This is what a cute anime girl looked like around 50 years ago. A notable example is Abe Ritsuko, possibly one of the most influential anime artists out there seeing as how most anime seems to involve lolicon nowadays though Abe Ritsuko was never interested in it.
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Ways of distributing the artwork in the 1970s was really limited so why not put them on pencil cases?
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A picture from Abe Ritsuko's most famous manga. Suekko Taifuu
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Coming to think, I wonder who she'd reflect on this whole thing now that she lived to have seen modern anime.
Abe Ritsuko wasn't the only one to pioneer that art style of cute anime girls we all see today. Here's a picture of the 1971 illustration Mon Cheri Coco illustrated by Yamato Waki. Another influential anime artist.
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Another pretty influential anime artist of the decade was Miuichi Suzue.
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To think that in a time with absolutely no connection to the internet to share ideas many artists in Japan during the 1960s and 1970s decided to collaborate and share ideas about improving the anime aesthetic and making it what it is today. Without people like them, anime would be a lot different and people from the west wouldn't be interested in it as much. Those 1970s anime pioneering works often have a lot of 1970s aesthetic put into it, the ones that would remind you of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin.
But. Improving the Anime Aesthetic has been a thing since the 1950s long before Anime TV shows became a thing and Manga were once in a blue moon.
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Still more detailed than basically 70% of anime that gets made today.
These poor artists wanted to make this medium as some sort of sophisticated piece of expression only to find out artists nowadays ditch what made that aesthetic good and instead go for making sex related Chinese cartoons. Some are probably dead before they saw that happen.