Have you noticed whenever you see a cartoon/anime character animated on screen and they open their mouth, their teeth are often drawn in an overly simplistic curved bar shape?
The reason for that is because Nobody wants to draw the complexities of real-life teeth on a character. It's too damn hard to get right and other times it makes the character look like they never had braces when growing up.
"You ain't making us wear those embarrassing headgears Dr. Maverick!"
So in essence, the easiest to depict teeth on cartoons and/or anime is to draw the teeth as a simple bar shape and often in a uniform shape without variations.
I often like to call this PIANO BAR TEETH. Because it's about as uniform as a White Piano Key from a piano whether it's acoustic or digital.
Sometimes, the piano bar teeth isn't completely uniform. To add some variation, the artist can add something like a fang. Like Charlie Morningstar shown below.
"Sans the cute fangs, I'll always have my perfect pearly white piano bar teeth"
And believe it or not, the bar teeth is so popular with artists looking for a quick way out of complexities that it's become a bit of a berserk button for some other artists who want to avoid the bar teeth like a plague just because it's so overused and basically leaves little to not variation to the teeth.
Of course, there are cartoons that break that mold but they still use those same stupid ass bar teeth. It's just that they add vertical lines on the bars to make it look like it's individual teeth.
Roger Klotz from DOUG is an example of people who decides to put vertical lines on his splendid pearly whites and call it a day. Does he use Crest Toothpaste?
I know KING OF THE HILL does this too.
In fact, it's a requirement to draw teeth like that in the show because according to Mike Judge or Greg Daniels, drawing hyper-realistic teeth on the characters of KOTH is liable to give the characters horse teeth.
There are some cartoons out there that I know where they claim they at least make an effort to have variations of individual teeth on their characters but I think that's a lie.
THE SIMPSONS is one of those shows that claim to make the effort but stop and look at this GIF of Homer Screaming.
It was novel for THE SIMPSONS, and later FUTURAMA and DISENCHANTMENT to depict their characters with this style of teeth but when the WESTERN ANIMATION industry decided to mandate those stupid CALARTS STYLE for today's shows, artists were given an ultimatum, either draw piano bar teeth or Simpsons Teeth.
I've seen some shows in the modern Western Animation scene that dealt with this dilemma like CLARENCE for example but I don't have a photo or fanart of that since I'm not a fan of any modern CARTOON NETWORK show that isn't an ADULT SWIM original so instead, here's a piece of fanart of Star Butterfly that's close to the actual art style from the show.....
"Star Butterfly is not amused with Tom's Orthodontal skills in the CalArts Style.
Tom is actually her former boyfriend. "
Rick and Morty is another show that borrows heavily from THE SIMPSONS in terms of the way they draw their teeth.
"Hey Maverick! A real *Burp* cartoon man's teeth should look off-white. Pearly Whites are just so f**king unrealistic. Little words of wisdom dawg."
Yeah... thank you rick. It's also worth noting that at least he has a realistic color choice of how teeth often look color wise without all that artificially whitening products that some people want to use on their own teeth.
Oh look. It's the most manliest Medic animation has ever laid eyes on. Here's his words of wisdom on the problem with drawing realistic teeth in animation.
"Ho ho ho ho! Thanks Maverick. I think I know what's the problem with why cartoon characters can't get realistic teeth to look proper. Like you said. It's too hard. Another, it'll end up looking flat. THIRD, even with all that effort, they'll end up looking like blasted incisors just like my set of pearly whites.
And that's my two cents."
So what Dr. Livesey is saying is that the problem lies with the fact that teeth are varied in such a way that it's hard to get them to look right and you end up drawing incisors instead of variations such as the molars, canines, premolars, etc.
To give you an idea what teeth are supposed to look like in real-life, here's a photo of actual teeth... not mine but rather a photo I pulled from WIKIPEDIA.
Pretty gnarly stuff but that's how teeth are supposed to look with all the variations that you can ask for.
Anime/Manga typically prefers the bar teeth but here's a screenshot of a semi-aversion of the bar teeth featuring GUTS from BERSERK.
Admittingly, I too am guilty of drawing bar teeth on my own characters but I can't help it. I was so used to doing this on my own characters like Hayden and Megumi shown below that If I ever decide to break convention and give these two characters realistic looking teeth, the results wouldn't look pretty.
So yeah, my art style will forever have to cope with the bar teeth no matter what.
CGI on the other hand varies. I've worked with rigs where the teeth are bar shaped or they're incisors. I'm still looking for other rigs but yeah.
It's also worth noting that for CGI, it's often mixed on whether a character would have bar teeth or incisors in their fixed 3D Models. I think that's mostly due to how uncanny realistic teeth would look for a character in pre-rendered animations.
Just like what happened with UGLY SONIC before that rig was fired and replaced with a better looking CGI SONIC for the 2020 movie.
Speaking about Sonic, I was actually informed about the difficulty modeling Sonic's teeth when I took 3D Modeling classes during the lockdowns and I can't fathom about the issues involved with modeling teeth like that. I just ended up modeling bar teeth by creating a simple bar and curving it with lattice deformers.
Anyhow, that's my post on teeth. I didn't really think I wanted to do a post about cartoon dentistry but sometimes I need to break away and write what I observe in art design. Especially when I sometimes get writers block, stress from my airport cafe job, or in this case, want to break into caricatures.
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