Facial Expressions In Anime

Anime is renowned for its over the top facial styles to represent how characters are feeling in certain situations. As part of a course there, the University of Michigan studied into how things like a bleeding nose, blushing or a sweat drop can translate into a person's emotion a particular moment.

 Blushing is known as a usual way of showing a person's embarrassment or feelings of love to another person. However, in the world of anime and manga, there are many forms of blushing used to symbolise basically every type of feeling. A slight embarrassment can be shown by having tiny red lines across both cheeks, a deeper feeling of embarrassment may by indicated by a thick red line across both the nose and cheeks, and with severe embarrassment the whole of a character's face can be seen to turn completely red.   

Blushing in blue still represents the feeling of embarrassment, but this is usually associated with the feeling of embarrassment with a mixture of anger. It can be seen to show that a character is still with embarrassment. This is usually partnered with evil-looking eyes, and maybe also with an anger vein or sweat drop.

In other circumstances, sweat drops may be displayed next to a character's head. These sweat drops can represent the feeling of embarrassment, the harshness of the feeling is measured by the size of the sweat drop on the character's head, and also maybe the number of sweat drops. This usually shows a less severe sort of embarrassment compared to the blue blush, and a less amorous form of embarrassment than a red blush.  

When a character is extremely aggravated and angry, three veins may be shown on their forehead or on their fist. These so called anger veins, can be used amply, but not always in a realistic way. These anger veins can be used in extremes, like in manga where the same sort of veins may appear on the back of a character's hand when in an violent rage.

In anime/manga, a bloody nose may not necessarily indicate that someone is injured, it instead means that they are either thinking of a beautiful woman, the sex of the character usually associated with this display is men, or that they are thinking of lustful thoughts. Many people question why a bloody nose is associated with lustful thoughts. When Gilles Poitras, author of the book 'The Anime Companion' questioned the same thing, he found the best answer he got was from a Japanese man who recollected to him that his mother told him that when he was much younger, if he stared at a beautiful woman he would get a nose bleed.

When anime and manga characters are shown crying, it is mostly shown as very exaggerated. One way of crying is shown in the form of 'tear lines'. 'Tear lines' can be seen as two wavy lines drawn from each of the character's eyes to the bottom of their face, filled with white to show that they are crying. An even more over the top way of showing a character is crying is when the artist takes the tear lines off the two-dimensional space of the face and then direct it out towards the sky, making the viewer perceive the character is crying waterfalls. Both these ways of crying are usually not taken seriously. In more dramatic or serious situations crying is seen to be more subtle.