Take a look at this character right here. You know who that is, don’t you? That’s Spider-Man, and he is one of the most beloved and recognizable characters in any medium ever in history. The average person is more likely to recognize Spider-Man than the President of the United States or a portrait of Jesus.
Now let’s take away Spidey’s color so he’s just a silhouette. Oh yeah, it turns out that Spider-Man is just a normal guy in a skin-tight suit. Nothing really too fancy about it. No frills, weapons, or anything. He’s basically one of those wooden mannequins.
Well then, this is clearly a violation of the silhouette theory, which, some people say, is the theory that your character should be clearly distinct and identifiable from other characters based on its silhouette.
Well, that’s it then. Pack it up. Spider-Man is just a completely shit character then. He needs to be “modernized” and reworked. So let’s make him more recognizable. Let’s just put a fucking spider on top of his head so you know he has spider powers. And let’s make him freakishly tiny, you know, because spiders are tiny.
Okay, hold on. That sounds pretty dumb, right?
Well, that is exactly the justification some people give to explain why Raphael’s redesign was good.
The claim is that in ye olden days all of the ninja turtles looked the same, and you couldn’t tell who is who based on their “silhouette” as if that matters. Now this is ignoring the fact that you can clearly tell the turtles apart in their silhouette because you can see their weapons right there. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who is who.
It is apparently good character design to take an existing character with easily identifiable visual characteristics, like their weapons and colors, and completely exaggerate everything about the character just to have a different silhouette.
So, Raph is aggressive and angry, so let’s make him fucking huge and give him a durag… and yeah, that’s about all of the thought that went into this rework.
I don’t have an issue with shaking things up, I just think this design is ugly as hell, different silhouette or not.
Despite the fact that the turtles in Rise of the TMNT have different silhouettes, I wouldn’t say they are necessarily upgrades from, say, the Mirage turtles or the ‘03 turtles.
The character design here is like diarrhea to my eyes. Raph is big and had a durag because he’s angry. Donatello has weird glasses/goggles or whatever because he’s techy. Mikey is small because he’s timid. And you get the idea.
But Raphael’s durag itself was never my complaint. Alternative headwear can be perfectly fine. I like The Last Ronin, and he wears, gasp, a hood! But the hood, in a way, is a pure artistic element of The Last Ronin. The hood was necessary to his character. It serves a purpose, and it was added for a reason that is directly relevant to the character’s needs.
Unlike the changes to Raphael, the hood wasn’t added to Mikey in The Last Ronin just for the sake of differentiating the character or altering the silhouette or whatever character design garbage jargon you want to throw at me.
If you are redesigning an existing character and your starting point is “how can I make this character have a more distinct silhouette” or “how can I make this character different” — you have already failed. You have already lost the essence of what makes a character great. You are a loser and a failure.
Now, I will explain something that amateur artists do not know about silhouettes. The so-called silhouette theory or silhouette rule was never, ever, about making your character distinctive or different.
The fact that Spider-Man’s silhouette in this example is just a man standing or the fact that Leonardo’s silhouette is just a ninja turtle standing, means they are successfully passing the silhouette test.
And you can clearly tell that Leonardo is some kind of warrior or ninja, even if you might not know he’s a turtle. Spider-Man, on the other hand, is in a heroic, confident pose, even if you don’t know what character he is from the silhouette. But the information that you need to know from the silhouette can easily be determined here.
In other words, they aren’t indistinctive blobs. Even if you can’t immediately determine who the character is (which, you can, in the case of Leonardo), what matters is that the silhouette is clearly representing a character doing something. The silhouette itself, not the identity of the character, is what is supposed to be identifiable. The fact that it is a silhouette of something and you know what that something is, a hero, or a ninja, is what is important.
To drive the point home further, here is a silhouette of Spider-Man swinging. You’ll think, “oh yeah, that’s a character swinging.” That is a proper application of the silhouette theory.
But drastically changing Raphael, just for the sake of making him more different than the other turtles, or giving him a more distinct silhouette, is bad character design. And if that’s what you think the silhouette theory is, then the silhouette theory itself is bad character design.
