Can you recognize that at a distance, even once you’ve looked at the bigger resolution? I’m sure you can tell it’s the core cast of Part 3, but do you recognize the style? With the coming of the new Part 3 anime, we’re now in a unique position of compare and contrast to how a JoJo’s anime was handled way back when. It’s been 20 years since the first OVAs came out, and 13 years since the second ones. It’s going to be a few months before we can compare them down to every detail, but the art styles are nice and available for Parts 1 all the way up to 5.
If you haven’t recognized the style yet, these were character design portraits done late last year and early this year by Junichi Hayama, the lead character designer on the 90s and 00s JoJo’s OVAs and the ill fated Phantom Blood movie. Supposedly, these were made in commemoration of the new anime, and someone on Naver collected them in further commemoration of the new Stardust Crusaders anime.
I criticized Hayama’s style when we got those scans of the PB movie character designs by saying something looked off about the faces. The only way I can describe it is that from the front, they look really wide like they’ve been slightly inflated or something. It was most noticeable on his Jotaro and Part 1 Dio, but from the sides, and with later characters, it doesn’t look quite as bad. To the contrary, he’s got a pretty nice eye for small detail. If you look at Giorno and Dio together, you can see that he took the time to make sure they have similarly shaped eyes. You can also kinda see a similar feel in appearance between Josuke and Joseph.
Most of the collected drawings focus on Part 3, but seeing Hayama’s Part 2 designs is also pretty interesting, and I wouldn’t have expected him to go for Josuke and Giorno. You can check out all the images on Naver.
One Pixel Jump 