Why does anime often feature giant, perfectly spherical sci-fi explosions?? Eg, consider this explosion from the movie “Akira”, pretty typical of the genre:
These seem inspired by nuclear weapons, often they are literally the result of nuclear weapons according to the plot (although in many cases they are some kind of magical / etc energy). But obviously nuclear weapons cause mushroom clouds, right?? If no real explosion looks like this, where did the artistic convention come from?
What’s going on? Surely they are not thinking of the spherical fireball that only occurs for a handful of milliseconds after a nuclear detonation?? Is it just that spheres are easy to draw??
The answer seems to be that large explosions in humid air (like, say, Japan) cause exactly this sort of rapidly-expanding spherical pulse, as shockwaves cause a pulse of condensation. Check out these videos of the (non-nuclear) 2020 Beirut explosion; it’s a dead ringer for the matching scene in Akira. Here is an especially far-away view of the Beirut explosion where you can see how the shockwave interacts with nearby clouds in an interesting way.
The USA’s cultural image of nuclear explosions comes mostly from early nuclear tests conducted in sunny Nevada, which only generates dry mushroom clouds. (Hence also, perhaps, our cultural associations of a post-nuclear-war world as a dry, desiccated wasteland like those of Fallout or Mad Max?) In Japan, I imagine the more salient reference points would have been 1. eyewitness descriptions of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which happened on partly cloudy & overcast days and presumably looked more like the Beirut video (but bigger), and 2. the later tests of hydrogen bombs at Bikini Atoll, which became somewhat of an international incident regarding the deaths of some Japanese fishermen, and whose explosions similarly had an “expanding white sphere” look to them.
(For a particularly HD, live-action hollywood representation of the spherical-anime-explosion motif, see this scene from Pacific Rim, which interprets the anime motif through a kind of confused mix of vacuum cavitation in water, the back-and-forth wind effects seen in lots of nuclear test footage, and the first-few-milliseconds spherical fireball of a nuclear explosion.)
Isn’t “explosion from a single point grows spherically” just an intuitive thought that people who have never saw a real large-scale explosion would have?
You could write precisely this post about lasers too! Why does anime feature the beams of light visible along the entire path instead of just at the end points? It’s amusing that the explanation is almost identical.
This is standard for all sorts of fiction though, and the reason is that if you don’t show the path of the laser then the audience can’t tell what’s going on.
Orson Welles bemoaned how the explosion in his adaptation of the Trial could interpreted as an allusion to a nuclear explosion—“because I hate symbolism”. He explained they tried all afternoon to film an explosion that wasn’t mushroomy and failed, he finally relented “all right, there’s going to be symbolism”. While the Trial was shot in France, I don’t have to hand where the second unit explosion photography was done and the ambient humidity there...
(I checked, the explosion at the start of Touch of Evil isn’t really an explosion: it cuts to a flaming car chassis bumping down on the ground, follow by a crash zoom)
Why does anime often feature giant, perfectly spherical sci-fi explosions?? Eg, consider this explosion from the movie “Akira”, pretty typical of the genre:
These seem inspired by nuclear weapons, often they are literally the result of nuclear weapons according to the plot (although in many cases they are some kind of magical / etc energy). But obviously nuclear weapons cause mushroom clouds, right?? If no real explosion looks like this, where did the artistic convention come from?
What’s going on? Surely they are not thinking of the spherical fireball that only occurs for a handful of milliseconds after a nuclear detonation?? Is it just that spheres are easy to draw??
The answer seems to be that large explosions in humid air (like, say, Japan) cause exactly this sort of rapidly-expanding spherical pulse, as shockwaves cause a pulse of condensation. Check out these videos of the (non-nuclear) 2020 Beirut explosion; it’s a dead ringer for the matching scene in Akira. Here is an especially far-away view of the Beirut explosion where you can see how the shockwave interacts with nearby clouds in an interesting way.
The USA’s cultural image of nuclear explosions comes mostly from early nuclear tests conducted in sunny Nevada, which only generates dry mushroom clouds. (Hence also, perhaps, our cultural associations of a post-nuclear-war world as a dry, desiccated wasteland like those of Fallout or Mad Max?) In Japan, I imagine the more salient reference points would have been 1. eyewitness descriptions of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which happened on partly cloudy & overcast days and presumably looked more like the Beirut video (but bigger), and 2. the later tests of hydrogen bombs at Bikini Atoll, which became somewhat of an international incident regarding the deaths of some Japanese fishermen, and whose explosions similarly had an “expanding white sphere” look to them.
(For a particularly HD, live-action hollywood representation of the spherical-anime-explosion motif, see this scene from Pacific Rim, which interprets the anime motif through a kind of confused mix of vacuum cavitation in water, the back-and-forth wind effects seen in lots of nuclear test footage, and the first-few-milliseconds spherical fireball of a nuclear explosion.)
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Isn’t “explosion from a single point grows spherically” just an intuitive thought that people who have never saw a real large-scale explosion would have?
You could write precisely this post about lasers too! Why does anime feature the beams of light visible along the entire path instead of just at the end points? It’s amusing that the explanation is almost identical.
This is standard for all sorts of fiction though, and the reason is that if you don’t show the path of the laser then the audience can’t tell what’s going on.
But hollywood also depicts lasers in this way. Wheras the spherical-white-explosion motif seems uniquely Japanese; you don’t see it in western media.
Has a laser ever been fired outdoors in japan
Orson Welles bemoaned how the explosion in his adaptation of the Trial could interpreted as an allusion to a nuclear explosion—“because I hate symbolism”. He explained they tried all afternoon to film an explosion that wasn’t mushroomy and failed, he finally relented “all right, there’s going to be symbolism”. While the Trial was shot in France, I don’t have to hand where the second unit explosion photography was done and the ambient humidity there...
(I checked, the explosion at the start of Touch of Evil isn’t really an explosion: it cuts to a flaming car chassis bumping down on the ground, follow by a crash zoom)
Beirut explosion looked pretty spherical tbh.
https://www.reddit.com/r/shockwaveporn/comments/j5ssnk/beirut_explosion_from_far_away_dont_know_if_it/
https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/i3lzno/huge_explosion_in_beirut_happened_30_min_ago/
especially this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/y0mvw2/beirut_shockwave/
https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/i41aj4/beirut_explosion_7_angles_at_once/