very metal aesthetic, and its artwork would also make a good album cover. The Devilman lead character is another metal-esque figure who has a famous fan in the form of the one and only kitty litter-carrying, brick-toting, French onion soup-loving Glenn Danzig. A character named Dark Schneider bares some resemblance to Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider, but a little bit of investigating reveals that the character’s creators used Udo Dirkschneider, former frontman of German metal legends Accept, as inspiration.

Everywhere we look into the world of anime we find evidence of its close relation to metal. Animetal, soundtracks, cutscenes, fashion design, dark gothic character style, and the fact that there are even a few famous heavy metal stars associated with anime characters. With all that in mind, it’s hard to deny the fact that Japanese anime creators are obsessed with heavy metal!