Animatope: A Manga-Styled Animation Expression Toolkit
Author(s): Asuka Tohda, Sho Hasegawa, Masa Inakage.
Proceedings: Eurographics 2003,
2003.
[BibTeX] 
Abstract:
Manga, a Japanese comic style, is becoming widely accepted within comic readers worldwide. In Manga, mimetic
symbols and onomatopoeia symbols are heavily used to express emotions and various movements in a comic frame.
In this paper, we present a toolkit named "Animatope", to emulate Manga-style symbols in a non-photorealisitc
animation. Animatope transfers the Manga-sytle symbol grammar to 3D animation. We extend Manga symbols to
Meta-symbols, or animated symbols, to enrich the emotional expressions and subtle behaviors. Meta-symbols are
categorized into several classifications in Animatope Toolkit. Meta-symbols are controlled with basic parameters,
shape of emitters, and motion handles.