Kabuki-Mono: The art of Kumadori facial expression for Manga and cosplay

Abstract

Recently, many local cultures are growing their popularities in the global society by creating various new pop cultures. For example, Japanese Manga (comic) and Anime (animation) are now fascinating young people all around the world. The characters in Manga are being their heroes or heroines. Readers of Manga created a bland new culture called Cosplay (costume play) that means they dress up as same as the characters in their favorable Manga. Cos-play has its origin in Japanese traditional play called Kabuki. In Kabuki there is special face make-up method called Kumadori. Kuwadori is a special way of expressing a person's emotion and also appealing himself to other people. In this paper we propose a system that can change human faces into faces with Kumadori make-ups. Thus people would feel that they are actual Kabuki actors. This system could become a new type of entertainment. Also this would help people understand traditional Japanese culture. © 2011 IEEE.