An old Disney cartoon starring Donald Duck and Pluto was called “The Eyes Have It.”
No word on how prescient ol’ Walt was back in 1945, but he might have well been talking about a different brand of cartooning hailing from Asia: Anime.
Anime’s young acolytes in the Snoqualmie Valley all agree that expressive peepers are a big part of most of its drawings.
“The eyes are very important,” 15-year-old Holly Dafer said. “They describe a character. You can tell if they are good or evil.”
Like many hobbies, Anime’s Valley crowd has its casual fans, its diehards and then there’s 14-year-old Alexandra Butler.
“Anime changed my life,” she said.
A freshman now, the memories of seventh grade are still more than fresh. That’s the year she discovered drawing Anime and Manga.
“Until seventh grade, I was an outcast,” she said. “The only reason people talked to me was to get test answers.”
She credits her childhood friend Sarah Cullup, from California, for introducing her to the art form.
“She taught me how to draw,” she said. “And it gave me a way to express myself, and become self-confident. It made me a lot more real in the world, more needed and wanted. I started to get more attention and I felt better about who I actually was.
“Instead of sitting in a corner, I felt better about being out there,” she said.
At the Snoqualmie Library, where you will find Butler drawing Anime once a week, you realize that being out there is almost one of the tools of the trade.
On this day, the group, gathered at the Snoqualmie Library on Center Boulevard, featured several children in costume.
“It’s cosplay,” one of them explained.
Cosplay is a conjunction of the words “costume” and “play” where the participants take on aspects of the personality of their characters.
“This is how we express our love of our shows,” McKayla Freitas, 14, said, referring to Anime TV series and animated movies. “It’s like it’s Halloween all year.”
Not everyone is as understanding. People sometimes get turned off by the getups.
“They look at me like I’m creepy,” said 12-year-old Kaya Furulie, speaking just above a whisper, dressed as a ninja, holding a bulbous gourd. “They look at my gourd and think it’s a peanut.”
Still, Butler said, most people know of Anime, they just may not pay too much attention to it.
Besides, the group members said, the real test of talent is not on what people think of your costume, but what happens when you put pencil to paper.
Fourteen-year-old Spencer Dolecki came prepared to show his stuff. To his one eraser in his left jacket pocket, he had 19 pencils in his right.
“I usually bring more,” he said. “I usually go through them pretty quick. They were longer this morning.”
On this day, his drawing included mythical creatures battling and eating each other. His buddies did not bat an eye and that, Dolecki said, is why he loves Anime.
“In Anime, you can take all your crazy ideas, put them on paper,” he said, “and people will accept them basically.”
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