Why Are Anime Mouths Drawn That Way?
When we talk about anime-style mouths, the first question should be “What do you consider to be an anime-style mouth?”
For example, is it super simple, like a cute anime mouth drawing?
Or is it highly detailed, like a pair of detailed manga and anime lips? Perhaps the teeth are particularly well-defined.
All of these are styles pulled directly from anime and manga. So what are we after? Well, it comes down to the type of work. Simpler manga and anime mouths tend to be about economy of line, speed, and being iconic.
For example, Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics says the following about icons in comic art: “The ability of cartoons to focus our attention on an idea is, I think, an important part of their special power, both in comics and in drawing generally [...] The fact that your mind is capable of taking a circle, two dots, and a line and turning them into a face is nothing short of incredible!” (McCloud, Understanding Comics, 31). Sometimes mouths are simple because they just work and it is easy for us to connect with what we see.
The simpler form of the mouth in the anime and manga industry is often driven by necessity. Often, it can be about production schedules and needing to maintain weekly chapters of dozens of pages for stories in magazines like Shonen Jump. If it only takes a few lines to make a convincing mouth that emotes in such a way anyone can interpret it, why wouldn’t you take advantage of that?
This is the same principle that allows us to empathize with a stick figure or simple character so readily. It doesn’t take a lot of detail to come up with something we can connect to as an audience.
The same applies to anime to a degree, as anime originally used fewer frames than contemporary American cartoons and would use simpler, more iconic mouth designs to read clearly and quickly. When you only have so many frames per second, you need a more basic variety of mouth shapes that can be substituted for one another to allow for the appearance of talking. That is why anime parodies often get a lot of mileage of having mouth shapes be small simple lines and giant gaping maws - because there is some element of truth to that in the early works of the genre.
But why then do we get some instances of highly detailed mouth shapes and designs in anime and manga as well? In some cases, it may be that there is a less rushed production where detail in facial features is a necessity in production and those details are mandatory. A higher budget certainly helps as well. However, often, more detailed mouths tend to be done for emphasis in a moment in anime and manga and appear simpler otherwise. For example, in some shoujo anime, lips are rendered in detail to provide a sense of beauty in closeup but may appear less detailed when out of closeup. Color choice will also be emphasized to give them a more full look.
So, when thinking about how to approach anime mouth drawing, it may require you to figure out your position in the spectrum of efficiency and detail. You may need to adjust where you are on the spectrum from project to project, and image to image.
Finding a Style
Because of the diversity in ways anime and manga mouths are drawn, you should probably find a style you like and develop your own based on that. You can develop anime mouth reference sheets based on your favorite manga artists and use those to help shape your style. A character’s mouth style is a factor in developing a character design.
For example, let’s look at some anime mouth references from some manga artist icons and see what we can learn about how they draw these features. We’ll be looking at two extreme examples across the spectrum of icon-based to detailed.
Echiiro Oda
Let’s look at a variety of mouth and lip styles in the work of Echiiro Oda, creator of One Piece. What do we see in his style?
Oda tends to skew more toward the “icon” style of mouths and lips, preferring simple shapes, and fewer details. Many of the mouths are designed around very strong shapes meant to emphasize specific characteristics or emotions. However, when necessary, extra detail is added, such as shading, texture, or emphasis on volume.
This is also a very, very limited sample of the wide variety of mouths drawn in the manga. With well over 1000 chapters, there are many examples to pull from.
Hirohiko Araki
Now let’s look at one manga artist known for their distinctive anime mouths and lips. Here are some examples of the work of Hirohiko Araki, creator of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventures.
Compared to the more icon-style mouths of Oda’s work, Araki’s mouths and lips seem more complex because more anatomy is readily apparent. They tend to feature defined lips given volume through shading, often using hatching. There is also more emphasis on the upper lip, exaggerating the “cupid’s bow” of the Philtrum of the upper lip and using thicker, darker lines for the lower Mentolabial Sulcus, just below the bottom lip.
But, if we look closely, it doesn’t take too much work to make Araki’s mouth drawing look more detailed. Sometimes it is just as simple as three lines: a line at the top of the lip, the line for the mouth, and a line for the bottom. The emphasis put on respective parts then creates unique-looking and detailed mouths.
How to Draw an Anime Mouth
With the idea that mouths can be iconic or detailed, depending on the need for an illustration, animation frame, or comic panel, let’s work on developing an adaptable style of anime mouths and anime lips that can take varying levels of detail.
To begin, let’s get a clear look at the structure of a mouth. First, we have the lips, as shown in this image from Wikipedia. When it comes to the inside of the mouth, you’ll want to find plenty of pictures of mouths in various states.
What we’ll be doing here is starting with very simple mouth designs, and then adding details to increase the complexity and detail of the mouth. What the lesson here is, I think is starting with the most simple mouth you can, and building on it, can result in developing your style.
So, to start, I have a basic anime-style character. Something very simple as a base. I am leaning on the more cartoony side of design here.
As you can see, the mouth shape is a very simple, soft curve. Nothing much at all, but it still reads like a smile. But, what if I wanted to give it a little more volume?
Simply erasing a little bit of the line, right where the philtrum would be, gives the mouth a little more character. Now, let’s take it a bit further and start adding lines.
Notice now with the addition of two more lines, the mouth is more defined. We have the presence of a top and bottom lip. I also gave the line for the bottom lip a little more thickness to give it a fuller look. But we can go further.
By closing off the shape of the top lip, it has more volume. But, we also can add some teeth to give the mouth further shape. Let’s keep going.
We’ve completely closed off the shapes of the mouth, making the mouth more detailed. It still feels a bit simple, however, as I have not done any shading or hatching to give it depth. How you shade and hatch an image is part of your style, and applying shading to just the mouth and ignoring the rest of the face would appear odd, so I am holding off on that. What about how to handle an open mouth, with teeth, though?
I return to my base and do a simple, open-mouth shape. In some cases, this can work for a simple anime-style mouth, as open mouths without defined teeth are seen in gag manga. However, let’s keep at it.
Even simply adding a couple of lines to imply the presence of teeth can go a long way to giving the mouth more character.
Closing the shape and using some shading to create some depth keeps the mouth in the iconic territory, but still offers up some detail and definition.
We’re changing the mouth here to an open mouth. We have simple closed-off shapes for the teeth and tongue. The shading also helps to give the image a little more depth.
Finally, adding some lines to create defined teeth can add a lot. I avoid drawing each tooth with heavy definition because it can be a little offputting in certain art styles. When I do add detail to teeth, I focus on the teeth that are further back in the mouth. I think it looks nicer. However, that also depends entirely on the level of detail of the image.
In any case, mouths can be pretty easy to figure out if you’re comfortable with experimenting with how you combine lines.
One of the best ways to develop your skills is to draw mouths as often as you can, spending as little time as possible on them. Overthinking about how to draw something in cartooning can hurt your ability to draw. Explore impulsive drawings and you’ll find your ability to draw anime-style mouths will increase pretty quickly.
Show Off Those Anime Mouths and Anime Lips!
Once you have the mouth style down for your anime-inspired OCs, why not share your hard work by creating a character profile on CharacterHub? You can not only share your character concepts there, but use features such as social posts, to share original artwork, such as all the anime-style mouths you’ll be drawing to keep your skills sharp.
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David Davis
David Davis is a cartoonist with around twenty years of experience in comics, including independent work and established IPs such as SpongeBob Squarepants. He also works as a college composition instructor and records weekly podcasts. Find out more about him at his website!
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