Why do Back Arrow’s Character Designs hold up so well?

Although Back Arrow is not for everyone’s taste of casual mech anime fandom, its character designs aren’t just fucking good while retaining their distinctiveness, they oddly blend in Go Nagai’s early art style a bit too well. It’s rather telling when roundish eyes paired with increasingly angular noses might mean that the show has successfully imitated the 1970s-early 1980s style of Go Nagai’s first popular works (at least after Harenchi Gakuen) without being too much of a ripoff.

The character designs of Back Arrow are more than frigging pretty designs, they’ve captured Go Nagai’s 1970s-early 80s Manga Vibes more nigh accurately than anything before and/or since. Due to being inspired by the way their designer animated DBZ characters in his time at Toei Animation, those of Toshiyuki san have only slight similarities to that of Shinobu Ohtaka’s prototypes for them all and tend to look slightly more like Camilla D’Errico’s cute illustrations instead. 

In other words, it’s rather more likely that Toshiyuki Kanno is such an engaging animation director that nearly everyone involved in making post-mid 1990s Mazinger variations may owe him some degree of indirect respect. 

As for Go Nagai himself, not many human beings have even thought of him being inspired by both Osamu Dezaki and Chieko Hosokawa to a small degree. 

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