Recommended for people who cannot appreciate paintings unless there are anime girls.
Titled Eshi de Irodoru Sekai no Meiga (loosely, World Famous Masterpieces Painted by Artists) and published in Japan, this new book features famous paintings reinterpreted with anime girls.
According to DreamNews, a variety of Japanese manga, anime, and video game artists participated, including Shiro of Encouragement of Climb fame, Kazuharu Kina, and Medabots manga artist Horumarin. These are talented folks, sure, but their styles don’t always suit the works they’re reimagining.
For example, here is Manet’s original masterpiece A Bar at the Folies-Bergère:
And the anime girl version:
The nuts-and-bolts art history mentioned in the book seems okay, but here, changing the image so drastically undermines much of the original work’s meaning, context, and history.
Ditto for anime style take on Vermeer’s The Milkmaid.
It completely ignores the quiet dignity of the original, especially how it didn’t sexualize its subject like other milkmaid paintings of that time.
Anime style Monet.
Well. Then.
This is one of the better ones. The cat is more prominent in the anime girl version than in Toulouse-Lautrec’s original, which drew on influences from Japanese art. Seeing a modern Japanese take on his work is fascinating.
Eshi de Irodoru Sekai no Meiga isn’t a super serious look at European art, but it doesn’t pretend to be. The interpretations are all over the place and might evoke eye-rolling, but also, hopefully, further study of the original works.
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