Pokemon characters (week 5)

This week, we gonna learn about character design. As example, our lecture choose the Pokemon because it is said to be the top franchise cartoon among the others.

What's character design?

Character design serves as a key element to fictional world building that represent something.

In pokemon, there are a few aspect that contributed into the character design of each pokemon and how it relates to each of their power.

A simple diagram that teach us how pokemon battle works.

Some of inspirations that the creator of pokemon took for each characters.

Japanese culture

Yokai, a type of demon/creature/monster in japanese folklore. Example:

Other cultures

Pokemon such as Magikarp is inspired by Chinese culture. The idiom "Liyu jumps over the dragon gate." Which means a fish after jumping through the gate will be powerful. They took this as an inspiration and applied it to the pokemon, not just the character but the evolution of it.

They are still a lot of inspirations that inspired pokemon, I personally find it very interesting as to how they applied it to each characters. I definitely would do more research on this when I am free!!

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Activity of the day: CREATE YOUR OWN POKEMON

After the lecture, we were asked to form group of 4 to create our very own pokemon. We were encouraged to use the types of inspirations we had discussed earlier such as folklore, cultures, zoology and many more.

My group have decided to get our character inspiration through the chinese idiom,"Crouching tiger, hidden dragon". Which means a person is actually strong/powerful but act mediocre to hide it. We felt that this is suitable because in our group, 3 of us is born in the year of the dragon (2000), while 1 is born in the year of tiger (1998).

The power of our pokemon would be based on the 4 elements, because according to feng shui different zodiac year came with different elements. For example, the year 2000 is the year of the metal dragon.

Some sketches

Final sketch!!