h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Does /anyone/ have /any/ idea why Anime characters /never/ look Japanese? Even the ones that are explicitly stated to be from Japan?

crap artists?????

apeal to a wider audience????

get the money from the dirty gaijin????

That just wouldn´t fit in with the general artistic style of anime characters.

"That just wouldn´t fit in with the general artistic style of anime characters."

No, because none of them look like that. The question was *why* none of them look like that, though.

I'm not so sure, but I'm interested in hearing thoughts on it.

It´s the style. It´s a bit like asking why cubism doesn´t look realistic.

[] [] balls to picasso

"It's like that because it's like that", if you prefer - but there are reasons why cubism (or dada, or socialist realism) emerged when and where they did. Or there were points people used different styles to make.

"Does /anyone/ have /any/ idea why Anime characters /never/ look Japanese? Even the ones that are explicitly stated to be from Japan?"

There's at least one anime movie with Japanese-looking characters. Maybe that has to do with the fact that it's made in a naturalistic, almost Ligne Claire-style.

It's called 'Jin-Roh' aka 'The Wolf Pack', and I highly recommend it.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0193253/

Kenko Zenrakei Suieibu Umisho has more than one distinctly Japanese looking character in it.

I was told, by a huge anime fan (whose name I dare not speak these days) that it was because they have some beliefs about eyes, so they make the eyes as big as possible. Or it's because of the size of their own eyes, so they are making their characters have 'the ideal' eyes.

Also, everyone in Japan has the same hair colour and eye colour (so I have been told before am jumped on) so they make their anime characters as mad as possible so they are all very different from each other.

Because Tezuka (an early influential Japanese animator) was inspired by the big features of Betty Boop, and found that big eyes allowed his characters greater expression of emotion. Other animators adopted his style and it became a 'standard'. It's not supposed to look particularly foreign or anything, it was just a handy style that became the standard. If you think about it, it's not that the characters actually look any more Western than Japanese - they don't look like any race, they look like Anime characters.

You may as well ask why are the Simpsons yellow rather than the colour of Caucasian American families.

KerrAvon has completely pre-emptyed me, with a better answer than I would have given. I was even going to mention Osamu Tezuka.
I'll just add that early anime is heavily influenced by French animation (hence the name) and western animation in general.
I also highly recommend Jin-Roh.